Gail Borden’s company, its long expansion and its break-up.

Borden is a name that has outlived the company that made it famous. English Wikipedia traces the business to Gail Borden Jr., who founded it in 1857 in Connecticut as “Gail Borden Jr., and Company,” with condensed milk as its main product. Short of money, the young firm was rescued when Jeremiah Milbank, a partner in a New York wholesale food distributor, invested and took half of the stock; in 1858 it became the New York Condensed Milk Company. Wikipedia records that the company sold condensed milk to the Union armies during the Civil War.

From there, the encyclopedia says, the firm moved into the milk people bought every day. It began selling processed milk to consumers in 1875, began using glass milk bottles in 1885, added evaporated milk in 1892 and expanded into Canada in 1895. It took the name Borden’s Condensed Milk Company in 1899 and became the Borden Company in 1919, after which it bought dairies, ice-cream makers and cheese producers across the country.

Ice cream brought an early legal fight over the name itself. In 1912, Wikipedia says, a federal appeals court held that a competitor, the Borden Ice Cream Co., whose owners included a man named Charles Borden, could sell ice cream under the Borden name because Borden’s Condensed Milk then sold milk but not ice cream; the encyclopedia adds that the limit on the dairy company’s own products did not last long.

The company grew far beyond dairy. Over the twentieth century it went into adhesives, plastics, pasta, snacks and soft-drink mixes, and in 1986 it bought the dairy products division of Beatrice Foods, including the Meadow Gold brand, according to Wikipedia. After heavy losses in the early 1990s, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) bought out Borden, Inc. in 1995 and began selling it off piece by piece.

Elsie the Cow, from medical journals to milk labels.

The part of Borden’s identity that has lasted through every owner is a cow. English Wikipedia says Elsie the Cow was created in 1936 by a team led by the advertising creative director David William Reid, and that she made her debut alongside other cartoon cows — Mrs. Blossom, Bessie and Clara — in a series of advertisements that ran in medical journals. Within a few years she had her own campaign.

Elsie soon became a real animal as well as a drawing. According to Wikipedia, a registered Jersey heifer named You’ll Do, Lobelia was chosen as the living Elsie while taking part in Borden’s Rotolactor exhibit, a rotary milking parlour, at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Dressed in an embroidered green blanket, she was put on show at the fair and afterwards toured the country making public appearances. Other cows took on the role in later decades; Wikipedia records an Elsie and her calf Beauregard appearing each year at the State Fair of Texas until their final fair in 2013.

Around her, Borden built a cartoon family. Wikipedia says Elsie was given a mate, Elmer the Bull, in 1940, and that Elmer was lent to the company’s chemical division as the mascot for its glue — the origin of the Elmer’s name. Calves named Beulah and Beauregard followed in the 1940s and twins named Larabee and Lobelia in 1957. In the early 1950s, the encyclopedia adds, the sculptor Peter Agostini created a fresh design of the character, working without public credit.

Elsie survived the break-up of the company that drew her. Wikipedia says the Elsie and Borden trademarks stayed with Borden’s chemical successor, Hexion Specialty Chemicals, until December 2014, when the U.S. marks were assigned to Grupo Lala of Mexico. Today the cow appears on Borden milk cartons and jugs and on the company website, which has a section called “Elsie’s Corner” and invites visitors to “meet Elsie & the family.” Wikipedia also notes that Eagle Family Foods uses the Borden name and Elsie on its Eagle Brand canned milk, and that Dairy Farmers of America kept the Borden name for cheese, so the same cow and surname appear on goods made by different companies.

Borden has also used celebrity advertising. Wikipedia records that Selena Gomez appeared as a spokesperson in Borden milk print and television advertisements while she was starring in Wizards of Waverly Place.

Cartons, jugs and half-gallons.

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 Dallas milk company that has changed hands several times.

The milk business that carries the name today has its own chain of owners. English Wikipedia says Borden’s dairy subsidiary was sold in September 1997 to Southern Foods, which was controlled by the Mid-America Dairymen, now Dairy Farmers of America (DFA); Southern Foods was later acquired by Suiza Foods, which became Dean Foods, while DFA kept Borden cheese. In 2009, the encyclopedia says, Lala’s parent Grupo Lala acquired National Dairy from DFA and began running its U.S. operations as Borden Dairy Company, headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Grupo Lala spun the business off in 2013 into a private company, Laguna Dairy, and in 2017 ACON Investments became majority owner, with Laguna Dairy keeping a stake, according to Wikipedia.

Borden Dairy Company and affiliated companies filed for Chapter 11 protection in Delaware on January 5, 2020. On June 29, 2020, CSP Daily News reported that Denver-based Capitol Peak Partners would acquire the company following a court-supervised sale, that KKR, an existing lender, would become a minority investor, and that the deal was expected to be finalised in mid-July. Borden said the business would remain intact, including its plants, branches, routes and the Borden brand. The same report quoted Capitol Peak’s founder and managing partner, Gregg Engles, the former chairman and chief executive of Dean Foods and WhiteWave Foods.

Borden’s milk is processed in its own plants rather than in a single dairy: Wikipedia says that as of May 2021 Borden Dairy operated plants across the Midwest, the South and the Southeast. Its website lists whole, reduced-fat, low-fat and fat-free milk, Dutch chocolate milk and heavy whipping cream, and says its milk comes from cows not treated with rbST and from a network of family farms whose farmers, it says, pledge not to use the hormone; it also carries the regulatory note that no significant difference has been shown between milk from treated and untreated cows. The site leans on the founding date throughout, with lines such as “trusted by families since 1857,” and describes Borden as “An American Original.”

For a design guide, Borden shows how a mascot and a date can hold a brand together across many owners: the company that founded it is gone, but Elsie and “since 1857” still sit on the milk case. Compare Elmer’s, the glue brand named for Elsie’s cartoon mate, and Lala, the Mexican milk brand whose parent once ran Borden Dairy. For this guide we use a deep red, a daisy yellow and a milk cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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