An MIT graduate, a bicycle factory and an oil that had to lose its smell.

Wesson is an American brand of cooking oil, sold today as vegetable, canola, corn and blended oils and owned by the Canadian agribusiness Richardson International. It carries the name of a chemist. A biography of David Wesson by Gary R. List, published in the Lipid Library of the American Oil Chemists’ Society (AOCS), says Wesson was educated in the public schools of Brooklyn, New York, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked there as an assistant to the professor of chemistry.

Fats came next. AOCS says Wesson became chief chemist at the N.K. Fairbank Company of Chicago, which made compound shortenings by blending animal fat with cottonseed oil, and that he later transferred to Guttenberg, New Jersey, in the same role. By 1893, the biography says, he had developed two compound shortenings for Fairbank, sold as Columbus and Bolivar’s Head.

He then struck out on his own. AOCS says Wesson opened a bicycle factory, set up a laboratory of his own and, about 1900, began work on producing an edible oil from cottonseed. Trading as the Wesson Process Company, he also became manager of the technical department of the Southern Cotton Oil Company. By the winter of 1900, according to the biography, a plant in Savannah, Georgia, was producing “Wesson Oil”.

The difficulty was smell and flavour. AOCS explains that treating cottonseed oil with fuller’s earth could take out its colour, but that odour and flavour were harder to remove and had limited the oil’s use in food. Earlier chemists had blown high-pressure steam through the heated oil in closed tanks. Wesson’s improvement, the society says, was to carry out the deodorising under vacuum, which avoided cooked flavours and produced an oil with better flavour and keeping quality. AOCS also credits him with a laboratory test for refining loss that bears his name, and with a part in founding the society itself.

The brand gives its own dates. The timeline on the Wesson website says David Wesson introduced his process in 1880, formed the Wesson Oil Company in 1899, and marketed his all-vegetable shortening as Wesson Snowdrift. BrandlandUSA reported in December 2022 that the US Patent and Trademark Office record for Wesson Oil gives 1899 as its date of first use, and that the brand began within the Southern Cotton Oil Company before passing to the Wesson Oil and Snowdrift Sales Co., headquartered in New Orleans.

Hunt-Wesson, a string of conglomerates, ConAgra and a family firm from Winnipeg.

The oil went on to share a company name with tomatoes. The International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, 1997) says that in 1960 Hunt Foods, the California tomato packer, merged with the Wesson Oil and Snowdrift Company, and that by 1964 the combined business had been renamed Hunt-Wesson Foods. The Wesson website dates the move of its own operations to Memphis, Tennessee, to 1936.

A run of corporate owners followed. The directory says Hunt-Wesson Foods, Canada Dry and McCall were brought together in 1968 as Norton Simon, Inc.; that Esmark bought Norton Simon in 1983; that Beatrice acquired Esmark in 1984; and that Beatrice went private the following year under the investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts as BCI Holding. In 1990 ConAgra of Omaha acquired BCI, and Hunt-Wesson came with it.

ConAgra pushed the line further. The directory says Hunt-Wesson introduced Wesson Canola Oil and Wesson Lite No-Stick Cooking Spray in 1990 and 1991, and that from 1991 the brand was run inside an operating company called Wesson/Peter Pan Foods Co., alongside Peter Pan peanut butter. Its tomato partner, Hunt’s, sat in a separate operating company.

The present owner is Canadian. On 18 December 2018, Richardson International of Winnipeg announced an agreement with Conagra Brands to buy Wesson together with the brand’s plant in Memphis. In that release Richardson described itself as a subsidiary of James Richardson & Sons, Limited, a family-owned company established in 1857. A second Richardson release, dated 25 February 2019, said the purchase had closed once regulatory and other conditions were met, and promised a continued US presence for the marketing, manufacturing and distribution of Wesson products. Richardson has owned Wesson since 2019.

The sale followed one that did not happen. just-food reported in April 2023 that Richardson bought Wesson after US competition officials opposed a sale of the Wesson assets to J.M. Smucker. The same report said Richardson was replacing its Wesson facility in Memphis with a new plant in the city, which makes the Wesson brand for retail customers as well as frying blends and shortenings for industrial and foodservice clients. The Wesson website says the Memphis facility makes and packages all Wesson Oil products.

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.

Snowdrift, a pouring spout, a 1964 logo and an actress who stayed for two decades.

The early products were named for what they replaced. The Wesson timeline says Wesson Snowdrift was sold first as a liquid cottonseed oil and later in a solid shortening form, and that in 1929 the can was given a new spout to make pouring easier. In 1955, the timeline says, the brand taught cooks a “LoveLight” two-egg chiffon layer cake from a cookbook called Quicker Ways to Better Eating; The Wesson Oil Cookbook followed in 1992.

The logo carries a designer’s name. The company timeline says the graphic designer Saul Bass redesigned the Wesson logo in 1964, and WebProNews, in a May 2013 list of corporate identities by Bass, also dates his Wesson Oil work to 1964. BrandlandUSA wrote in December 2022 that the Bass design used blue and green on a patented bottle. During the Beatrice years, the same report says, the Bass design almost disappeared, and the Beatrice name was attached to the top of the label.

Television gave the brand a face. BrandlandUSA says the actress Florence Henderson began appearing for Wesson while she was playing the mother on The Brady Bunch, and that she went on to front its advertising for many years. The company timeline dates her “Wessonality” campaign to 1976 and describes the word as the crisp, non-greasy taste of food fried in Wesson oil. BrandlandUSA quotes the jingle line that the chicken has “a certain Wesson-ality”.

The brand has also changed its message over the years. BrandlandUSA says that in the 1980s Wesson stressed that it was a range of different kinds of oil, and it lists slogans of the period including “Cooks as Light as it Looks”. The Hunt-Wesson additions of the early 1990s, canola oil and a no-stick spray, widened that range again.

The latest pack looks back to the 1960s. The Wesson timeline marks 2022 with the line “Great new look. Same pure oil.” BrandlandUSA reported that the new design mentions the brand’s Memphis roots and evokes the 1960s package design by Saul Bass, with a cleaner feel than the label it replaced. The brand’s website now describes Wesson as proudly made in Memphis.

For a design guide, Wesson shows how a chemist’s surname, a designer’s mark and a long-running television face can hold one pantry brand together through a long line of owners. Compare it with Crisco, another American cooking fat, and Hunt’s, its partner in Hunt-Wesson Foods. For this guide we use bottle blue, leaf green, oil gold and label cream with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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