From a partnership with the Stokelys to Bush Brothers & Company.

Bush’s began with tomatoes. English Wikipedia, drawing on Gale’s International Directory of Company Histories, says that in 1904 A. J. (Andrew Jackson) Bush went into partnership with the Stokely family to open a tomato cannery in Chestnut Hill, Tennessee. The cannery did well enough that by 1908 he was able to buy out the Stokely interest and set up his own business, taking his two eldest sons, Fred and Claude, into partnership as Bush Brothers & Company.

The business was incorporated in June 1922, with Fred Bush as president, and Wikipedia says A. J. Bush borrowed against his life-insurance policy and used his bank credit to do it. Through the 1920s the company moved beyond tomatoes: it built a small factory in Clinton, Tennessee, in 1923, canned tomatoes and peaches there from 1924, and in 1928 took on corn and hominy, leasing a corn plant at Oak Grove near Dandridge. A new building in Chestnut Hill, put up in 1929, became its main cannery for many years, and in 1930 it opened a plant in LaFollette, Tennessee.

Beans entered the story in 1933, when, Wikipedia says, Bush Brothers began offering pork and beans under its Chestnut Hill label; the product led to a contract with Armour and Company and a range of canned meats, and the company also canned Tony Dog and Cat Food until the 1980s. In the 1940s the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Douglas Dam project flooded part of the French Broad River bottom, and the company sold seven tracts of farmland and its Oak Grove plant to the authority; in October 1944 it bought the Blytheville Canning Company in Arkansas, which Claude Bush later moved there to run.

From private label to Bush’s Best.

For its first decades the company canned largely for others. Wikipedia says that from 1946 Bush Brothers moved from private label to a branded presence, selling its goods under the newly developed Bush’s Best logo and label. It introduced Great Northern Beans with Plain Sauce in 1952 and Mexican Style Beans in Chili Gravy in 1953. Claude Bush became president in 1959, and in the 1960s the company bought canning plants in Shiocton and Augusta, Wisconsin, in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and in Ville Platte and Cecilia, Louisiana, and started its own trucking line, Tennessee Truck Lines, in 1962. In 1965 Claude became chairman and his brother-in-law C. J. Ethier president.

Its baked beans arrived in a difficult year. Wikipedia says that in 1969, with the canning industry facing overproduction and low prices, Claude’s son Condon Bush developed a baked bean product to keep the Augusta plant busy in the off-season, basing it on his mother Kathleen’s recipe. The company went on to put its resources behind Bush’s Best Baked Beans around the United States Bicentennial. In 1978 Condon became president, and in 1979 the company bought the Dubon brand of canned vegetables, sold mainly in Louisiana.

The family business then reorganised. Wikipedia says that after consulting Leon Danco of the Center for Family Business, Bush Brothers added directors from outside the family and the company, and that it moved its headquarters from Chestnut Hill to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1991 to recruit professional managers. Jim Ethier became president and chief operating officer in 1992, with Condon Bush as chairman and chief executive. Wikipedia describes Bush Brothers today as a family-owned company based in Knoxville, with plants in Augusta, Wisconsin, and Chestnut Hill; its brands include Bush’s, Bush’s Best and Showboat Pork and Beans.

Design and documentation.

Canned and shelf-stable meal brands in general live or die on a few square inches of label. A can or a box sits in a long run of near-identical shapes on a pantry shelf, so the label has to do the work that a bottle’s silhouette or a shop’s window might do elsewhere: a band of colour that can be spotted from the end of an aisle, a name set large enough to read at a glance, and a picture of what is inside.

Many of these brands also lean on a face or a figure — a mascot, a cartoon character or a portrait of a cook or founder — and those images can outlast several owners, or be redrawn and retired as tastes change. Colour coding often does quieter work, telling one variety from another within the same range.

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

A family recipe, a spokesman and a dog who wants to sell it.

The brand’s advertising voice came from a small agency in Georgia. Wikipedia, citing Ken Albala’s Beans: A History (2007), says that in 1993 Bush Brothers hired Cole, Henderson, Drake (CHD) of Atlanta to develop a campaign for its baked beans. The commercial was built on the “secret family recipe” and introduced Jay Bush, Condon Bush’s son, as the company’s spokesman. It ran in test markets in 1993 and was released nationally in May 1994.

The second character arrived the next year. Wikipedia says that in the summer of 1995 a new commercial paired Jay with Duke, a mischievous talking golden retriever modelled on the Bush family’s own golden retriever of the same name, who, Wikipedia says, suffered stage fright and was not camera-trained, and other dogs played Duke on screen. The campaign was created by CHD copywriter David Garzotto. Its running joke is Duke’s scheming to sell the secret recipe and Jay’s efforts to stop him, and its catchphrase, “Roll that beautiful bean footage!”, introduced shots of the beans themselves. The pairing carried over into print: Wikipedia says the company published a children’s book, Duke Finds a Home, in 2006.

The origin story is also on show in Tennessee. Wikipedia says the Bush Visitor Center in Chestnut Hill is an expansion of A. J. Bush’s original general store, with a museum, a shop and a café, and that it houses a guarded display of the “Bush’s Secret Family Recipe” book. In Augusta, Wisconsin, where the company bought the old canning factory in 1961, it sponsors the annual Bean and Bacon Days festival.

For a design guide, Bush’s shows how a family name, a recipe kept off the label and a dog can carry a canned product further than the can itself. Compare it with Van Camp’s, another American canned pork-and-beans label, and Campbell’s, another canner whose label became its signature. For this guide we use bean-sauce rust and molasses brown on golden with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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