A grocer from the East, a Swiss dairyman and a bankrupt plant south of Seattle.

Carnation is a brand of evaporated milk, the unsweetened canned milk sold for baking and cooking, owned today by Nestlé. It began in Kent, in King County, Washington. HistoryLink, the online encyclopedia of Washington State history, says in an essay by Priscilla Long posted in August 1999 that the Washington Condensed Milk Company had set up a condensing plant in Kent in 1898 and went bankrupt within a year and a half. The Pacific Coast Condensed Milk Company, established by Elbridge Amos Stuart, acquired the plant and its machinery, and on 6 September 1899 produced its first cases of evaporated milk, sold as Carnation Sterilized Cream.

Stuart came to the business from retail. A second HistoryLink essay, a biography posted in October 1999, describes him as an already successful grocer who arrived in the Northwest in 1899 looking for an investment. It says he struggled at first with manufacturing methods and with finding shops to stock the product, changed the process from sweetened condensed milk to unsweetened evaporated milk, using a partial vacuum to remove water at a lower temperature, and eventually moved to wholesale operations only.

The technical knowledge came from Switzerland. Stuart’s own account, quoted in Long’s essay, says that while the Kent plant was being prepared the company employed a Swiss dairyman nicknamed “Cheese John” to teach local dairymen how to produce milk of high enough quality. HistoryLink identifies him as John Meyenberg, who had patented a method of preserving milk with high heat to sterilise it, where the older method relied on added sugar. Nestlé’s own brand history calls him Johann Baptist Meyenberg, says he had worked for the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company in Switzerland in the 1880s, and says that in 1899 he teamed up with the food retailers E. A. Stuart and Tom Yerxa to create the Pacific Coast company.

Growth followed. Long’s essay says Washington’s State Dairy and Food Commissioner reported in 1902 that Carnation milk was a favourite brand among grocers, and that the Kent plant turned its first profit in 1903.

A model farm, a family company and Nestlé.

Stuart then turned to the supply of milk itself. Long’s HistoryLink essay says he established a farm in the Snoqualmie Valley in 1908 and stocked it with prize Holstein cattle; the HistoryLink biography says he bought a farm near the town of Tolt in 1910 and added to it over the following years. The biography says that in 1917 Tolt was renamed Carnation in honour of the company’s farm.

The company widened its range in the 1920s. The HistoryLink biography says Carnation entered the fresh milk and ice cream business in 1926 and three years later bought the Albers Brothers Milling Co., which made flapjack flour, cornmeal, oatmeal and animal feed. By 1919, the essay says, the company had already set up overseas affiliates in France, Germany and the Netherlands. Stuart left the president’s seat in 1932 but stayed involved with the company for years afterwards.

The family era ended in the 1980s. The Christian Science Monitor reported on 6 September 1984 that Nestlé, the Swiss food company, had reached an agreement to acquire the stock of the Carnation Company of Los Angeles, and that Carnation’s directors had recommended shareholders accept. On 14 January 1985 the same paper reported that the Federal Trade Commission had given Nestlé unrestricted approval in early January, after examining overlaps such as frozen french fries and chocolate drink powders, and that shares were being tendered to Nestlé Holdings. The Monitor noted that Carnation, founded in 1899, had been run by family members until 1983. Nestlé has owned Carnation since 1985, the year it gives for the purchase on its own brand-history page.

Nestlé uses the name in more than one market. Its brand history says Carnation is used today in baking and cooking, mostly in the United States and Latin America. In the Philippines, a Nestlé release published by Philstar.com on 15 October 2021 announced that Nestlé Philippines was relaunching Nestlé Carnation and Nestlé Milkmaid as culinary dairy brands, timed to the company’s 110th year in the country.

Design and documentation.

The baking shelf of a grocery store holds a particular kind of product: condensed and evaporated milk in small cans, chocolate chips and baking chocolate in bags and bars, corn starch in a box and baking powder in a tin. They are ingredients rather than finished foods, bought to be measured into something else, and a single can or tin may sit in a kitchen cupboard for months between uses.

That shapes how their packaging works. A name, a colour and a simple device have to be recognised on a crowded shelf, and then again in a cupboard, often by someone following a recipe that names the product. Directions, measurements and recipes printed on the pack are part of the design as well, read in the kitchen with flour on the counter and the oven already warming.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, where it is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A name spotted on cigars, a slogan about cows and a can that changed shape by market.

The brand name came from a shop window. Nestlé’s brand history says Stuart was walking along a street in Seattle when a cigar brand name caught his eye in a shop window; the HistoryLink biography puts it more precisely, saying he settled on Carnation when he saw a carnation on the lid of a box of cigars. The biography says he was looking for a more marketable company name, and Long’s essay says the Pacific Coast Condensed Milk Company later changed its name to become the Carnation Milk Company.

The flower then became the visual system. Nestlé says the Pacific Coast company used the name together with a flower logo and bold red and white colours. In the Philippines, Nestlé’s 2021 relaunch release described the familiar red and white can with a chef’s hat, and said Carnation was known there as the “cooking milk”.

The slogan supplied the story behind the can. The HistoryLink biography says Stuart began using the line “milk from contented cows” in 1906, and Long’s essay says it was Carnation’s advertising agency that turned the Holsteins on the company farm into the brand’s “contented cows”. The idea outlived print advertising. The biography says the company’s “Contented Hour” radio programme aired across the country.

A town in Washington took the brand’s name, and the company farm near it gave the advertising its cows. For a design guide, Carnation shows how a borrowed name, a single flower and a two-colour can can hold a brand together across more than a century. Compare it with La Lechera, Nestlé’s milkmaid brand of condensed milk, and Coffee mate, another Nestlé brand; the sweetened counterpart in the American baking aisle is Eagle Brand. For this guide we use carnation red, can white, petal pink and pasture green with a bold script, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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