A husband and wife, a fruit and vegetable store and a side business in jars.

Polaner is an American brand of jams, jellies, preserves and fruit spreads, owned today by B&G Foods of New Jersey. It carries the name of the couple who began it. A company history published on the B&G Foods website, read here in an archived copy from August 2009, says Max Polaner and his wife Lena started preserving fresh fruits and pickling fresh vegetables sometime before the turn of 1900, working in a room next door to their fruit and vegetable store in Newark, New Jersey. The brand’s current website puts a date on it, closing its home page with the line “Made for today. Since 1898.”

The jars began as a sideline. The 2009 history says Max and Lena sold jellies, preserves, sauerkraut, pickles and other goods as a “side business,” and that once they saw how quickly customers took to them, they began selling through other stores in Newark and then through food stores across the New York and New Jersey metropolitan area. The present website tells the same story in warmer terms: it says the couple canned and preserved jams and jellies in the small kitchen next to their market, using fruit preserved for their own family table.

The business moved several times as it grew. The company history says that in 1910 it took larger quarters in Newark with ten employees, two of them salesmen, and that as its goods travelled to stores some 100 miles away it needed more space again. In 1928, the history says, a new shop was built on Morris Avenue in Newark, where thirty employees worked. The firm stayed in the city for the next forty years.

The family name stayed on the company through the generations. English Wikipedia says the business was founded by Max and Lena Polaner as M. Polaner Inc. and was renamed M. Polaner and Son, Inc. when their son Sidney Polaner joined it. The company history names Leonard Polaner, Max and Lena’s grandson, as the leader under whom the firm launched its fruit spread in the 1980s.

Roseland, Artal, American Home Products and B&G Foods.

The move that still defines where Polaner is made came in the late 1960s. The B&G Foods history says the company studied other preserving plants in the United States and decided to modernise, and that in 1968 a new building went up on eight acres of land in Roseland, New Jersey. Two expansions followed, in 1972 and 1978, and the history described the site as still in use in 2009.

It is still in use now. News 12 New Jersey reported on 6 July 2026, in a segment by Jack Ford for its “Made in New Jersey” series, that workers at a B&G Foods facility in Roseland produce Polaner jams and jellies as well as Grandma’s Molasses. The plant manager, John Bennett, told the programme he had worked at the site since 1977 and had watched it change from a largely manual operation into a modern plant.

Ownership passed out of the family in the 1980s. English Wikipedia says the company was acquired by the Dutch Artal Group in 1986 and sold to American Home Products in 1993, later becoming part of International Home Foods. Its article on B&G Foods adds that Leonard S. Polaner, who had led the family business before the acquisition, was appointed president over both Polaner and the pickle maker B&G under Artal, and later became chairman of B&G Foods when that company was formed in 1996.

The brand then came back to New Jersey hands. The trade site Food Online reported on 14 January 1999 that B&G Foods, then based in Roseland, had signed a definitive agreement to buy the Polaner brand of fruit spreads, preserves and wet spices from International Home Foods. The report said B&G was already the exclusive co-packer of Polaner products and sold them through its own store-door distribution in the greater New York area, and that it planned to add the line to its national network. It quoted David Wenner, B&G’s president and chief executive, saying the company meant to use its experience with smaller specialty brands to grow Polaner. B&G Foods has owned Polaner since 1999.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sell three of the plainest things in an American kitchen: sugar, cooking oil and fruit spread. Each sits on a different shelf, in a different kind of pack. Sugar usually travels in a paper bag or a carton, oil in a clear or tinted bottle, and fruit spread in a glass jar with a lid, so the look of the brand is carried by a label, a name, a colour and the shape of the container.

Many names on these shelves have also outlived their first owners. A refinery, a press or a family kitchen may have started the brand, and a different company may now make, bottle or pack it, sometimes far from where it began. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where it is made.

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 packs and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A fruit spread that refused the word jelly, and a campaign built on that refusal.

The product that made the name national arrived in 1986. The B&G Foods history and the current Polaner website both say that in that year, under Leonard Polaner, the brand introduced Polaner All Fruit, which the company describes as sweetened only with fruit and fruit juice. English Wikipedia names All Fruit as the brand’s main line and cites a New York Times article of 2 October 1991 by Florence Fabricant on the rise of fruit spreads.

The positioning gave the brand its advertising. The product was sold not as jelly but as a fruit spread, and the television campaign turned that distinction into a joke. English Wikipedia describes the “Don’t DARE call it jelly” advertisements of the 1980s and 1990s: a succession of well-to-do diners ask for the Polaner All Fruit to be passed, until a decidedly less refined guest asks someone to please pass the jelly, leaving the table shocked. The article cites a commercial from 1989.

The company still treats the line as its signature. The Polaner website says All Fruit was fuelled by the popularity of the “Don’t DARE call it jelly!” campaign and has remained a staple in American homes for more than thirty years, and it writes the slogan with a registered-trademark sign. The 2009 company history used the same phrase, with “DARE” in capitals.

The range has widened around that core. The 2009 history listed Polaner Sugar Free preserves and a line of Ready-To-Use Spices, including garlic, oregano, basil and jalapeño, alongside All Fruit, toppings and organic spreads. The current website features seedless raspberry, blackberry and strawberry preserves, recipes from tarts to chicken wings, and the claim that Polaner is “a home cook’s secret ingredient.” Its “About Us” page returns to the founding couple, saying it has been more than one hundred and twenty years since Max and Lena started preserving in the kitchen next to their market, and that the brand has been passed “across tables and time.”

For a design guide, Polaner shows how a product category can be named by refusal, so that the word a brand will not accept becomes its signature line. Compare it with Smucker’s, another family preserves name with a slogan built on its surname, and B&G, its stablemate at B&G Foods. For this guide we use Concord purple, strawberry red, label cream and leaf green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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