Two immigrants, a Manhattan pickle company and a plant in Queens.

B&G is a pickle and relish brand whose initials now also name the company that owns it. English Wikipedia describes B&G Foods, Inc. as an American branded foods holding company based in Parsippany, New Jersey, and says it was formed in 1996 to acquire Bloch & Guggenheimer, a Manhattan-based producer of pickles, relish and condiments that had been founded in 1889. The pickle brand is therefore the older of the two names: the jar came first, and the holding company took its name from it.

Wikipedia traces the name to Joseph Bloch and Julius Guggenheimer, two immigrants who started a pickle company, Bloch & Guggenheimer, Inc., in Manhattan in 1889. The firm’s initials became the brand, and the two letters joined by an ampersand are what has carried the name on jars of pickles and relish ever since.

In its early days, Wikipedia says, B&G built a pickle plant in Long Island City, Queens. The company operated that plant until the 1970s, when it moved production to Maryland. Across those decades B&G produced pickles, relish and other condiments under the B&G brand, and Wikipedia says that by the 1980s the company had become a significant retail and foodservice supplier in the New York City area.

For most of its first century, then, B&G was a regional pickle maker with roots in one city, a plant across the East River and a customer base centred on New York. The changes that followed were not about the pickles themselves but about who owned the company that packed them.

A Dutch owner, a buyout group and a new holding company.

Wikipedia says that in the 1980s the Dutch conglomerate Artal NV bought several North American food companies, including B&G and M. Polaner, Inc. Leonard S. Polaner, who had led his family’s business before its acquisition, was appointed president over both companies, and he hired David Wenner, a former Johnson & Johnson executive, to manage B&G. Starting in March 1993, Artal began to sell its food businesses.

In June 1993, according to Wikipedia, an investment group led by Robert Bass and the Dallas buyout firm Haas, Wheat & Partners formed Specialty Foods Corp. to buy Artal’s remaining North American food companies, B&G among them. Polaner and Wenner both took executive positions with Specialty. Two years later, Wikipedia says, Specialty decided to focus on its bread and cheese businesses and began selling its other holdings.

That sale created the modern company. Wikipedia says a group of New York investors, Bruckmann, Rosser, Sherrill & Co., working with Polaner and Wenner, formed B Companies Holdings Corp. in 1996 to buy Bloch & Guggenheimer and the snack foods producer Burns & Ricker from Specialty. In 1997, following those acquisitions, the company took the name of its more notable subsidiary and became B&G Foods Holdings Corp., with Polaner as chairman and Wenner as president and chief executive.

From there the pickle maker’s name spread far beyond pickles. Wikipedia says B&G began buying other food brands in June 1997, starting with several from Nabisco, including Regina wine vinegar, Brer Rabbit molasses and Vermont Maid syrups, and in August 1997 bought Louisiana-based Trappey’s Fine Foods, a maker of hot sauces and pickled peppers. In October 2004 the company became B&G Foods, Inc., and in 2007 it began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker BGS. Later purchases, Wikipedia says, included Green Giant from General Mills in 2015 and Crisco from The J.M. Smucker Company in 2020. The B&G brand on a pickle jar has been owned by B&G Foods and its predecessor holding company since 1996.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are all American pickle names. Pickle brands in general reach people through a glass jar more than through any other object: a cylinder of brine, cucumbers and spice that sits on a shelf or in a chilled case, with a paper or printed label and a metal lid. Some pickles are sold shelf-stable in the ordinary grocery aisle, while others are kept refrigerated from the plant to the store, and that choice shapes where a jar is placed, how it is shipped and how the label has to read from a distance.

Because brine and cucumbers look much the same from one jar to the next, much of a pickle brand’s identity is carried by the label, the lid, the colour of the type and sometimes a mascot or a slogan. Many pickle names began as regional brands sold close to the farms and plants that supplied them, and some have since passed to national food companies. The questions worth asking are plain ones: who started it, who owns it now, and where the pickles are packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what a company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Initials, an ampersand and a company named after a pickle.

The brand’s design story begins with its name. Bloch & Guggenheimer was shortened to two initials joined by an ampersand, and that compact mark is the part of the identity that has lasted from a Manhattan pickle company of 1889 to a listed food group in New Jersey. Wikipedia’s account shows the name travelling in two directions at once: it stayed on jars of pickles and relish, and it moved up to become the name of the holding company that owns them.

The holding company formed in 1996 took the name of the pickle maker it was set up to buy. Wikipedia says the company was renamed in 1997 after its more notable subsidiary, so the jar label and the corporate name share the same two letters.

The places in the record also shape the brand. Its history runs from Manhattan to a plant in Long Island City, then to Maryland in the 1970s, and its owners have included a Dutch conglomerate, a Dallas-linked buyout group and New York investors before the move to Parsippany. Through all of that, B&G remained a pickle, relish and condiment name with a long history in the New York City area.

For a design guide, B&G shows how a pair of founders’ initials can outlast the founders’ full names, the factory they built and several owners, and end up naming a whole company. Compare it with Green Giant and Crisco, two brands that B&G Foods later bought. For this guide we use deli green, dark dill, brine yellow and pepper red with a sans-serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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