A merchant from Germany, a small grinder and a blend for crabs and shrimp.

Old Bay is an American seasoning for crabs, shrimp and other seafood, owned today by McCormick & Company. It began in Baltimore in the workshop of a spice merchant from Germany, Gustav Brunn, and it took its name from a steamship line that once ran out of the city’s harbour.

Brunn arrived in the city as a refugee. The Baltimore Sun, in an article by Christina Tkacik published on 13 August 2018, citing the historian Deborah Weiner, co-author of On Middle Ground: A History of the Jews in Baltimore, said Brunn had worked in Europe as a spice merchant selling seasoning to sausage makers. After the rise of the Nazis he was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, released after two weeks, and in 1938 fled to Baltimore with his wife. Preservation Maryland, in a history published on 28 April 2017 and drawing on Brunn’s oral history at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, says the family had run a wholesale spice business in Wertheim and then Frankfurt, and that Brunn was arrested on Kristallnacht in November 1938.

He started again with a machine he had carried from Germany. The Sun said Brunn used a spice-grinding machine brought from Europe, and the Baltimore Jewish Times, in a profile by Connor Graham published on 14 March 2018, said the family had packed a small mill and a small mixer for seasonings with their furniture, and that the mixer is displayed at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. Both the Jewish Times and Preservation Maryland say Brunn worked briefly for McCormick & Company before setting up on his own. The Jewish Times says the family settled in Baltimore in early 1939, and that a New York spice importer, Katz American, gave him credit.

The new firm was the Baltimore Spice Company. The Baltimore Sun reported on 1 November 1990 that the crab seasoning had been devised and hand-ground by Gustav C. Brunn, who founded Baltimore Spice Co. in 1939. The shop faced the city’s wholesale fish market, and the Sun said in 2018 that seafood sellers were among Brunn’s customers. They mixed their own blends, Weiner told the paper, and Brunn thought he could make a better one, adjusting a basic recipe many already used. The Jewish Times quotes his son Ralph Brunn as saying his father first made a crab seasoning around 1940, while Preservation Maryland places its birth during the Second World War.

A family firm, a British conglomerate and McCormick.

The blend was slow to catch on. The Sun said in 2018 that, according to an oral history Brunn recorded in 1980, local seafood merchants were at first reluctant to try it until a wholesaler on Water Street took a sample and found that customers liked his crabs better, after which, Brunn said, he got one customer after another. The Jewish Times tells a similar story of a small crab steamer around the corner who was given a box to try. Preservation Maryland says the company also made an imitation pepper from buckwheat during the war, when pepper was scarce, and filled large orders for the military.

The Brunns kept the business in the family for decades. Preservation Maryland says the Baltimore Spice Company was family owned and run until Ralph Brunn retired in 1985, and the Jewish Times says Ralph had become the company’s chief executive. In 1986, both the Jewish Times and the Sun reported, the British conglomerate Hanson Industries bought Baltimore Spice; the Jewish Times says Hanson separated Old Bay into its own entity.

McCormick bought the brand four years later. The Baltimore Sun reported on 1 November 1990 that McCormick & Co., based in Hunt Valley, had bought Old Bay, as confirmed by a company spokesman, in a sale that had taken place in August. The paper said McCormick acquired Old Bay’s trademark blue and yellow labeling and the recipes for its seafood seasonings: the crab seasoning and the Crab Cake Classic, Tuna Classic and Salmon Classic mixes. Hanson had sold Baltimore Spice’s industrial seasonings plants that July to a German company, the Sun said, and the Old Bay sale was its last remaining piece of the business.

McCormick & Company, the Baltimore spice house founded in 1889, has owned Old Bay since 1990. The Baltimore Banner reported on 1 December 2025 that the company was bringing back tin packaging for Old Bay Seasoning, the original material before the brand switched to plastic in 2017, and quoted a McCormick executive, Giovanna DiLegge, calling the seasoning a “symbol of heritage, flavor, and Baltimore pride”. The Banner said the tins would reach shelves that month.

Design and documentation.

Spice jars, seasoning shakers and boxed potato pouches share a problem: the product inside is a dry powder, a blend or a flake that looks much the same from one maker to the next, so much of what a shopper sees on the shelf has to be carried by the container and its label. A cap colour, the shape of a tin, a band of type across a carton or a pouch that stands upright can do more work than any description of the contents.

Many of these packs are long-lived. A jar or carton may keep its basic form for decades while the company behind the name changes owners, moves its plants or widens its range far beyond the product it began with. That makes the plain questions worth asking of each name: who started it, who owns it now, and where its spices, blends or potatoes are actually grown, milled and packed.

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

A long working name, an adman’s suggestion, a trademark label and a tin that came back.

The seasoning did not start out as Old Bay. The Baltimore Sun said in 2018 that the blend was first called “Delicious brand shrimp and crab seasoning”, and that an antique bottle at the Baltimore Museum of Industry lists ingredients including laurel leaves, mustard, salt, pepper, cardamom, cloves, paprika and ginger. A friend from Baltimore’s Jewish community who worked in advertising suggested something catchier, the paper said, and they chose the name of a local steamship line. Preservation Maryland identifies it as the Old Bay Line, whose steamers ran between Baltimore and Norfolk, Virginia.

The label itself has long been treated as an asset. The 1990 Sun report said McCormick bought Old Bay’s trademark blue and yellow labeling along with the recipes. Thirty-five years later, The Baltimore Banner still described the brand’s packaging as distinctive bright yellow and blue.

The container has been part of the identity too. The Banner reported that Old Bay had been sold in tins until the switch to plastic in 2017, and that McCormick announced their return on 1 December 2025. The company paired the relaunch with a limited collectible tin made with the Baltimore Ravens, which fans could win in a contest running from 1 to 14 December, the Banner said, and hosted an invitation-only launch event that week.

The brand has also used its home city in its advertising. The Baltimore Jewish Times reported in 2018 that McCormick’s advertising for the seasoning’s 75th anniversary, four years earlier, featured Hillel Baron, a Chabad rabbi from Howard County. The same article followed the seasoning into local businesses, among them a Baltimore ice-cream shop, The Charmery, that sells an Old Bay caramel flavour, and gift-basket makers who include the can in their baskets.

For a design guide, Old Bay shows how a regional seasoning can be carried by a borrowed place name and two flat colours on a can, kept steady through a family firm, a British conglomerate and a national spice company. Compare it with McCormick, its Baltimore owner since 1990, and Frank’s RedHot, another McCormick flavour brand. For this guide we use can yellow, label blue, bay navy and steamed-crab red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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