Charles Strite, Waters-Genter and the Model 1-A-1.

Toastmaster began as the name of a single product. English Wikipedia describes Toastmaster as a brand name for home appliances that was originally the name of an automatic electric pop-up toaster for home use, the Toastmaster Model 1-A-1. The toaster history site toaster.org, which reproduces the Model 1-A-1’s instruction manual, says the Waters-Genter Company began selling the model in 1926 and that it was designed by Charles Strite. English Wikipedia’s article on toasters adds that Strite had patented an automatic pop-up toaster in 1921.

The founding date depends on which source is speaking. English Wikipedia’s Toastmaster article gives 1921 as the year the name first belonged to the Model 1-A-1, and Select Brands, the brand’s present licensee, said in a 2012 press release that Toastmaster “traces its roots back to 1921.” The toaster.org manual page puts the start of sales in 1926. Both dates appear in the published record, and this guide gives both.

The name soon outgrew the product. According to English Wikipedia, the Toastmaster brand was owned from 1929 until 1980 by McGraw Electric, which was renamed McGraw-Edison in 1957, and over that time the name was used on a wide range of small kitchen appliances, including coffeemakers, waffle irons, toasters and blenders. A single toaster had become a family of appliances, and the family took its name from the original machine rather than from the company that owned it.

Missouri became the brand’s home. English Wikipedia says Toastmaster was headquartered in Boonville, Missouri, and that the head office later moved from Boonville to Columbia, Missouri, during the 1970s. It lists factories in Boonville, Macon, Moberly, Kirksville and Clarence, all in Missouri, and in Laurinburg, North Carolina, together with warehouses in Columbia. One of the old Boonville plants is pictured in the article, described as long since vacated.

Magic Chef, a 1992 listing, Salton and a licence.

After half a century inside McGraw Electric and McGraw-Edison, Toastmaster went through a series of owners. English Wikipedia says that, following a leveraged buyout in 1980 involving Magic Chef, the brand changed hands several times and finally went public in 1992 as Toastmaster, Inc., listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

In those years the company sold far more than toasters. English Wikipedia lists the products made during the 1970s and 1980s as toasters, griddles, box fans, waffle bakers, sandwich makers, ceiling fans, toaster ovens, convection ovens, bread makers, humidifiers, clocks and timers, with mixers, can openers, meat slicers and microwave ovens imported from overseas factories. It also lists other brand names the company used, including Manning-Bowman, Edison, Everhot, Bersted, Eskimo and Zero fans and Ingraham clocks and timers. The same article says a Vita-Mix blender was built under contract for Vita-Mix.

The independent company ended in 1999, when, English Wikipedia says, Toastmaster, Inc. was acquired by Salton, Inc., the Florida appliance company. Salton’s own later history explains where the brand went next. English Wikipedia says Salton changed its name to Russell Hobbs, Inc. in December 2009 and was taken over by Spectrum Brands in June 2010. The Toastmaster article says that after this series of acquisitions the brand is owned by Spectrum Brands.

The consumer brand has been run under licence since 2012. On 5 September 2012 Select Brands, Inc., a Kansas City small-appliance company known for its Babycakes treat makers and Kitchen Selectives line, announced a long-term licensing agreement for Toastmaster. Its founder and president, Bill Endres, said: “We’re working hard to reinvigorate the Toastmaster identity.” Today Select Brands’ website lists Toastmaster among “Our Brands” beside TRU and Babycakes, describing it as “reliable and versatile kitchen appliances,” and describes Select Brands as a kitchen-appliance company dating from 1998.

The name also lives on in professional kitchens. English Wikipedia says commercial Toastmaster products for the food-service industry are made by The Middleby Corporation, so the same word now appears on two different kinds of equipment from two different companies.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make small kitchen and home appliances: toasters, slow cookers, pressure cookers, mixers, coffee makers, fans and heaters. Names like these often sit at many different points in the trade, from companies that still carry a founder’s name or a home town to brands that have passed through several owners and now belong to much larger housewares or consumer-products groups.

A small-appliance brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a name, a logo and a familiar look on the shelf, because the company behind that name may have been sold, merged or split, and its products may now be designed and made far from where the brand began. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its appliances are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A product name that became a company name.

The most distinctive thing about Toastmaster as a brand is the direction in which the name travelled. Toastmaster started as the name of one toaster, the Model 1-A-1, and only later became the name of a company: by 1992 the business listed on the New York Stock Exchange was called Toastmaster, Inc. The word itself is an older English term, recorded by English Wikipedia, for the person who presides over a dinner and its speeches and toasts.

The Model 1-A-1 also left a printed record. toaster.org reproduces the instruction manual that came with the toaster, page by page, so the earliest Toastmaster material that survives in public is product literature rather than advertising. Those pages are the closest thing in public to a founding document for the brand.

Ownership has repeatedly changed how the name is used. Under McGraw Electric and McGraw-Edison it was one of several brands in a manufacturing group, alongside names such as Manning-Bowman and Edison. As Toastmaster, Inc. it was the company name as well as the product name. Under Salton and then Spectrum Brands it became one brand among many again, and under Select Brands it is a licensed name that sits on the same website as TRU and Babycakes and as a range of character-licensed appliances. In the 2012 announcement Select Brands spoke of its plans to “reinvigorate the Toastmaster identity” and to launch new products “under the Toastmaster flag,” wording that treats the name as an asset to be revived rather than a company to be run.

The split with the commercial line adds another layer. Because Middleby makes commercial Toastmaster equipment for food service, the same name is attached both to countertop appliances sold to households and to equipment sold to restaurants, under different companies.

For a design guide, Toastmaster shows how a clever product name can outlive the toaster it was coined for, the Missouri factories that made it and several owners in turn. Compare it with Salton, which bought Toastmaster, Inc. in 1999, and with Proctor Silex, another American toaster brand in this series. For this guide we use toast brown, gold and chrome with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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