A grocery, a twelve-stool counter and a Wednesday pilaf.

Near East is an American brand of rice pilaf, couscous and other boxed grain dishes. It began as a family business in Worcester, Massachusetts, and PepsiCo has owned it since 2001, through its merger with The Quaker Oats Company. The brand’s own account says Near East started in 1962 as a small, family-owned company; the Near East page on PepsiCo’s consumer-contact site, as archived in September 2026, gives the start as 1963.

The story both accounts tell starts with a couple, George and Hannah Kalajian. The company says they immigrated to the United States from Armenia and set up a grocery store in 1940. The Christian Science Monitor, in a feature published on 20 September 1985, said the Kalajians emigrated from Armenia in 1940 to Worcester. A longer version appeared in a 2018 profile by Keith Pandolfi in The Boston Globe, reproduced by PanArmenian.net on 14 March 2018. Drawing on Hannah Kalajian’s out-of-print autobiography, Hannah’s Story (Armenian Heritage Press, 1990), it describes her childhood flight during the Armenian genocide, her arrival in New York in 1924 and her marriage to George, a family friend; by the early 1940s, the profile says, the couple were in Worcester.

There, the Globe profile says, George opened an Armenian grocery store and luncheonette called George’s Spa and Market. The company says Hannah began serving sandwiches and home-cooked hot meals at a twelve-stool luncheonette counter beside the store, and that on Wednesdays she served her specialty, roasted chicken with Armenian-style rice pilaf. The company describes that pilaf as a combination of rice, orzo pasta and seasoning, and says it became so popular that Hannah began to package it, filling bags of pilaf mix by hand in her home kitchen.

The Globe profile adds detail from her daughter, Carol Kasparian. It took Hannah a year to prepare, Kasparian said: she researched every aspect of the business, talked to the rice commissioner about packaging and learned about shelf life. The early mix, the profile says, was made in the market’s second-storey apartment with rice, broken vermicelli noodles and chicken stock, by a group of Armenian women working in one small room.

Leominster, then Heinz, Quaker and PepsiCo.

Selling the mix was a family job too. The Globe profile says Kasparian drove her mother to grocery stores and markets along the East Coast, with a card table and an electric pot in the trunk for cooking demonstrations. Before long, the profile says, Stop & Shop, Star Markets and Macy’s in New York were carrying the pilaf. Near East moved out of the small bedroom above the market into a larger space in Worcester and then, in 1977, into a plant in Leominster, Massachusetts.

The Christian Science Monitor found the business there in 1985. Its feature said the couple’s son, Jack Kalajian, an engineer, was president of Near East Food Products in Leominster, a company selling pilaf mixes and other grain mixtures first inspired by his mother’s pilaf recipes. The same feature said Near East Food Products, of Leominster, was sponsoring the exhibition of Armenian rugs organised by the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth and the Armenian Rugs Society, along with related cultural events. The company itself says that over the years production moved out of Hannah’s kitchen and into modern manufacturing facilities.

The family then sold the brand. The Globe profile says Near East was sold to the H. J. Heinz Company in 1986. It did not stay there long. The company history of The Quaker Oats Company published by Funding Universe, drawn from the International Directory of Company Histories, records that in 1993 Quaker acquired the Near East rice and pasta product brand, in a year when it also bought Chico-San rice cakes and Petrofsky’s bagels. Adweek, in an article on 20 April 2010, likewise said the brand had been bought from Heinz in 1993. The same Quaker history notes that Quaker had bought the Golden Grain Macaroni Company, maker of Rice-A-Roni, in 1986, and lists Rice-A-Roni, Pasta Roni and Near East together as its flavoured rice and pasta side dishes.

Quaker itself changed hands in 2001. FoodNavigator reported on 3 August 2001 that PepsiCo had announced, on 2 August, the completion of its merger with The Quaker Oats Company. Adweek’s 2010 article said Near East was by then sold and marketed under PepsiCo’s Quaker portfolio. The Near East website today carries a copyright line in the name of the Golden Grain Company, and the brand is listed on PepsiCo’s consumer-contact site among the PepsiCo family of brands.

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 founder’s packaging, a flavour pack and a couscous campaign.

One design story in the brand’s history concerns the package itself. In the Globe profile, Carol Kasparian said of her mother’s preparations: “she even designed the box!” Hannah Kalajian’s own story, the profile says, once appeared on every box of Near East. Her name no longer appears on the packaging as it once did, the profile notes, although her story is still told on the brand’s website; Kasparian said she worried that most people buying it no longer know who Hannah was.

The company now gives the package a role of its own. Near East’s About Us page describes “our refreshing white box” as a symbol of its dedication to simple food made with recognisable ingredients, herbs and spices. The same page, in the versions archived in 2023 and 2026, still opens with Hannah Kalajian and the first pilaf she made, and still describes her Wednesday chicken and pilaf at the Worcester counter.

The product inside has its own remembered details. Pandolfi’s profile, as reproduced by PanArmenian.net, recalls the salty, nutty mix of rice and toasted orzo together with its accompanying paper flavour pack of onion, garlic and bouillon. The company’s description of the original pilaf names the same base of rice, orzo pasta and seasoning.

Under PepsiCo the brand has been marketed beyond pilaf. Adweek reported on 20 April 2010 that Near East, then a range including rice pilaf, falafel and taboule along with meal kits, was running a new digital campaign for its couscous. The campaign centred on an online community called “Around the World in 5 Minutes”, where visitors could share couscous recipes, and on videos starring the chef Peter Bowen, who also wrote a blog called “Tour de Taste”. Near East brand manager Lindsay Williamson told Adweek the idea came from research showing that home cooks “love couscous,” but found it a challenge to work into everyday meals.

For a design guide, Near East shows how a founder’s own packaging decisions and life story can sit at the centre of a grocery brand, and how that story can move from the box itself to the website as the brand passes from a family company to Heinz, Quaker and PepsiCo. Compare it with Rice-A-Roni, the Golden Grain side dish that Quaker owned alongside it, and Success, the Houston boil-in-bag rice. For this guide we use paprika red, toasted orzo gold, box white and bay-leaf green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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