A restaurant owner in southern Ohio decides to make the sausage himself.

Bob Evans is an American grocery brand of pork sausage and refrigerated side dishes such as mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese. It is made by Bob Evans Farms, a company based in New Albany, Ohio, which Post Holdings has owned since 2018. The name belongs to the man who started the business: English Wikipedia says the company was founded in 1948 by Bob Evans, when he began processing and packaging sausage for his small diner in Gallipolis, Ohio, with early operations based at his farm in Rio Grande, Ohio.

The company tells the story in more detail on its grocery website. It says Evans opened a small restaurant in Gallipolis in 1945, after returning from service in the Second World War, and called it The Terminal Steak House. The company says the restaurant stood next to a truck stop, that truckers wanted a hearty breakfast, and that Evans had trouble buying good sausage from his suppliers. Having learned meat cutting at his uncle’s meat-packing business, it says, he decided in 1948 to make the sausage himself, starting with a few hogs, black pepper and sage.

The company also gives the product’s original name. It says the original manufacturing building was in Springfield Township, Ohio, and that the sausage was originally called Springfield Farm Sausage before being renamed Bob Evans Sausage soon after. Its “About” page says his wife, Jewell Evans, helped perfect the seasonings, and that the sausage was soon sold to grocery stores in Ohio and West Virginia before reaching the rest of the country. The Columbus Dispatch, in an obituary published on 22 June 2007, recorded that Evans had married Jewell Waters, whom he met in high school.

The business took a corporate form a few years later. Wikipedia says friends and family established Bob Evans Farms, Inc. in 1953, and the company’s own timeline calls 1953 its official founding date. Wikipedia says growing traffic to the farm led to the company’s original restaurant there in 1962, named “The Sausage Shop.” The company’s timeline dates the start of a sausage route outside Ohio to 1964 and its annual farm festival to 1971.

Owens sausage, side dishes, a split from the restaurants and Post Holdings.

For decades the sausage and the restaurants grew under one company. Wikipedia says Bob Evans Farms acquired the Texas-based Owens Country Sausage in 1987, and the company’s timeline gives the same year for the purchase of Owens Sausage. The Columbus Dispatch reported in 2007 that Evans retired from the restaurant and sausage business in 1986 and afterwards concentrated on promoting farming techniques and wildlife conservation. The same newspaper reported that he died on 21 June 2007.

Side dishes became a second pillar of the grocery business. The company’s timeline says Bob Evans mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese went on sale in grocery stores in 1997. When USA Today reported on the company’s plans on 24 January 2017, it described its food division, BEF Foods, as having a big stake in refrigerated side dishes sold in supermarkets, especially mashed potatoes and sausages.

That same report described a split. USA Today said the restaurants division would be sold to an affiliate of the private equity firm Golden Gate Capital and taken private, while the parent company would stay public, keep the Bob Evans Farms banner for its food business and acquire Pineland Farms Potato, adding another potato processing plant. It quoted chief executive Saed Mohseni as saying the two businesses “were founded together” and that it was time to separate them. Wikipedia says both the restaurant sale and the Pineland Farms purchase closed on 1 March 2017, with Mike Townsley leading the new Bob Evans Farms. Nation’s Restaurant News reported in February 2026 that Golden Gate had sold the Bob Evans restaurant chain to 4X4 Capital.

The food company changed hands within the year. USA Today reported on 19 September 2017 that Post Holdings had agreed to buy Bob Evans Farms to grow in packaged food, and described it as making refrigerated potato, pasta and vegetable-based side dishes and pork sausage under the Bob Evans, Owens, Country Creek and Pineland Farms brands. In a release dated 11 January 2018, Post said it expected to close the purchase on 12 January 2018 and would create a refrigerated retail unit led by Townsley; Wikipedia says the deal closed that day and Bob Evans Farms left the Nasdaq. Post Holdings has owned the Bob Evans grocery brand since 2018, and the company’s timeline records the acquisition of BEF Foods, Inc. by Post in that year.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sell nuts, rice and chilled side dishes, three kinds of food that reach the shelf in very different packages. A nut brand may speak through a tin, a jar or a resealable bag; a rice brand through a printed sack or a box that sits in the cupboard for months; and a side-dish brand through a tray or tub in the refrigerated case, where it is seen for a few seconds beside its neighbours.

In each case the pack carries most of the identity: a name, a colour that can be spotted from the end of an aisle, and often a picture of a place, a farm or a person. Behind that name, the company may have changed owners, moved its kitchens or plants, or grown from a single shop or farm into part of a much larger food group.

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 packs and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Sausage in Ohio and Michigan, sides in Ohio and Texas, all under one farm name.

The Bob Evans identity rests on a person and a place. The Columbus Dispatch wrote in 2007 that Evans’s name and his white Stetson hats were closely linked with the food business he founded. The company’s grocery website still describes its food in farm terms, from the “farm-fresh” sausage of its history page to the line “The minute you warm it up it’s homemade.” These are the company’s own words.

The company says where it makes its food. Its “About” page lists production at Xenia, Ohio, where it says it makes fresh sausage rolls and links on a property Bob Evans bought in 1954; Hillsdale, Michigan, which it says has made Bob Evans sausage since 1964 and is its only site for fresh sausage patties; Lima, Ohio, where it says it began making mashed potatoes in 2009 and now makes mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese; and Sulphur Springs, Texas, a plant it says it acquired in 2003 that makes refrigerated sides including macaroni and cheese. The company says it added a plant in Rigby, Idaho, in 2025 for refrigerated and frozen potato products, and that its head office is in New Albany, Ohio, where its timeline says it moved in 2013.

The brand now sits inside a wider family. The company’s website lists four brands — Bob Evans, Simply Potatoes, Owens Sausage and Egg Beaters — and groups its products under headings that include fresh sausage, hash browns, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, and side dishes. The company announced a protein macaroni and cheese and a limited bacon macaroni and cheese on the same site. Under Post, Bob Evans sits beside cereal names such as Grape-Nuts and Honey Bunches of Oats.

For a design guide, Bob Evans shows how a founder’s name and the idea of his farm can carry a brand from a roadside restaurant’s sausage to a supermarket range of chilled side dishes, and how that name can stay with the food after the company behind it has been divided and sold. Compare it with Grape-Nuts and Honey Bunches of Oats, which share its owner, Post Holdings. For this guide we use barn red, sage green, mashed-potato cream and black pepper with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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