A fruit stand, a roaster and a partnership in Wilkes-Barre.

Planters is an American snack-nut brand owned today by Hormel Foods. English Wikipedia traces it to Amedeo Obici, an Italian immigrant who started out in the United States as a bellhop and fruit-stand vendor in Scranton, Pennsylvania, before moving to Wilkes-Barre, opening a fruit stand of his own and investing in a peanut roaster. Within a few years, Wikipedia says, he had turned peddler, working from a horse and wagon and calling himself “The Peanut Specialist.” Mental Floss, in a history of the brand published in March 2017, gives his home town in Italy as Oderzo.

The company took shape in 1906. Wikipedia says Obici went into partnership that year with Mario Peruzzi, who had worked out his own method of blanching whole roasted peanuts so that the hulls and skins came away, and that Planters began with six employees, two large roasters and crude machinery. Mental Floss describes Peruzzi as a friend and fellow Italian immigrant and says the two partners chose the name “Planters” because they thought it sounded dignified. In 1908, Wikipedia says, the firm was incorporated as the Planters Nut and Chocolate Company.

Production soon moved south. Wikipedia says that by 1913 Obici had moved to Suffolk, Virginia, and opened a mass-production plant for the company there. Mental Floss says the move was made to cut costs and put the operation closer to the peanut-growing land around Suffolk.

Obici was a promoter as well as a roaster. Mental Floss says he put a single letter of the alphabet into each bag of peanuts and rewarded customers who collected the letters of his surname, O-B-I-C-I, at first with a free bag and later with a watch. The same article says the 1930s brought a chain of Planters Peanut Shoppes, with branches in New York’s Times Square and on the Atlantic City boardwalk, and that in 1935 a Planters salesman made his rounds in a shell-shaped car, which Mental Floss counts as an early Nutmobile.

Standard Brands, Nabisco, Kraft Heinz and Hormel.

Wikipedia says that in February 1956 Frank A. English, an employee with long service at the company, became president of Planters.

The next change was a change of owner. Wikipedia says Standard Brands began taking over Planters in 1960 by buying a large block of shares from philanthropic trusts that Obici had set up, and that Planters contested the purchase in court before a settlement left Standard Brands in control. Mental Floss dates the acquisition to 1961 and says the Peanut Shoppes were then closed or sold, with some continuing to trade independently.

Later owners arrived through mergers. Wikipedia says Standard Brands merged with Nabisco in 1981 to form Nabisco Brands, that Nabisco was acquired by Kraft Foods in 2000, and that Kraft merged with the H. J. Heinz Company in 2015 to form Kraft Heinz.

The most recent sale came in 2021. Wikipedia says Kraft Heinz announced in February 2021 that it would sell Planters and its other nut businesses to Hormel Foods. Vending Times reported on 7 June 2021 that Hormel had closed its acquisition of the Planters snacking portfolio from Kraft Heinz, a deal that took in the Planters, NUT-rition, Planters Cheez Balls and Corn Nuts brands together with three production facilities. Hormel Foods, the Austin, Minnesota, company behind SPAM, has owned Planters since 2021. In Canada, Wikipedia says, Planters products, including Planters peanut butter, are made by Johnvince Foods, which licenses the trademark.

Wikipedia lists the brand’s advertising taglines including “The Nickel Lunch!” for peanuts and peanut bars in the 1930s and 1940s, “Planters is the word for (good) Peanuts” in the 1950s, “America is Nuts for Planters” in the 1970s, “Everybody Loves a Nut!” in the 1990s, “Relax. Go Nuts.” for Deluxe Mixed Nuts in 1997, “Put Out the Good Stuff” from 2003 to 2008 and “A Nut Above” in 2021.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are nut and rice names: snack nuts sold in cans, jars and bags, and rice and grain mixes sold in boxes and pouches. In this part of the grocery aisle the package often does as much of the brand’s work as the name, because the food inside can look much the same from one label to the next.

A nut or rice brand’s identity is usually carried by a container, a colour, a character or a line of copy that a shopper can find quickly on a crowded shelf. Many of these names have also changed hands over the years, passing from founders and families to cooperatives, food groups or larger companies, while the pack on the shelf has kept some of its older look. That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its food is grown, packed or made.

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

A 1916 drawing, a monocle, a borrowed voice and a staged funeral.

Mr. Peanut is both the brand’s mascot and its advertising logo. Wikipedia describes him as an anthropomorphic peanut in its shell, dressed as an old-fashioned gentleman in a top hat, monocle, white gloves, spats and carrying a cane. Wikipedia says the character began in 1916, when a schoolboy, Antonio Gentile, submitted drawings of a peanut figure to a design contest. ABC7 News, citing the Planters website in January 2020, likewise said the character was “born” in 1916 from a student’s sketch and that the top hat, monocle and cane were later additions by a commercial artist. Wikipedia names that artist as Andrew S. Wallach and records a disputed claim made for a second artist.

Wikipedia says the design has continued to change over the years. ABC7 News reported that Mr. Peanut appeared on a Times Square billboard in the late 1930s and was an attraction at the New York World’s Fair in the 1960s; Mental Floss says he was a draw at both the 1939–40 and the 1964–65 fairs. Wikipedia says that in 2006 Planters held an online vote on whether to give him a bow tie, cufflinks or a pocket watch, and the public chose no change. On 8 November 2010, Wikipedia says, Planters announced the actor Robert Downey Jr. as the character’s voice; the comedian Bill Hader took the part for a 2013 campaign, and after a 2018 revamp Mr. Peanut was silent again. Wikipedia also says he sat down to dinner with other advertising mascots in MasterCard’s “Icons” commercial during Super Bowl XXXIX in 2005.

The 2020 campaign was built around the character’s exit. ABC7 News reported on 22 January 2020 that Planters had “killed off” Mr. Peanut in a Super Bowl campaign: in a video, he and the actors Wesley Snipes and Matt Walsh swerve the Nutmobile off a cliff to avoid an armadillo, and Mr. Peanut lets go of a branch so that it can hold his friends. Planters said the mascot’s “funeral” would air during the Super Bowl on 2 February. Wikipedia says the Super Bowl LIV commercial showed a younger “Baby Nut” sprouting at the funeral, that the character was aged up as “Peanut Jr.” in August 2020, and that the campaign ended in February 2021, when an adult Mr. Peanut returned under the line “A Nut Above.” In May 2021, ahead of the sale to Hormel, Wikipedia says Planters relaunched him as a two-dimensional animated figure.

Hormel Foods said on 7 October 2026 that Planters would return to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with a float marking 120 years of the brand and 110 years of Mr. Peanut, built around a Ferris wheel that shows the character’s evolution from the 1916 drawing to the present design.

For a design guide, Planters shows how a mascot drawn in 1916 can stay at the centre of a brand while owners, slogans and voices change around it, from Standard Brands and Nabisco to Kraft Heinz and Hormel. Compare it with Skippy and Peter Pan, two American peanut-butter brands. For this guide we use deep blue, peanut gold, shell cream and monocle black with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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