A New York packaged-foods group, a margarine and a Sunday-night comedy show.

Blue Bonnet is an American brand of margarine and bread spreads owned today by Conagra Brands. In October 2026 the brand’s own web address, bluebonnet.com, forwarded visitors to a Conagra Brands where-to-buy page for a Blue Bonnet product. The brand has passed through three food companies, and the earliest part of its story belongs to Standard Brands, a packaged-foods group based in New York City.

English Wikipedia says Standard Brands was formed in 1929 by the bank J. P. Morgan & Co., which merged the Fleischmann Company, the Royal Baking Powder Company, E. W. Gillett, Widlar Food Products and the Chase & Sanborn Coffee Company. The article cites Time magazine from 1929 and a December 1929 report in The Standard Union for the merger. Standard Brands later bought the nut company Planters in 1960, the same article says, and it stayed independent until 1981.

The margarine came later than the group itself. Advertising Week’s AW360 site reported in August 2019 that Standard Brands founded Blue Bonnet Margarine in 1942. In a question-and-answer feature published by the American Marketing Association’s Marketing News in November 2019, written in the voice of the brand’s mascot, Blue Bonnet says it was founded in New York City in the mid-1940s. In the same feature the brand says that many shoppers assume it has Texas roots, because the bluebonnet is the state flower of Texas, and it answers that its beginnings were in New York.

Radio carried the name to a national audience. English Wikipedia’s article on The Fred Allen Show, citing the historian Alan Havig’s book on Fred Allen’s radio comedy, says that when the comedian returned to the air on NBC on 7 October 1945, Standard Brands was the program’s original sponsor and used it to advertise two of its products, Tenderleaf Tea and Blue Bonnet margarine. The show ran on Sunday evenings, the article says, on the same night as programs hosted by Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen, with Kenny Delmar doubling as announcer.

Standard Brands, Nabisco Brands and ConAgra.

Blue Bonnet stayed with Standard Brands for decades. English Wikipedia’s article on the brand says its original owner, Standard Brands, merged with Nabisco in July 1981. The article on Standard Brands, citing a Chicago Tribune report from April 1981, says the combined business took the name Nabisco Brands, Inc. Advertising Week gave the same sequence in 2019, saying that in 1981 Standard Brands merged with Nabisco to become Nabisco Brands.

The next change came in the summer of 1998. In a news release dated 21 July 1998 and issued from Omaha, Nebraska, ConAgra, Inc. announced that it and Nabisco, Inc. had a definitive agreement for ConAgra to acquire Nabisco’s egg-substitute brand Egg Beaters together with Nabisco’s tablespreads business. The release said that business made and marketed margarine under several names, including Parkay, Blue Bonnet and Fleischmann’s. The companies expected to complete the cash transaction after the waiting period required under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, and the terms were not disclosed.

ConAgra’s president and chief executive at the time, Bruce Rohde, was quoted in the release describing the purchase as an opportunity that moved ConAgra “into two new grocery categories.” He placed the spreads beside ConAgra’s existing refrigerated brands, which the release listed as including County Line and Treasure Cave cheeses and Reddi-wip dessert topping. The release described ConAgra as an Omaha-based food company whose consumer brands then included Healthy Choice, Banquet, Hunt’s and Peter Pan.

English Wikipedia’s article on the brand likewise says Nabisco sold Blue Bonnet to ConAgra in 1998, along with other food brands, and names ConAgra as the owner. The company now trades as Conagra Brands, and the brand’s web address pointed to a Conagra Brands page when it was checked in October 2026.

Design and documentation.

Butter spreads and packaged cheese share a shelf and a set of design problems. A spread is usually sold in a plastic tub with a printed lid, or as wrapped sticks in a small carton; cheese is sold in vacuum-sealed blocks, in slices, in wedges wrapped in foil, or in a round box that holds several portions. In each case the pack is small, handled every day and stored in a refrigerator, so the brand has to read clearly from the front of a lid, the end of a carton or the face of a block.

That is why so much of the identity in this category sits in a few repeated elements: a name in a set type style, a colour that runs across the whole range, and sometimes a drawn character or symbol that customers can find among many similar packs. Behind those elements, the companies themselves may have changed owners, merged or moved production more than once.

Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now, where its products are made and how its packs and advertising have changed, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A modelling agency, a pageant winner, an artist’s rendering and a line about everything being better.

The brand’s visual signature is a woman in a blue bonnet. Advertising Week reported in August 2019 that in 1946 Standard Brands approached the Harry Conover Modeling Agency to find a model to be its “Miss Blue Bonnet,” and that it chose Jeni Freeland, later known as Jeni Berry, who had been named Miss Florida in 1945 and had competed in that year’s Miss America pageant. The brand’s own 2019 feature in Marketing News says its likeness was inspired by Jeni Freeland and gives 1948 as the year she was selected as Miss Blue Bonnet.

According to Advertising Week, her early work was promotional appearances at supermarket openings, followed by events at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel; the site also says she travelled to Washington, D.C., with a group that lobbied lawmakers on Blue Bonnet’s behalf to allow margarine to be sold coloured yellow. The same article says an artist drew a rendering of her for the packaging, and that this image made its debut on Blue Bonnet packaging in 1948. Advertising Week says her run as the face of the brand ended in 1986, that the Miss Blue Bonnet seen on packs today is not designed to depict a specific woman, and that the original bonnet was created by the designer Sally Victor.

Television added well-known faces under the same hat. In its 2019 Marketing News feature, the brand says that notable Blue Bonnet commercials of the early 1980s featured the actors Jamie Farr and Georgia Engel and the baseball players Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays. English Wikipedia records the brand’s slogan and jingle as “Everything’s better with Blue Bonnet on it!” and notes the everyday phrase “I’m on it like Blue Bonnet!”

For a design guide, Blue Bonnet shows how a single costume detail can carry a grocery brand from a radio sponsorship to the supermarket chiller: a colour, a hat and a smiling face carried the name. Compare it with Parkay, which came to ConAgra in the same 1998 agreement, and with the Minnesota butter co-operative Land O’Lakes. For this guide we use bonnet blue, spread yellow and kitchen cream with a brush script, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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