The Del Sol Food Company, two family names and a move to the country.

BRIANNAS is an American brand of bottled salad dressings, made in Brenham, Texas, by the Del Sol Food Company, Inc. The company writes the name in capital letters and without an apostrophe, and the dressings are sold as BRIANNAS Fine Salad Dressings. The business began more than a decade before the name did. A press release issued in Houston by the investment bank GulfStar Group on 21 August 2017 says Del Sol was founded in 1982, and the kosher certifier OU Kosher, in a profile of the company published on 8 July 2015, said it was founded in Austin, Texas, as the Del Sol Food Company, Inc.

The company tells its own story as a family one. Its website says the Brown family started Del Sol in 1982 to make salad dressings that tasted homemade, hand-stirred in small batches in Austin, and its timeline says it began by making salad dressing and hot sauce. OU Kosher quoted Jerry Brown, the company’s president, in 2015: he said the company made all of its flavours “home style”, a little at a time in small batches, that many of its recipes began in the family’s kitchen at home, and that “salad dressing is all we do”.

The business did not stay in the city for long. The Brenham radio station KWHI reported on 6 October 2022 that BRIANNAS started as a small, family-owned operation out of Austin and moved to Chappell Hill, a small town in Washington County, in 1984, and the company’s own timeline gives the same year. An earlier KWHI report, published on 30 September 2019, put the Chappell Hill move alongside 1992, saying that Del Sol began selling the dressing that year and that it moved to a manufacturing facility in Chappell Hill, where it was made and distributed until 2006.

The name itself joins two people. The company says that in 1992 it changed the name of its dressing to BRIANNAS, a combination of two family names, Brian and Marianne, and released new labels at the same time. OU Kosher said in 2015 that the brand was named after the owner’s daughter Marianne and grandson Brian. The certifier also reported that Del Sol had begun the process of obtaining Orthodox Union kosher certification in 2014, in response to requests from customers.

A plant in Brenham, a Mexican owner and a bakery in New Jersey.

Production settled in Brenham in 2006. OU Kosher reported in 2015 that all BRIANNAS dressings were made at the company’s facility in Brenham, built in 2006, and KWHI said in 2022 that the company established its headquarters in Brenham that year. KWHI’s 2019 report described Del Sol as the maker and worldwide seller of the dressings and said the company had doubled its warehousing in 2016.

The family era ended in 2017. KWHI reported on 12 August 2017 that the La Costeña Group of Mexico City had announced that its operating company Sabormex had acquired the Brenham-based manufacturer. The station listed La Costeña, Sabormex, Faribault Foods and Vilore Foods among the group’s operating companies. GulfStar Group, which advised Sabormex, said in its release of 21 August 2017 that Sabormex S.A. de C.V. had acquired Del Sol Food Company, Inc., owner of the BRIANNAS brand, and that the transaction closed on 10 August 2017. Sabormex has owned Del Sol and BRIANNAS since then.

The buyer kept the business where it was. KWHI quoted Jerry Brown, then Del Sol’s president, as saying that both companies were family-owned and committed to their customers, and that Del Sol would continue to be headquartered and operated locally. By 2019 the company was led by Scott Eckert, its president and chief executive, and KWHI reported that September that it was moving its distribution operations into an adjacent building in Brenham. The company says it added a distribution centre there in 2019.

Del Sol marked its fortieth anniversary in Brenham. KWHI reported on 6 October 2022 that the company held a celebration and ribbon cutting with its owners and leadership, members of the City of Brenham and the Washington County Chamber of Commerce, and that Brenham’s mayor pro tem read a city proclamation honouring the anniversary. The following year the owner of BRIANNAS made an acquisition of its own. KWHI reported on 8 June 2023 that Del Sol had acquired John Wm. Macy’s, a New Jersey bakery that makes baked cheese sticks, cheese crisps and crostini, and that the bakery would continue to operate in Elmwood Park, New Jersey.

Design and documentation.

Dried pasta, mustard and salad dressing are pantry goods that sit side by side on a grocery shelf, and each category has settled into a familiar kind of pack. Dried pasta is often sold in a printed paperboard box or a clear bag, so the shape of the noodle and the name on the front have to work together. Mustard usually comes in a glass jar or a squeeze bottle, where a narrow label has to carry the name, the style and the colour of the condiment at a glance.

Salad dressing is most often sold in a tall bottle with a wraparound label, and the dressing itself can show through the glass or plastic. Across all three categories, the label tends to do much of the work that a logo does elsewhere: it names the product, marks the flavour or shape, and signals the brand behind it.

Each guide in this group looks at who started a brand, who owns it now and where its products are made, separating what independent sources record from what a company says about itself.

New labels with the 1992 name, a 2020 update and a range that kept growing.

The brand’s visual identity rests on its labels and its name. The company says it released new labels in 1992, when the dressing took the BRIANNAS name, and that in 2020 it updated its packaging to give the brand name more prominence and to increase the size of the illustrations on the label. On its own website and in the press releases issued about it, the name appears in capital letters, written as one word without an apostrophe.

The range around the label has widened in stages. The company’s timeline says it launched a line of organic salad dressings in 2019 and a line of avocado oil dressings in 2021. KWHI reported in October 2022 that the company planned to add a new line of marinades, sugar-free dressings and croutons by the beginning of 2023, and the company’s timeline lists sugar-free dressings, classic marinades and seasoned croutons as 2023 launches. The company says it expanded its bakery operations in Brenham in 2025 to produce the croutons, introduced single-serve sachets the same year and, in 2026, extended the avocado oil line and added a seasoned garlic crouton. Rich Poppy Seed is among the flavours on its website.

The company’s website still describes the dressings as handcrafted in small batches and traces them back to a family kitchen in Austin, while noting that they are produced in Brenham, the town where Del Sol has been based since 2006.

For a design guide, BRIANNAS shows how a family name, coined from two people and set in capitals, can carry a pantry brand through a change of town, a change of owner and a widening range, with the label redrawn rather than replaced. Compare it with La Costeña, whose group’s operating company Sabormex has owned Del Sol since 2017, and Marzetti, another American dressing brand, which began in a Columbus restaurant. For this guide we use brick red, dressing gold, label cream and field green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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