Delaware North Brand Guidelines: Buffalo Concessions Since 1915 & a 2014 Logo

Theatre concessions in Buffalo, 1915.

Delaware North began in Buffalo, New York, in 1915. English Wikipedia says it started as Jacobs Brothers, founded by the brothers Marvin, Charles and Louis Jacobs, and the company’s own history page says the brothers began by running concessions in theatres. Boston magazine, writing in 2013, gave the same year and the same first name, and traced the later names Sportservice and Emprise.

The theatre business led to sport. English Wikipedia says the brothers turned to ballparks when theatres closed in the summer heat, and that Sportservice was set up in 1926 after contracts with minor-league ballparks in Buffalo and Syracuse. The company dates its first Major League Baseball contract, with the Detroit Tigers, to 1930, and its first airport concessions contract to 1939. Racetracks followed: English Wikipedia dates the first racetrack purchase to 1939.

The name changed several times. English Wikipedia lists Emprise Corp. and then Sportsystems Inc. before the present name was adopted in 1980. The history includes a serious legal finding: English Wikipedia records a 1972 racketeering conviction of Emprise Corp., Delaware North’s predecessor company. English Wikipedia says the family reorganised its holdings after that case under the new name, and that the name itself comes from a Buffalo street corner: the meeting of Delaware Avenue and North Street, where the head office stood at the time.

Ownership has stayed in one family. The company describes itself as “family-owned-and-operated” and says three generations of the Jacobs family have guided it. Its timeline says Jeremy Jacobs, Louis’s son, became chairman and chief executive in 1968 at the age of 28, and that he bought the Boston Bruins hockey team and the Boston Garden arena in 1975. In January 2015, the company said, his sons Jerry Jacobs Jr. and Lou Jacobs became co-chief executives, and Charlie Jacobs became chief executive of its Boston holdings.

Ballparks, airports, resorts and casinos.

Delaware North is a caterer, but not only a caterer. Its website sorts its work into high-volume food service, catering, venue development and management, lodging and resorts, full-service restaurants, specialty retail, and gaming and mobile wagering. Its business units are listed as Parks & Resorts, Gaming, Sportservice, Patina Group, Boston and International.

Sport remains the core of the story. Sportservice, the oldest operating company, runs food, drink and retail in stadiums and arenas, and English Wikipedia says the company owns the Boston arena now called TD Garden, which the company’s timeline says opened in 1995. In 2019 it opened The Hub on Causeway, a development next to the arena, according to its timeline.

The same timeline traces the spread into other sectors. It bought Tenaya Lodge, near Yosemite, in 2001; began turning racetracks into casinos at Wheeling Downs in West Virginia in 2003; and took a majority interest in Patina Restaurant Group, a premium restaurant and catering business, in 2014. A company article of December 2015 dates the Patina deal to May 2014.

Outside the United States, the company dates its return to Europe to a contract at Wembley Stadium in London in 2006, and in 2025 it was named the hospitality provider for Sunderland Association Football Club. English Wikipedia adds contracts at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium and at airports including Gatwick, Heathrow and Edinburgh, and resorts in Australia; in 2019 a Darwin casino it bought was renamed the Mindil Beach Casino & Resort. In 2014 the company said it served guests in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Asia, with more than 60,000 associates.

In 2026, its timeline says, it entered “a new era” with the opening of Nu Stadium in Miami.

How contract caterers present themselves.

Contract caterers sell a service that happens inside someone else’s building, so their brands have to work in two places at once: on the corporate pages where owners and clients read about them, and on the counters, menus and uniforms that guests see. Most of their public material shows food and venues rather than the company itself. Delaware North’s history page, for example, tells its story as a slide show of dated photographs, and Levy’s press room is a run of venue announcements.

Large groups split that work into sectors. Compass Group says it organises its business by market, a model it calls “sectorisation,” delivered through a portfolio of brands; its sectors include business and industry, healthcare and senior living, education, and sports and leisure. In that model a workplace canteen, a school kitchen and a stadium concourse can each carry a different name, even when one parent owns them all.

Some companies go the other way. In November 2014 Delaware North announced one global identity, dropped “Companies” and the DNC initials from its logo, and folded most of its operating units into a single name, keeping Sportservice as a named exception. Levy, owned by Compass since 2006, has instead added named units of its own, from E15 to Rank + Rally, each with its own launch year.

For a reader trying to understand these brands, the most useful sources are the companies’ own history and ownership pages, read alongside dated reporting. This guide gives founding dates, owners and contracts only as those sources state them, attributes each claim, and treats the visual identity described here as an unofficial interpretation rather than a reproduction of any company’s mark.

One name, no initials.

The clearest design moment in the company’s record is its November 2014 rebrand. In a release dated 5 November 2014, the company announced “a new global brand identity” ahead of its hundredth anniversary in 2015. It would be known simply as “Delaware North” rather than “Delaware North Companies,” and it ended the use of the initials “DNC” in its logo.

The release also folded most of the operating companies into the one name. Units that had carried titles such as “Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts” would also be called Delaware North. There were two exceptions. Delaware North Sportservice kept its name because of its history as the original operating company and its recognition in sport, and it would use the new Delaware North logo with the word “Sportservice” set in script beneath it. Patina Restaurant Group, newly acquired, kept its own logo.

Jerry Jacobs Jr. described the aim as “one unified brand with one compelling vision for our future,” and called the new logo “forward-thinking and visually inventive.” The switchover of branded items across its operations was to run until the move to a new head office. That move came in November 2015, when, the company said, it took a 12-storey, glass-walled building at the corner of Delaware Avenue and Chippewa Street in downtown Buffalo, bringing the head office back to the avenue in its name. Centenary events ran for 100 days, from August to December 2015.

Its history page now carries a short line of its own, “100+ Years of Thinking Ahead,” and sets out the timeline as a slide show of dated photographs, from the theatre years in 1915 to the Miami stadium in 2026. It also names the three founding brothers under the heading “Visionaries,” a reminder that the family name sits behind the corporate one.

For a design guide, Delaware North shows how a family company with many trading names can pull them under one mark while keeping a single historic sub-brand. Compare Aramark, another American food and facilities group, and Levy, the Chicago stadium caterer. For this guide we use a lake blue, an ice grey and a gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Delaware North’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.