Salted meat, sardines and a cannery outside Nantes.

Cassegrain is one of the oldest names in French canning, and like most of the great Nantes canners its founder came from elsewhere. Charles Cassegrain was born in 1831 in the Loiret, the last of twelve children, according to the Nantes heritage encyclopedia Patrimonia, whose entry by the historian Didier Guyvarc’h is taken from the Dictionnaire de Nantes (2018). He was apprenticed to a charcutier in Paris at thirteen and reached Nantes in 1850. In 1856 he founded a salted-meat and canning business at Le Fresne-Rond, in Saint-Sébastien-sur-Loire, on the edge of Nantes. French Wikipedia, citing Yves Rochcongar’s Capitaines d’industrie à Nantes au XIXe siècle (2003), tells the start slightly differently: Cassegrain took over a charcuterie in 1856, and the vegetable cannery at Saint-Sébastien followed in 1868.

Success came quickly. Patrimonia says that in 1861 he received a diploma, issued by the Empress Eugénie, attesting to the quality of his conserves, which were shown six years later at the 1867 Exposition universelle in Paris. Like its Nantes neighbours, the firm followed the sardine along the Atlantic coast, opening factories at Saint-Guénolé in Finistère — in 1880, French Wikipedia says — and at Croix-de-Vie and L’Herbaudière in the Vendée. By the end of the Second Empire, Patrimonia says, Charles Cassegrain was the richest man in Saint-Sébastien.

The business became a family affair. French Wikipedia says it took the name Cassegrain Père et Fils in 1898, and from 1902 his son Léopold Cassegrain ran it in partnership with his cousin Maurice Garnier. A cannery at Concarneau followed in 1904. Léopold also went into politics: a member of Nantes city council from 1900, he was elected mayor of Nantes in 1929, and to concentrate on public life he had sold his shares to the two Garnier brothers in 1913, Patrimonia says.

Mélanie the Bretonne, then a white rabbit.

Cassegrain’s look was built by poster artists. Under Léopold and Maurice Garnier, Patrimonia says, the firm turned to well-known affichistes for its advertising. The most important was Eugène Ogé, who drew Mélanie, a young Breton woman in traditional dress who identified Cassegrain cans until 1959. Ogé also used the news to sell his client’s products: a 1905 poster, now in the collection of the Château des ducs de Bretagne, shows Cassegrain conserves being delivered to the Russian troops at Port-Arthur during the Russo-Japanese War.

The brand also worked under many other names. During the First World War, Patrimonia says, the business coped better than others with the ban on exports because it supplied the army with canned meat, and in the inter-war years it kept expanding: by 1930 Cassegrain held 27 registered trademarks, from Pilot Club to Überall für alle, names that show how much it depended on exports.

After the Second World War, French Wikipedia says, the brothers Pierre and André Garnier set out to modernise the brand. In 1961 it ran its first colour advertising campaign, in magazines including Paris Match and Marie Claire. In 1970 a new mascot arrived: a white rabbit, which replaced Mélanie on the cans, Patrimonia says. In 1987, according to a 2009 special issue of the business magazine Capital on brand mascots cited by French Wikipedia, the rabbit was given a pair of sunglasses and a green bow tie, and sometimes a chef’s toque on each ear. The rabbit, Patrimonia concludes, has “definitively eclipsed the Bretonne.”

One older detail survived the change of mascot. Saupiquet, which owned Cassegrain for more than two decades, says that the rectangular Jockey-Club tin format developed by its founder in the 1880s was kept by Cassegrain and is still in use.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food, and all of them come from France: Herta, Fleury Michon, Banania, Tipiak, Cassegrain, Saupiquet and Bjorg. French food brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a village grocer to a hypermarket shelf.

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

From Saupiquet to Bonduelle, and from Nantes to Picardy.

Cassegrain stayed in family hands well into the twentieth century. In 1938, Patrimonia says, the company’s capital was double what it had been in 1902 and was still held by the family. It lost its independence in the great consolidation of French canning in the 1960s. In 1966 it was bought by its Nantes neighbour Saupiquet, which was then absorbing many of the city’s canneries; Saupiquet’s own history says it acquired the Cassegrain factory that year, and Patrimonia notes that Saupiquet also used Cassegrain to try frozen food.

The second sale came in 1989, when Saupiquet decided to concentrate on canned fish and sold its vegetable canning business, together with its Cassegrain subsidiary, to the vegetable group Bonduelle, according to French Wikipedia and Patrimonia. Saupiquet’s own timeline describes Cassegrain as part of its group from 1966 to 1990. French Wikipedia, citing a company-register summary from 2019, says the brand belongs to Bonduelle Europe Long Life, part of the listed Bonduelle group.

Production has left the city where the brand was born. Patrimonia says it moved from Nantes to Picardy, and French Wikipedia names Flaucourt, in the Somme, as the place where processing now takes place. The old Cassegrain factory at Saint-Sébastien-sur-Loire was taken over by Covi, a maker of ready meals, French Wikipedia says. Nantes has kept the name in another form: a street in the city centre was named after Léopold Cassegrain in 1961, Patrimonia says.

The surname is shared by several unrelated businesses. French Wikipedia lists a Cassegrain leather-goods company based in Segré, behind the Longchamp brand, and an engraving house in Paris; neither has any link to the canner.

For a design guide, Cassegrain shows how a canned-vegetable brand can swap one mascot for another and keep its name for 170 years. Compare Bonduelle, its owner since 1989, and Saupiquet, the Nantes fish canner that owned it before. For this guide we use a rabbit white, a bow-tie green and a tin gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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