Two origin stories, one exhibition kitchen and a name borrowed from shipping.

A.1. is a brown sauce sold in the United States and Canada as A.1. Original Sauce, owned there by Kraft Heinz. It is British in origin, and the man linked to it, Henderson William Brand, gave his name to Brand & Co., the London business that sold it. Two versions of its beginnings have circulated, and the brand’s own owners have told both.

The older story is the one the company used in advertising for decades. A Kraft Foods Group press release of 15 May 2014 traced the sauce to the 1820s and to the chef of King George IV, and said it was “commercialized in 1862 for the masses”. The Los Angeles Metropolitan News-Enterprise columnist Roger M. Grace, writing on 18 November 2004, gave the year as 1824, said the king reportedly proclaimed the sauce “A.1.”, and noted that the term came from the ratings that Lloyd’s gave to ships, where A1 marked the sturdiest vessels. He wrote that Brand began selling the sauce under his own name in 1831.

Grace revisited that account on 14 September 2006. He reported that a Kraft brand manager had written to him about an advertisement in the London Evening Post of 26 July 1881, which credited the sauce to “Mr. H. W. Brand (formerly of the Royal Household)” in 1862, when he was cook and co-manager of the cuisine at the International Exhibition in Hyde Park. Grace also found a United States trademark application for “The A1 International Sauce”, filed on 1 June 1895 by the brand’s British owners, which said the mark had been used in business by them since 1862.

The brand-history site Let’s Look Again gave the 1862 version in October 2014. It said Brand submitted the sauce to the Royal Commission for the exhibition’s restaurants and that the Chief Commissioner reportedly declared it “A.1.”. Whichever date is right, the business did not stay with Brand. Grace wrote in 2004 that Brand sold it to W. H. Withall, who kept the Brand & Co. name, and that Withall sold the company in 1873 to Dence and Mason, the owners who filed the 1895 application.

A Connecticut liquor importer, two tobacco companies, Kraft and Kraft Heinz.

The sauce reached America through a drinks business. Let’s Look Again says Gilbert Heublein, a German-born spirits distributor in Connecticut, encountered A.1. in England and obtained the exclusive United States distribution rights from 1894, adding the production rights from 1916. Grace’s 2004 column put the start of American marketing shortly after the turn of the century and named the importer as G. F. Heublein & Brothers, a liquor company.

In Britain the sauce took a different path. Let’s Look Again reported in 2014 that A.1. was phased out of the British market in the 1970s, in a crowded field of brown sauces, and that the trademark in Britain was by then owned by Premier Foods. Among the brown sauces it named in that field was HP.

The American brand then passed through a chain of large owners. Grace wrote that R. J. Reynolds merged with Heublein in October 1982, and that the brand later belonged to Nabisco Brands. In 1991, he reported, the United States District Court in Connecticut ruled for Nabisco Brands in a trademark action against a delicatessen selling a sauce called “A.2.”. Grace wrote that Philip Morris bought A.1. in 2000 when it acquired Nabisco Holdings, and placed it with its Kraft Foods business.

By 2014 the brand belonged to Kraft Foods Group of Northfield, Illinois, which issued the renaming release that May. TIME reported on 25 March 2015 that Kraft Foods Group would merge with H.J. Heinz, the ketchup maker co-owned by Berkshire Hathaway and the Brazilian firm 3G Capital, to form the Kraft Heinz Company, co-headquartered in the Chicago and Pittsburgh areas. Kraft Heinz announced the completion of the merger on 2 July 2015, and Kraft Heinz has owned A.1. in the United States since then. Its A.1. page now lists Thick & Hearty and Smoky Black Pepper sauces beside a line of marinades named after steakhouse cities and regional cooking.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are barbecue and steak sauces, condiments sold in bottles on supermarket shelves and set out on restaurant tables. They are bought quickly and used often, so a bottle in this category usually has to be recognised at arm’s length, among many similar bottles in the same aisle, by its shape, its colour and the name on the label.

That is why identity in this part of the grocery trade tends to rest on a few repeated signals rather than on the sauce itself. A wordmark, a founder’s name or face, a place name, a slogan or a short run of letters can travel from bottle to advertisement to recipe card, while the bottle changes size, material and cap many times over the years and new flavours are added beside the original.

The companies behind these names have often changed hands, been folded into larger food groups or moved where their sauces are made, so each guide asks plain questions: who started the brand, who owns it now, where the sauce is made and how its labels have been presented. Each separates what independent sources record from what a company says about itself.

Old advertisements, a word dropped from the label and a campaign about friendship.

For much of its American life the brand’s identity has been carried by its short name and by advertising lines. Grace’s 2004 column was illustrated with an A.1. advertisement from 1906, and he wrote that the royal-chef story he first repeated came from old advertisements for the product. During the recession of 1974, he reported, ads said A.1. “isn’t just for sirloin anymore”; in the early 1990s a catchy line held that A.1. was how a steak is done; and a later Kraft campaign was built on the phrase “Yeah, it’s that important”.

The label changed in 2014. Kraft Foods Group’s release of 15 May 2014 said that in the 1960s the brand had shifted its focus to beef and the product was renamed A.1. Steak Sauce. After almost fifty years, the company said, it was removing “Steak” from the name and returning to A.1. Sauce, while the formula stayed unchanged. Kraft said the redesigned label incorporated vintage details as a nod to the brand’s roots as a sauce for many foods, and quoted its earlier advertising of a “saucy sauce” for Welsh rarebits, broiled lobster and English mutton chops.

The release also introduced a campaign, “For Almost Everything. Almost.”, created by the agency CP+B-LA, with two television spots from 19 May 2014, a Facebook campaign in which the brand “friended” other foods, and a Pinterest page with boards for pork, chicken, fish and vegetables. The line has lasted: Kraft Heinz’s A.1. page still carries “For Almost Everything. Almost.” above the range.

For a design guide, A.1. shows how a name of two letters and two full stops can outlast changes of country, owner and even of what the product is for. Compare the London brown sauce of HP Sauce and the Worcester sauce of Lea & Perrins. For this guide we use label red, bottle black and label cream with a fat-face display serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep A.1.’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.