One room, white loaves and a Dublin round.

Brennans began in a single room in Dublin. The Irish Independent reported in May 2024 that in 1972 Joseph A. Brennan began baking loaves of white bread in a one-room bakery on Fumbally Lane, in the Liberties area of the city. RTÉ News, reporting the same week, said he had founded the business, Joseph Brennan Bakeries, 55 years earlier, which would place the start a few years before 1972; the company itself says only that the first loaves were baked on Fumbally Lane “over fifty years ago.” Brennan was originally from Rathfarnham, in south Dublin, RTÉ said.

The bakery soon outgrew its first room. According to RTÉ, it moved to Kimmage and then to Walkinstown, where its main operations are today; the company’s own address is the Greenhills Industrial Estate in Walkinstown, Dublin 12. At first the bakery served the Dublin area. It later expanded nationally across the island of Ireland, and some of its bread was also distributed overseas, RTÉ reported, describing Brennans as one of the largest bakeries in Ireland. The company now runs a schools competition for pupils in Northern Ireland, the Great Bread Challenge, which asks children to turn leftover bread into new dishes.

Brennans has stayed in the family. RTÉ said in 2024 that the company remained family owned and run, and the Irish Independent reported that the Brennan family still oversees the recipes and baking skills its founder perfected, a line the company repeats on its own website. Joseph Brennan died on 26 May 2024, aged 82, the Irish Independent and RTÉ reported.

Old Mr Brennan, a jingle and a slogan.

The brand’s voice has long been its advertising. For decades its radio spots have featured a narrator recalling his dealings with “Old Mr Brennan,” a character modelled on the founder, RTÉ reported; the Irish Independent said the adverts had aired on radio for more than 30 years, with a recognisable jingle and a distinctive voice-over by Bill Golding. Alongside the character runs the catchline “Today’s Bread Today,” which RTÉ described as a pitch for bread baked fresh every morning.

The brand has updated that formula rather than replaced it. In August 2015 The Irish Times reported a new cross-media campaign made for Brennans by the Dublin agency DDFH&B. The TV spot followed three Brennans employees — two bakers and a van driver — through their working day, with a voiceover by the actor Ian Lloyd Anderson, and the traditional Brennans voice closed it with “Dedicated to today’s bread today,” an adaptation of the long-running slogan. The paper described the approach as part of the brand’s recent “national treasure-style” marketing.

More recently the brand has moved onto social media. The Irish Independent reported in 2024 that the company had built up millions of views on TikTok and Instagram, with many of its video ads voiced in Irish. In March 2024, for Seachtain na Gaeilge, the annual Irish-language festival, Brennans ran a campaign called “Learning is Better with Brennans,” which recreated well-known Irish television and viral moments with Irish-language phrases; Marketing.ie reported that it was created by a team at GroupM’s Mindshare. RTÉ also noted that during the “Beast from the East” snowstorm of 2018, which brought the country to a standstill, Brennans went viral on social media as people complained that they could not get fresh bread.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all food and drink names from the Netherlands and Ireland: Calvé, Duyvis, Chocomel, Unox, Odlums, Club Orange and Brennans. Dutch and Irish food and drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food and drink groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A food or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal, snack or drink it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made 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 packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A yellow wrapper at the top of the brand tables.

Brennans regularly sits at or near the top of Irish brand rankings. The Irish Times reported in 2015 that the Checkout Top 100 Brands list for 2014 placed Brennans Bread third in the Irish grocery market, behind Coca-Cola and Avonmore. In June 2021 the paper wrote that each year, in the top 100 compiled by the trade magazine Shelflife with the research firm Kantar, Brennans and Avonmore compete for first place. Shelflife’s editor, Gillian Hammill, told the paper that Brennans was familiar to everyone through its bright yellow packaging. In July 2023 RTÉ reported that Brennans had again held the top spot in Kantar’s Brand Footprint report, ahead of Avonmore, Tayto, Cadbury Dairy Milk and Denny.

The best-known loaf is the Family Pan, sold in a wax-paper wrapper. The company says that paper is sourced from mills in Spain and the United Kingdom, is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, and is recyclable and industrially compostable, certified under Cré’s Irish compostable scheme; it says its soft plastic bags are recyclable too. The company also says it is a member of REPAK and of Bord Bia’s Origin Green programme, and that it joined the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil in 2019.

Surplus loaves have even found their way into a can. In July 2023 the Wicklow brewery Wicklow Wolf launched Sliced Can, a craft lager brewed with surplus Brennans Family Pan in place of malted barley as a way to cut food waste, the radio station FM104 reported.

For a design guide, Brennans shows how a founder’s voice, one slogan and a yellow wrapper can carry a bakery brand for more than half a century. Compare Tayto, the Dublin crisp brand that shares the top of the Irish rankings, Odlums, the Irish flour brand, and Warburtons, the family baker from Bolton. For this guide we use a wrapper yellow, a crust brown and a flour white with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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