Butter from spare cream, a cotton gin and a schoolteacher who took over.

Blue Bell is an ice cream brand from Brenham, Texas, a town in Washington County northwest of Houston. It began as a butter maker. The Handbook of Texas, published by the Texas State Historical Association, says the business started in 1907 as a Washington County dairy farmers’ cooperative called the Brenham Creamery Company, whose founders converted a nearby abandoned cotton gin into a creamery and made butter from their excess cream. Houston History, the magazine of the University of Houston’s Center for Public History, wrote in 2012 that a group of Brenham businessmen set the creamery up as a cooperative to produce sour cream butter, and the company’s own history also credits a group of local businessmen who made butter from cream brought in by area farmers.

Ice cream came four years later. The Handbook of Texas dates ice cream production to 1911. Houston History says the creamery’s manager, H. C. Hodde, named the year after its founding, wanted to use the sweet cream too, and experimented with ice cream that year: the butter maker hand-cranked cream, sugar and flavourings in a metal can packed in ice and salt inside a wooden tub, and the ice cream went out by horse and buggy to Brenham families who could eat it before it melted.

The creamery struggled in the late 1910s. Hodde left in 1916, Houston History says, and the company went through several managers before the board hired E. F. Kruse in 1919. He was a schoolteacher and First World War veteran from a local farming family who, the magazine says, turned down a school superintendent’s job to take it. The Handbook of Texas calls him general manager and credits him with reversing the creamery’s declining fortunes after two early managers had failed to expand the business.

In 1930 the company changed its name to Blue Bell Creameries, after the bluebell, a wildflower native to Texas. Houston History says Kruse chose the name to reflect the purity and freshness of his favourite wildflower. Butter continued alongside ice cream for almost three more decades; both the Handbook and the company date the end of butter making to 1958, when Blue Bell began to concentrate on ice cream alone.

Three generations of Kruses and a slow march out of Texas.

Blue Bell has been run by the Kruse family since 1919. E. F. Kruse led the company until his death in 1951, Houston History reported, and his sons Ed. Kruse and Howard Kruse followed him in turn; the Handbook of Texas names Ed as chairman and chief executive and Howard as president. In 2012 the magazine described Paul Kruse, Ed’s son, as the third generation of the family to head the company. The Christian Science Monitor described Blue Bell in July 2015 as privately owned and operated by the Kruse family. In January 2024 the company named Jimmy Lawhorn its president, in a statement quoting the board chairman, Jim Kruse.

Growth came gradually. The Handbook of Texas says refrigerated trucks replaced horse-drawn delivery wagons in 1936. Expansion began with temporary production facilities in Houston in 1960, followed by branches in Austin in 1965, Beaumont in 1973 and Dallas in 1978, and in 1989 by out-of-state branches at Oklahoma City and Baton Rouge. Houston History credits vending machines bought in 1961 with a boost to Houston sales. The company says it was not until the 1980s that Blue Bell became available outside Texas.

The production base widened with the territory. The Handbook records a production plant at Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, opened in 1992, and English Wikipedia dates a third plant, at Sylacauga, Alabama, to 1996. Houston History named Brenham, Broken Arrow and Sylacauga as its plants in 2012. The company says its ice cream reaches stores through direct store delivery, so that no one but a Blue Bell employee handles the product between the plant and the grocery shelf. The Handbook notes that Blue Bell sells through grocery chains rather than its own parlours.

The brand’s flagship flavour came from the second generation. Houston History says Howard Kruse began working in 1967 on a way to reproduce the taste of hand-cranked vanilla, and struggled for nearly a year before he found the right texture and flavour; Homemade Vanilla went on sale in 1969, a date the Handbook also gives. On 20 April 2015, after Listeria monocytogenes was found in some of its products, Blue Bell recalled all of its products, CNN reported. In July 2015 the company accepted an investment from the Fort Worth investor Sid Bass, The Christian Science Monitor reported.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are regional American milk, dairy and ice-cream names. Dairy brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family farms that still bottle under a founder’s name to labels that have passed through cooperatives, holding companies and investment firms, and a single brand can be sold in one state’s supermarkets or across much of the country.

A dairy brand’s identity is usually carried less by one product than by a carton, a jug label or an ice-cream half-gallon seen in the chiller cabinet every week, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, closed plants or moved its processing as it grew. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its milk or ice cream is actually processed and packed.

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

A logo from 1977, an in-house agency and a listed Art Moderne plant.

Blue Bell’s identity rests on one image and one idea. The image is the logo: the Handbook of Texas says that in 1977 the company adopted its familiar logo, which depicts a young girl leading a cow. The idea is the place. Blue Bell presents itself as “the Little Creamery in Brenham,” and the company’s headquarters and visitor centre in the town, completed in 1988, still go by that name on its website.

That phrase was a marketing decision. Houston History credits John Barnhill, who joined Blue Bell in 1960 and rose through the company, with a marketing strategy built on the claim that its ice cream came from the “Little Creamery in Brenham”; the magazine shows him painting an advertisement on a storefront window in 1999. The Handbook of Texas says the company set up Blue Bell Advertising Associates, an in-house advertising agency, in 1987, to produce seasonal radio and television spots that aired between February and October, and that well-placed advertising reinforced its image as the little creamery in Brenham.

The creamery itself is part of the story. The Handbook says the original Brenham plant, which incorporated building elements from the American Cotton Gin Company and included a one-storey main building in the Art Moderne style, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990 for its role as an agricultural processing facility. Visitors can tour the Brenham plant and its visitor centre, and the company also invites visitors to its Sylacauga site.

The flavours carry the same regional voice. Houston History describes Houston-area flavours such as Dos Amigos, Tres Leches and Buñuelos that went on to rotate across Blue Bell’s routes, and a Key Lime Pie flavour introduced in Florida and later offered elsewhere. To mark its centenary in 2007 the company ran a flavour contest, won by a recipe called Southern Hospitality, with pineapple, pecans and strawberry sauce in a vanilla base. The magazine also notes that the company has experimented with flavours that did not last, such as a dill pickle ice cream.

For a design guide, Blue Bell shows how a small-town address, a wildflower name and a picture of a girl with a cow can carry a regional ice cream across the South. Compare it with Breyers, the Philadelphia ice cream brand, and Mayfield, another Southern dairy. For this guide we use bluebell blue, vanilla cream, wildflower violet and pasture green with a bold script, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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