Twelve trays and a numbered panel.

Combat is an American household pest-control brand of roach and ant baits, and its name began as a trademark of American Cyanamid Company, the New Jersey chemical group. A carton accepted by the US Environmental Protection Agency in a letter dated December 1982 is headed “New COMBAT Roach Control Bait Trays.” It describes a pack of twelve bait trays and carries the line “Trademark of American Cyanamid Company,” with a consumer relations address at the company’s offices in Wayne, New Jersey.

The active ingredient on that carton is given only by its full chemical name, the compound known as hydramethylnon; English Wikipedia lists Combat among the brand names under which hydramethylnon has been sold. The name itself is printed in capitals throughout the label, as COMBAT, followed by an asterisk that points to the trademark line at the foot of each panel.

The carton was laid out around the trays. Its back panel carries a numbered list headed “COMBAT Locations,” running from one to twelve, followed by a space for a “COMBAT Placement Date” and a line reading “Remember to replace by,” left blank for the buyer to fill in. The small trays carried their own short labels, with the trademark line and a note directing the reader to the outer carton for the full directions and precautions.

Within Cyanamid, the brand was handled from New Jersey. An EPA letter dated February 1986, about administrative changes to the label of the “Combat Roach Control System,” was addressed to the company’s Shulton Research Division in Clifton, New Jersey, and later Cyanamid labels on file with the agency carry the same Clifton address.

Clorox buys the brand.

In June 1990 Cyanamid sold the brand. United Press International reported on 20 June 1990 that The Clorox Company of Oakland, California, was buying Pine-Sol cleaner and Combat insecticides from American Cyanamid. A Cyanamid spokeswoman told UPI that the sale was part of a strategy, adopted about four months earlier, to sell all of the company’s consumer-products lines; the same report said Cyanamid had announced plans the week before to sell its Old Spice and Breck brands to Procter & Gamble, and would concentrate on its medical, agricultural and chemical businesses.

Clorox’s chairman and chief executive, C. R. Weaver, explained the purchase to UPI in plain terms: “By acquiring Combat, we avoid the sizable expense and risk involved in the development and national expansion of a new product.” He compared it with Liquid-Plumr and Formula 409, which UPI said were established products before Clorox bought them.

Under Clorox the registrations moved to the new owner. An EPA letter dated September 1993, addressed to Clorox at Pleasanton, California, dealt with the labelling of the “Combat Roach Killing System” and the “Combat Ant Killing System.” It accepted new formulas dated October 1991 and February 1992, and asked that the word “tray” be replaced with “disc” wherever it appeared on the labelling — a change to the vocabulary printed on the pack.

A Stanford Graduate School of Business teaching case, “Clorox, Combat Advertising Strategy,” written by James Lattin and colleagues and dated 2004, follows the Clorox brand team in July 1997 as it planned the following season. The case says Clorox had gained access to a new insecticide ingredient, fipronil, from Rhône-Poulenc, and that the team intended to use it in place of hydramethylnon, then the ingredient in all of Combat’s SuperBait products.

Bags, shakers, cans and bait packs.

Lawn-care and household pest-control brands sit on garden-centre shelves, in hardware aisles and under kitchen sinks, and they reach shoppers through packs more than through advertising. A fertiliser bag, a shaker of garden dust, an aerosol of insect repellent and a card of bait stations all have to name the product, say what it is for and carry required label text, often within a small space and alongside rival packs.

Many of these names have changed hands more than once, passing from the chemical or consumer-goods companies that started them to other groups, so the name on a pack can be older than the company that now owns it. That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and how its packs and marks have changed over time.

Each guide sets out what independent, dated sources record and what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time and how its packs have looked — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word. Products are described by name and category only.

From Clorox to Henkel.

Clorox kept the brand until 2004. On 6 October 2004 it announced an agreement with its major shareholder, Henkel KGaA, under which Clorox would hand Henkel a subsidiary holding its insecticides business — named in the announcement as Combat, Home Mat and Home Keeper — together with the Soft Scrub cleanser business, Clorox’s interest in the Henkel Iberica joint venture in Spain and Portugal, and cash, in exchange for Henkel’s shares of Clorox stock. The release said the employees moving to Henkel would come mainly from the subsidiary’s operations in South Korea, and that Clorox would provide some interim production of insecticides. On 22 November 2004 Clorox announced that the exchange was complete.

Henkel has owned Combat since 2004. In the United States the brand sits with Henkel Corporation, which English Wikipedia describes as doing business as Henkel North American Consumer Goods and as formerly The Dial Corporation, the soap maker Henkel acquired. Wikipedia says the business moved its headquarters from Scottsdale, Arizona, to Stamford, Connecticut, in July 2017. The Combat website, in October 2026, carries a copyright line for Henkel Corporation and the phrase “Proud to be a member of the Henkel Family.”

The present range is organised on that website by pest and by form: roach killers, divided into products for large and for small roaches, and ant killers, offered as bait and as gel. Products named there include Combat Max for large roaches, a Combat Max roach killing gel and a Combat Max 2 in 1 ant bait. The site sets the name in capitals with a registered-trademark sign, as COMBAT®, the same capitalised form printed across the 1982 carton.

For a design guide, Combat shows how a single word can stay on the pack while the company behind it changes, from American Cyanamid to Clorox to Henkel. Compare Raid, S. C. Johnson’s insecticide brand, TERRO, another ant-bait name, and Black Flag; Combat’s earlier owner Clorox and Henkel’s Persil have guides of their own. For this guide we use black, a signal red and an amber with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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