Five residents of a Mohawk Valley village, a smoked-ham recipe and a name taken from the trees.

Beech-Nut is an American baby food brand, made in upstate New York and owned by the Swiss food group Hero. It began as something else entirely: a ham. A finding aid published by the Rochester Public Library’s Local History and Genealogy Division in March 2024 says the business was founded in 1891 as the Imperial Packing Company, a food maker based in the Mohawk Valley, and was incorporated in 1899. The company’s own website gives 1891 and names Canajoharie, New York, as the site of its original factory. Hero, in its published history, dates the founding to 1890 and says the firm was started by five residents of Canajoharie.

English Wikipedia names the founders as Raymond P. Lipe, his friend John D. Zieley, their brothers Walter H. Lipe and David Zieley, and Bartlett Arkell, and says its original product, Beech-Nut ham, was based on the smoked hams of the Lipes’ father, a farmer. It says the firm took the name Beech-Nut Packing Company on its incorporation in 1899, with Arkell as its president.

The name was chosen for its associations. According to Hero, it evoked the beech trees that grew around the area as well as the “nutty” flavour of the company’s hams. The Beech-Nut website points readers to the Arkell Museum in Canajoharie for photographs of the company’s early days.

The name soon travelled well beyond ham. In a trademark dispute with the P. Lorillard Company over the word “Beechnut” on tobacco, decided against Beech-Nut on 11 April 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, recorded that the Beech-Nut mark had begun on ham and bacon and been extended to goods as varied as chewing gum, peanut butter and ginger ale, often advertised as “Beech-Nut Quality.”

Hero says that by the 1920s Beech-Nut made or processed a wide range of foodstuffs, experimenting with products such as cheese, dates, seafood and maple syrup, and that chewing gum proved a major product. The Rochester finding aid lists candies, mints, gum, canned foods and peanut butter among its goods, and records a Beech-Nut plant in Rochester from 1912 to 1970 that produced coffee among other products.

Strained food in 1931, Life Savers in 1956 and Hero since 2005.

Baby food arrived during the Depression. Hero says the economic situation of 1931 meant Beech-Nut introduced few new products that year, with one exception: strained baby food, followed by chopped “junior” food in 1938. The company itself says it has made baby food in upstate New York since 1931, and notes on its website that it no longer makes Beech-Nut gum.

Ownership then changed several times. The Rochester finding aid says the company merged with Life Savers in 1956, forming Beech-Nut Life Savers, and merged again in 1968 to form the Squibb Beech-Nut Corporation. In 1973, it says, the baby food part of the business was sold to the lawyer Frank C. Nicholas, and it was ultimately bought by the Swiss firm Hero Group in 2005.

Hero has owned Beech-Nut since 2005. The group says it was founded in 1886 in Lenzburg, Switzerland, where its headquarters remain, and it lists Beech-Nut among its brands alongside Hero, Corny, Schwartau, Semper and Organix. Beech-Nut says it works with its parent company to share practices and supplier programmes.

The company also left the village where it started. CNY Central reported on 16 January 2015 that crews had begun demolishing the old Beech-Nut factory complex just off Exit 29 of the New York State Thruway in Canajoharie, a familiar industrial landmark for motorists in the Mohawk Valley. The big red letters spelling out the company’s name over the complex had already been removed, the report said. Beech-Nut had closed the factory in 2011, when it opened a new plant to the east, outside Amsterdam, New York; the company had been in Canajoharie since the late nineteenth century.

Beech-Nut says its headquarters in Amsterdam, in the Mohawk River Valley, was built in 2011 and houses its food processing.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sit in three corners of the freezer and the baby-food shelf: bagged frozen vegetables, pints and tubs of ice cream and gelato, and food for babies sold in jars and squeeze pouches. Each of those formats asks a lot of a small surface. A frozen bag is read through frost and at a glance from an open case; an ice-cream pint is turned in the hand, its lid seen from above; a jar or pouch is bought by a parent who wants to know quickly what is inside.

Names in these categories have often started with a family, a farm or a single shop and later passed to larger food companies, sometimes more than once. A label can therefore outlast several owners, and the place on the front of a pack is not always the place where the food is now grown, churned or packed.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, where its food is made and how its packs and logos have changed — and marks plainly what rests on the company’s own word.

A Chicago design firm, a glassmaker and a label you can see through.

The present look dates from 2014. Packaging Digest reported on 9 June 2014 that Beech-Nut had developed a new style of glass jar for the 1 April 2014 launch of a new line of baby food, working with the glassmaker Owens-Illinois, or O-I. Jeff Boutelle, president of Beech-Nut Nutrition, summed up the line as “real food for babies,” a phrase the brand still uses on its website.

Andy Dahlen, Beech-Nut’s vice-president of marketing and sales, confirmed to the magazine that the brand worked with Bluedog Design, a Chicago package design company, and said Beech-Nut wanted a new logo that captured its transformation as a company and a brand. He described the logo as a metaphor for Beech-Nut, “always growing.” Bluedog, Dahlen said, drew on sessions with mothers to build a design strategy that it carried across the brand’s touch points, and that strategy inspired the structural design behind the jar.

That jar is known as the “honeypot.” Shawn Welch of O-I told Packaging Digest that baby food shelves were dominated by short, uniformly round jars, and that the taller, tapered shape was designed to help Beech-Nut stand out, with sides that angle the label toward shoppers. The base was made to fit snugly into the top of the closure so the jars stack. The labels are transparent, so the colour and texture of the food show through, and because the label had to stay simple, Dahlen said, a short claim about the food was printed on the skirt of the closure instead. He said the glass and labels were made in New York and the food packed at the company’s headquarters in Amsterdam, and that sample kits for parents and the press came in wooden boxes holding four jars.

The jar was recognised by the packaging trade. In October 2014 Packaging Strategies announced that Beech-Nut Baby Food had won the glass category of its 2014 People’s Choice awards, voted by its readers; the entry was submitted by O-I, with Beech-Nut as brand owner, and the magazine noted its focus on ergonomics, spoonability and graphics.

For a design guide, Beech-Nut shows how a brand can renew itself through structure as much as graphics: a tapered glass jar, a see-through label and a name once spelled out in red above a Mohawk Valley factory. Compare Gerber, another American baby food brand, and Hero, the Swiss group that has owned Beech-Nut since 2005. For this guide we use beech green, leaf green, glass white and carrot orange with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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