A New Jersey company built around how meat is raised and made.

Applegate is an American brand of hot dogs, bacon, sausages, deli meats and frozen foods, sold under natural and organic product lines and owned today by Hormel Foods. Its story is usually told through its founder. Consumer Goods Technology reported in May 2015 that Stephen McDonnell founded Applegate in 1987, and quoted him looking back on the company’s first decades. “Over the last 28 years Applegate has brought transparency and clean ingredients to American favorites and classics like hot dogs, bacon and deli meat,” he said. “It was my mission from the start to change the way we think about meat – how it’s raised and produced.”

Hormel’s own profile of the business tells the founding with two names rather than one. It says Applegate Farms, LLC was founded in 1987 by Stephen McDonnell and Chris Ely, whom it calls “two food rebels with a cause”. Applegate’s own website from 2012, preserved by the Internet Archive, lists Chris Ely as the company’s co-founder and describes press interviews in which he talked about antibiotic-free meat and about how the company cures its products.

The legal name and the brand name differ slightly. The company is Applegate Farms, LLC, as Hormel styles it, while the name on the packs and the website is simply Applegate.

The brand is a New Jersey company. Consumer Goods Technology said in 2015 that its headquarters were in Bridgewater, New Jersey, and that they would stay there. Hormel’s current company profile of Applegate gives Bedminster, New Jersey, as its location.

The range is the core of the brand. Consumer Goods Technology listed it in 2015 as deli meats, hot dogs, bacon, sausages, frozen breaded chicken and pre-packed lunch kits. Applegate’s website today groups its products under headings including bacon, breakfast sausage, burgers, deli meat, dinner sausage, hot dogs and breaded chicken, and lets shoppers filter them by Organic, Natural and Grass Fed. Hormel says the company also makes a line of natural and organic cheese.

An agreement in May, a closing in July and a stand-alone subsidiary.

The change of ownership came in 2015. Consumer Goods Technology reported on 27 May 2015 that Applegate had announced an agreement with Hormel Foods to become an independently operated, stand-alone subsidiary. Under the agreement, the report said, McDonnell would serve as an adviser, and Kerry Collins, the company’s chief executive at the time, would continue in her role for the next several months. The headquarters would remain in Bridgewater and all employees would be retained.

The people quoted in that announcement spoke mostly about continuity. “Applegate’s consumers won’t see any changes,” Collins said. “Our products, standards, mission and focus will remain the same.” Gina Asoudegan, Applegate’s senior director of Mission, said the company would continue to support labelling and transparency on genetically engineered foods, limiting the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture and advancing humane standards. For Hormel, its chairman, president and chief executive Jeffrey M. Ettinger said that a growing number of consumers were choosing natural and organic products, and that the deal let Hormel expand the breadth of its protein offerings.

The transaction closed that summer. The Poultry Site reported on 28 July 2015 that Hormel Foods had announced the closing of its acquisition of Applegate Farms, and that Applegate would operate autonomously as a stand-alone subsidiary in the company’s Refrigerated Foods segment. Hormel has owned Applegate since 2015. Adweek described the brand in December 2019 as a standalone subsidiary of Hormel Foods, which acquired it in 2015, and Hormel today lists Applegate Farms, LLC among its family of companies, next to businesses such as Jennie-O Turkey Store.

The leadership has changed since the sale. Adweek’s report of 3 December 2019 named John Ghingo as Applegate’s president and Nicole Glenn as its vice president of brand strategy and innovation.

What the brand says about its standards is part of the identity, and it is the company’s own description. Applegate’s website sets out three headings: “No Antibiotics Ever”, “Applegate Humanely Raised” and “Simple Ingredients”. Hormel’s profile explains what Applegate means by natural: meat from animals raised without antibiotics, hormones or growth promotants and fed a vegetarian or pasture-centred diet, with no added chemical nitrites, nitrates or phosphates and no artificial ingredients or preservatives. Applegate says its beef is grass-fed.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are all meat and poultry names, sold from the chiller cabinet, the deli counter and the freezer. Meat and poultry brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family packing houses that still carry a founder’s name or a home town to labels that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single name can appear on bacon, ham, sausages, sliced deli meat and frozen dinners alike.

A meat brand’s identity is usually carried less by one package than by a name, a colour and a promise printed on a label, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually processed and packed.

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

A registered mission line, a costumed cow on a job interview and a new creative partner.

The brand’s most consistent words are a slogan it treats as a mission. Both Hormel and Applegate print the line “Changing The Meat We Eat” with a registered-trademark sign, and Applegate presents it on its website as the purpose behind its range.

One campaign noticed by the trade press used humour to make the same point. Adweek chose an Applegate Farms commercial as its “Ad of the Day” on 26 June 2012. The campaign, “What’s in your hot dog?”, was created by the agency Taxi to drive summer sales ahead of the Fourth of July, Adweek reported. Its central device was a set of men in cow costumes being grilled, job-interview style, about their drug histories by mothers worried about medicated meat on their children’s plates.

In the spot called “Mooscles”, Adweek wrote, a muscle-bound bodybuilder cow vacantly denies using growth hormones while a woman balks at the needle sticking out of what she identifies as his “haunch”. Applegate’s own newsroom of 2012, preserved by the Internet Archive, listed the commercial among its press mentions alongside product names such as The Great Organic Hot Dog.

The brand’s later creative work moved to a new partner. Adweek reported on 3 December 2019 that Applegate had selected the New York independent agency Terri & Sandy as its creative agency of record after a review. The agency was to create a new strategic communications platform across all customer touchpoints and internal communications, as well as an integrated national campaign, both expected to launch in early 2020. Media buying and planning stayed with Swellshark, the report said, and Applegate had previously worked with a number of agencies on creative.

Nicole Glenn said in a statement quoted by Adweek that Terri & Sandy had “absolutely nailed the brief”, so much so that Applegate was moving forward with the very campaign the agency presented in the pitch. Adweek noted that the appointment reunited John Ghingo with the agency’s co-founders, Terri Meyer and Sandy Greenberg, who had worked together with him on Oreo for years. Greenberg said Applegate had a “strong and meaningful point of view” in a heated category.

For a design guide, Applegate shows how a mission line and a set of standards can do the work that a mascot or a jingle does for older meat brands, with the advertising built to dramatise the label rather than the product. Compare it with Hormel, its owner since 2015, and SPAM, a fellow Hormel brand. For this guide we use pasture green, apple red, farm cream and sky blue with a soft serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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