From a parboiling patent to a Houston rice company.

Ben’s Original started as a way of treating rice. English Wikipedia says that in the 1910s the German-British chemist Erich Huzenlaub and the British chemist Francis Heron Rogers developed a form of parboiling, later known as the Huzenlaub Process, in which the whole grain is vacuum-dried, steamed, dried again and then husked. Citing a 1945 bulletin of the National Research Council, Wikipedia says the method shortened cooking time and made the grain resistant to weevils.

The link to the confectionery family came through Forrest Mars Sr. Wikipedia, citing Mars’s own history page, says he moved to the United Kingdom in 1932 to expand the Mars food business abroad, and while there learned of Huzenlaub’s work; Huzenlaub’s London company was called Rice Conversion Ltd. The two men later formed a partnership, Mars and Huzenlaub, in Houston, Texas, which gave Mars a share in the rice-conversion patent.

The company behind the brand followed during the Second World War. Wikipedia says that in 1942, with Mars’s guidance and sponsorship, Huzenlaub and the Houston food broker Gordon L. Harwell created Converted Rice, Inc., which sold its whole output to the United States and British armed forces. Time magazine covered the process in an article dated 28 June 1943, and in August 1944 reported that the company was building a second large plant, financed in part by the government’s Defense Plant Corporation and by an investment from Forrest Mars. Wikipedia dates the rice’s retail marketing under the name Uncle Ben’s to 1943; the BBC, reporting in 2020, said the brand entered the market in the 1940s.

Mars took full control later. Wikipedia, citing a letter from Forrest Mars dated September 1959, says that in 1959 he bought Huzenlaub’s interest in the company and merged it into his own business, Food Manufacturers, Inc. Mars has owned the brand since then.

Houston offices, a Mississippi mill.

The brand’s home has moved within the American South. Wikipedia says the Uncle Ben’s milling plant stood on the Houston Ship Channel until 1999, when operations moved to Greenville, Mississippi; the Houston Business Journal reported the planned closure of the old Houston mill and the move to Mississippi in a story by Monica Perrin dated 11 October 1998. The Houston Chronicle, in a June 2020 report by Amanda Drane, said the company’s headquarters had stayed in Houston after the mill left.

Greenville has remained central to the brand. When Mars announced the new name in September 2020, the Associated Press, in a report carried by CBS News on 23 September 2020, described Greenville as the city where the rice brand had been produced for more than 40 years — a longer span than the 1999 move date given by the Houston Business Journal and Wikipedia would suggest, so the two accounts differ on how long production has been based there.

The product line is described plainly in the reference sources. Wikipedia calls Ben’s Original an American brand of parboiled rice and related food products, introduced by Converted Rice, Inc., the Houston company that Mars now owns. Time’s 1943 and 1944 reports framed the converted grain as a supply for troops: Wikipedia, summarising them, says the rice could be air-dropped to soldiers in the field without risk of weevil infestation and cooked more quickly than other rice. The 2020 announcements came from Mars Food, the division of Mars named by the AP and the BBC, and the brand’s American headquarters remained in Houston, according to the Houston Chronicle.

Design and documentation.

Canned and shelf-stable meal brands in general live or die on a few square inches of label. A can or a box sits in a long run of near-identical shapes on a pantry shelf, so the label has to do the work that a bottle’s silhouette or a shop’s window might do elsewhere: a band of colour that can be spotted from the end of an aisle, a name set large enough to read at a glance, and a picture of what is inside.

Many of these brands also lean on a face or a figure — a mascot, a cartoon character or a portrait of a cook or founder — and those images can outlast several owners, or be redrawn and retired as tastes change. Colour coding often does quieter work, telling one variety from another within the same range.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its food is made and how its labels and characters have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A pack image retired in 2020.

For decades the brand’s identity rested on a face. Wikipedia says that from 1946 to 2020 Uncle Ben’s products carried the image of an elderly African-American man in a bow tie. The Associated Press reported in September 2020 that Mars has said the face was originally modelled on a Chicago maître d’hôtel named Frank Brown. Wikipedia also records that Mars had earlier described Uncle Ben as a rice grower known for the quality of his rice, and that Gordon L. Harwell chose the name when the company moved from military supply to selling to the general public.

The character was reworked once before it was retired. The New York Times, in a column by Stuart Elliott dated 30 March 2007, reported on an advertising campaign that cast Uncle Ben as the chairman of the board of a rice company; the BBC described that campaign in 2020 as a move away from the brand’s earlier, more servile presentation.

The change came in two steps in 2020. CNN and Adweek reported on 17 June 2020 that Mars said it would “evolve” the brand’s visual identity, including its logo, and the BBC said the pledge was made amid global protests over police brutality and racism. On 23 September 2020 Mars announced the new name, Ben’s Original. Mars said: “We understand the inequities that were associated with the name and face of the previous brand, and as we announced in June, we have committed to change,” according to the BBC. The AP quoted Fiona Dawson, then global president of Mars Food, multisales and global customers, saying, “We listened to our associates and our customers and the time is right to make meaningful changes across society,” and reported that months of conversations with employees, customers and other stakeholders led the company to the new name. The portrait was removed from the packaging along with the old name; Wikipedia, citing PennLive in May 2021, says the new packs became widely available in the United States and Canada from around the middle of that year.

For a design guide, Ben’s Original shows how a pantry brand changed both its name and its pack image at once, retiring the portrait that had appeared on its products from 1946 to 2020. Compare it with Rice-A-Roni, another boxed American rice side, and Campbell’s, a pantry label built on colour rather than a character. For this guide we use rice-box blue and harvest orange on grain cream with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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