Graded butter from Minnesota’s co-op creameries.

Land O’Lakes began as a federation rather than a factory. Wikipedia says the cooperative was founded on 8 July 1921 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, by representatives of local cooperative creameries, under the name Minnesota Cooperative Creameries Association. Its purpose was practical: to improve the way member creameries marketed their butter, and to raise its quality and consistency so that dairying paid better for the farmers who supplied the milk.

The association’s tool was a system. Wikipedia describes how it built an inspection, grading and certification scheme for butter made by its member creameries, which made the product more uniform from one creamery to the next, and how that reliability became a selling point in its advertising. The certificate forms used by the association carried the marketing name, so the guarantee and the name travelled together.

The name itself came from the public. In 1924, Wikipedia says, the association’s graded sweet cream butter was named “Land O’Lakes” after a contest, a play on Minnesota’s nickname, the “Land of 10,000 Lakes.” The brand caught on quickly enough that people began to confuse the organisation with its butter, and in 1926 the association adopted the name Land O’Lakes Creameries, Inc., taking the name of its own product.

The cooperative did not have the name entirely to itself. Wikipedia, citing the court’s 1963 decision, says the Oconomowoc Canning Company of Wisconsin had registered “Land O’Lakes” as a trademark in 1924 for canned vegetables it had sold under that name since 1920, and that when the dairy cooperative sued in 1963 the federal court in eastern Wisconsin ruled for the canner.

From creamery federation to farm-and-food cooperative.

Over the following century Land O’Lakes widened from butter into a broad agricultural cooperative. Its headquarters today are in Arden Hills, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis–Saint Paul, and Wikipedia describes it as a member-owned cooperative focused on the dairy industry, with businesses in dairy foods, animal nutrition, and seed and crop protection.

Much of that breadth came through acquisitions. Wikipedia says that in 2001 the cooperative took over the animal feed producer Purina Mills, once part of Ralston Purina, and that the business now trades as Purina Animal Nutrition; that in October 2015 its WinField business merged with United Suppliers to form WinField United, as a WinField United press release of that month records; and that in August 2012 it bought the refrigerated desserts maker Kozy Shack. Wikipedia lists the dairy foods brands as Land O Lakes, Alpine Lace, Kozy Shack and Vermont Creamery.

Leadership is part of the public story too. Wikipedia says the cooperative named Beth Ford as president and chief executive in July 2018, with the appointment taking effect on 1 August that year.

The spelling of the name is worth noting for anyone setting type. The corporate name is written Land O’Lakes, Inc., with an apostrophe, while Wikipedia notes that the apostrophe is sometimes dropped in product branding. The cooperative’s own February 2020 press release refers to the LAND O LAKES brandmark in capitals and without the apostrophe.

The corporate site, landolakesinc.com, sits apart from the consumer site, landolakes.com, which carries the butter, cheese and recipes. Several places share the name, including the town of Land O’ Lakes in Florida.

Design and documentation.

American dairy brands sit in a crowded chiller cabinet, and their packaging has to be read at a glance. Butter comes in boxes of sticks and in tubs, sour cream and cottage cheese in round plastic tubs, cream cheese in foil-wrapped bricks and tubs, milk and cream in gable-top cartons and plastic jugs, and whipped toppings in aerosol cans.

Pastoral imagery is a common thread: cows, barns, green fields, farm names and the sense of a particular place. Some brands belong to farmer-owned cooperatives and put that ownership on the pack with a co-op seal or a line about the farm families behind them; others belong to large food groups that have bought and sold names over many decades.

Colour does practical work too. Many milk and cream ranges use a colour for each fat level, so that whole, reduced-fat and fat-free versions can be told apart on the shelf, and flavour lines extend that system further.

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

An illustration that lasted, and the packaging that replaced it.

For much of its history the brand was carried by a picture. Wikipedia, citing the design historian Rebecca Houze in her 2016 book New Mythologies in Design and Culture, says the image of an Indigenous woman holding a butter box, known as Mia, was painted in 1928 by Arthur C. Hanson, an illustrator for the calendar and advertising company Brown & Bigelow. According to Land O’Lakes, as Wikipedia reports, the original painting was “simplified and modernized” in 1939 by Jess Betlach and adjusted in small ways over the following decades.

One revision is documented in art history. Wikipedia, citing Houze and Bill Anthes’s 2006 book Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960, says the Red Lake Ojibwe artist Patrick DesJarlait updated the image in the 1950s, and that Mia’s clothing was changed to match Ojibwe styles. Wikipedia also notes the visual device of the old box: the woman held a pack that showed the same woman holding the same pack, an example of the Droste effect, which appears in a 1928 advertisement for the butter.

The picture came off the packs in 2020. In a press release dated 6 February 2020, the cooperative announced new packaging with the words “Farmer-Owned” above the LAND O LAKES brandmark, “Since 1921” below it, and an illustration of land and lakes, with photographs of member farmers on some products, including stick butter; it quoted Beth Ford saying the cooperative needed “packaging that reflects the foundation and heart of our company culture—and nothing does that better than our farmer-owners.” Business Insider reported on 17 April 2020 that the redesign removed the image of the Native American woman.

The release set out a staged rollout. The new design appeared initially on tub butter spreads, foodservice products and deli cheese, was to reach stick butter in the spring and summer of 2020, and was expected across the LAND O LAKES range by the end of that year, ahead of the cooperative’s centenary in 2021. The same release tied the packaging to a wider campaign about farmer ownership, built around the tagline “All Together Better.”

For a design guide, Land O’Lakes shows how a quality mark can become a company name, and how an illustrated figure can give way to a wordmark and a landscape; compare the farmer-owned cheesemakers Tillamook and Cabot Creamery. For this guide we use lake blue, butter yellow and pasture green on cream with a soft serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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