A soldier’s idea, a Procter and Gamble subsidiary and a 1995 sale.

Fisher is a brand of baking and snack nuts owned by John B. Sanfilippo & Son, the nut processor based in Elgin, Illinois. Its owner tells the brand’s origin story in a March 2020 press release marking the brand’s centenary. The company says the brand began in 1920, when Sam Fisher, an immigrant from Russia, developed a line of salted in-shell peanuts in St. Paul, Minnesota. According to the release, Fisher had been stationed in France during the First World War, where he became fascinated by local farmers salting in-shell peanuts in their farmyards, and he began to experiment after the war.

The company says the business took off from there and that its peanuts became a consumer favourite sold in ballparks across the United States. John B. Sanfilippo & Son repeats the same account on its corporate page for the brand, which calls Fisher a brand born in the country’s heartland and says it now offers a full line of snack and recipe nut products.

By 1995 Fisher belonged to Procter & Gamble. The Virginian-Pilot reported on 14 October 1995 that P&G would sell its Fisher Nut snack-nuts brand, describing Fisher Nut as a subsidiary with operations in Suffolk, Virginia, and Edenton, North Carolina. The paper said P&G had announced in June that it planned to sell Fisher Nut Co. along with other brands in order to refocus on its core labels.

The buyer was a Chicago-area nut processor. The Chicago Tribune reported on 11 October 1995 that John B. Sanfilippo & Son, then based in Elk Grove Village, had agreed to acquire substantially all the assets of P&G’s Fisher Nut business, including its brands and trademarks, for an undisclosed sum. The Tribune said the company would buy the inventory and some of the equipment but would not acquire or continue operations at any of Fisher Nut’s facilities, and the Virginian-Pilot reported that the Suffolk warehouse and the North Carolina processing plant would close. John B. Sanfilippo & Son has owned Fisher since 1995, and its own history timeline records the year simply as the one in which it acquired the Fisher brand.

A 1922 pecan storefront and a plant in Elgin.

Fisher’s owner has its own century-long story. John B. Sanfilippo & Son says it was founded in 1922, when Gaspare Sanfilippo and his son John started a pecan shelling company in a small storefront in Chicago. The company’s timeline says the business moved into a larger downtown Chicago facility in 1959 and began to diversify into other nut types, introduced Pick o’ the Grove baking nuts in 1967, and opened a facility in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, in 1981.

English Wikipedia’s article on Jasper Sanfilippo, John’s son, says Jasper assumed day-to-day control of the company in 1963, took it public on the Nasdaq in 1991 under the symbol JBSS, and acquired the Fisher nut brand from Procter & Gamble in 1995, citing the Chicago Tribune. The article says Jasper retired from active management in 2006 and was succeeded by his son Jeffrey Sanfilippo.

The same article says Jasper led the engineering and installation of the company’s shelling plants and of its final processing facility in Elgin, Illinois, a building acquired from Panasonic and opened in 2007. The company’s timeline dates the groundbreaking, the move of its headquarters and the consolidation of facilities there to 2005 to 2007. On its facilities page, the company describes Elgin as its corporate headquarters and a roasting, processing and packaging site, with can, jar and flexible packaging lines.

The company lists further production sites, several of them in nut-growing regions: a peanut shelling and processing plant in Bainbridge, Georgia; an almond and walnut facility in Gustine, California; a pecan shelling plant in Selma, Texas; and a snack bar plant in Lakeville, Minnesota, which its timeline says it bought in 2023. It says the Gustine site shells, processes and packages walnuts and has a dedicated almond-only processing room.

Fisher shares that portfolio with other names. The company says it acquired Orchard Valley Harvest in 2010 and the Squirrel Brand and Southern Style Nuts brands in 2017, and its website lists Fisher, Chef’s Naturals, Orchard Valley Harvest, Squirrel Brand and Southern Style Nuts as registered trademarks. The company marked its centenary by closing the Nasdaq stock market on 14 March 2022, according to its timeline.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sell nuts, rice and chilled side dishes, three kinds of food that reach the shelf in very different packages. A nut brand may speak through a tin, a jar or a resealable bag; a rice brand through a printed sack or a box that sits in the cupboard for months; and a side-dish brand through a tray or tub in the refrigerated case, where it is seen for a few seconds beside its neighbours.

In each case the pack carries most of the identity: a name, a colour that can be spotted from the end of an aisle, and often a picture of a place, a farm or a person. Behind that name, the company may have changed owners, moved its kitchens or plants, or grown from a single shop or farm into part of a much larger food group.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its food is made and how its packs and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Resealable bags, clear cans and a Damen Jackson refresh.

John B. Sanfilippo & Son says that in 2011 Fisher introduced its “Freshness Seal” resealable stand-up bag, designed to help consumers keep nuts fresh after opening, and followed it the next year with “Freshness You Can See” clear plastic cans. A company release from February 2017 dates the launch of the stand-up, resealable Fisher bag in the recipe nut category to 2012.

The same February 2017 release, issued from Elgin, named the design firm. John B. Sanfilippo & Son said it had partnered with Damen Jackson to refresh the Fisher snack packaging to better highlight the variety of snack nuts available, and that the two companies had unveiled a stand-up bag meant to give maximum visibility on shelf, with new visual treatments and a re-sealable zipper intended to make the snacks portable and keep them fresh. Howard Brandeisky, the company’s senior vice president of global marketing and customer solutions, said in the release that Damen Jackson’s design concepts “enhance our brand by appealing to both our retail customers and consumers.” The company said it had worked with the same firm on packaging for Orchard Valley Harvest.

Fisher’s advertising in the same period leaned on a television chef. The 2017 release said Fisher was continuing its partnership with the Food Network chef Alex Guarnaschelli, launching a social campaign that encouraged consumers to “experiment, improvise, and find an unexpected crunch” in their cooking and elsewhere in their lives, and inviting people to post what it called their unshelled moments under the hashtag #LiveUnshelled.

In its March 2020 centenary release, the company said it had launched the Fisher Oven Roasted Never Fried line in 2018, made of nuts oven roasted and seasoned with sea salt. “We are a brand that prides itself on innovation,” Brandeisky said in that release. The company’s timeline adds that Fisher launched nut flours in 2021. In the baking aisle, the 2020 release linked the Fisher recipe range to its resealable bags.

For a design guide, Fisher shows how a brand that its owner traces to a salted ballpark peanut has been presented in the baking aisle through its packaging, with the resealable stand-up bag at the centre of the company’s own account. Compare it with Planters and Blue Diamond. For this guide we use red, oxblood, peanut gold and shell cream with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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