A food scientist, a frozen-food division and a shortcut for the dessert course.

Cool Whip is an American frozen whipped topping, sold in plastic tubs in the freezer aisle and owned today by Kraft Heinz. It did not begin in a kitchen. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, marking the brand’s fiftieth year in May 2016, described it as a food scientist’s project rather than a cook’s creation, and said that William A. Mitchell came up with the formula in 1966. The paper said the topping was introduced by the Birds Eye division of General Foods during the Lyndon Johnson administration.

Mitchell spent his working life at General Foods. Smithsonian Magazine, in a profile published on 19 July 2019, described him as a Midwestern farm boy from rural Minnesota. During the Second World War, the magazine said, he worked on a substitute for tapioca that soldiers nicknamed “Mitchell’s mud”. In 1957 he came out with a powdered, fruit-flavoured drink mix that became Tang, and in 1956 an attempt at an instantly self-carbonating soda led instead to the candy later sold as Pop Rocks, which Smithsonian said was patented in 1961 and reached shops in the mid-1970s.

His work also touched another General Foods brand. Smithsonian reported that in 1967 Mitchell patented a powdered gelatin dessert that could be set with cold water, which paved the way for quick-set Jell-O.

The Post-Gazette placed Cool Whip among the convenience foods that spread after the war, alongside instant mashed potatoes and frozen dinners. It said the topping offered an easy alternative to whipped cream, which took time to prepare and kept only a few days in the refrigerator, at a time when more women were working.

Birds Eye, General Foods, Kraft Foods and Kraft Heinz.

The product reached the whole country a year after the formula. The Post-Gazette dated Cool Whip’s national launch to 1967, and the Linda Hall Library, in a “Scientist of the Day” entry on Mitchell published on 26 July 2017, also said the topping came onto the market in 1967, sold by the Birds Eye division of General Foods. Smithsonian likewise placed its introduction in 1967.

Since then the brand has moved with its parent company through a series of mergers. According to the Post-Gazette, General Foods became part of Kraft Foods in 1995 and part of the Kraft Heinz Co. in 2015. Kraft Heinz has owned Cool Whip since that 2015 merger, and Smithsonian named it as the brand’s current owner in 2019. The Kraft Heinz website lists Cool Whip among its brands today and describes it as “the dollop that makes desserts extra-special”.

The topping has kept a fixed home. The Post-Gazette reported in 2016 that the eight-ounce plastic tubs, sold in the frozen food aisle, were still made at the same facility in Avon, New York. The same report quoted Molly White, then Kraft Heinz’s associate director of frozen meals and desserts, who said the brand was “still so relevant today”.

The range has grown in steps. White told the Post-Gazette that an Extra Creamy version was launched in the 1980s, and the paper said that in the 1990s the brand added Cool Whip Lite and Cool Whip Free. A French Vanilla flavour also sat in the line-up in 2016. The Kraft Heinz website now lists Zero Sugar, Reduced Fat, Fat Free and Extra Creamy whipped toppings alongside the original.

Cool Whip sits in a different part of the store from the aerosol cream of Reddi-wip. Cool Whip is sold frozen in a plastic tub, the Post-Gazette noted, rather than in an aerosol can.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sit on the drinks and dessert shelves of an ordinary grocery store: powdered mixes stirred into a jug of water, fruit drinks sold in bottles and small boxes, and whipped toppings kept in the freezer. Each one turns a simple product into something a shopper can recognise at a glance, and most of that work is done by the container rather than the contents.

A drink-mix brand lives on a canister, a tub or a flat pouch, where the flavour name, a fruit illustration and the number of quarts it makes all compete for space. A juice drink has to read from a refrigerated case or a lunchbox, on a tall bottle or a box with a straw. A frozen topping has a round lid and a tub that is often kept and reused long after it is empty, so its colours stay in a kitchen for years.

Each guide sets out what dated, independent sources record about the brand — who started it, who has owned it since, and how its labels, logos and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own account.

Advertising, the back of a pudding box and a dollop on the pie.

Much of the brand’s life has been spent inside other recipes. The Post-Gazette quoted Alice Julier, then director of food studies at Chatham University, who said advertisers of the period “did an unbelievable job of convincing people” that such products were wonderful new inventions and necessary to make lives convenient. Trying one, she said, meant trying something new.

The recipe that travelled furthest started on a different package. The Post-Gazette said the green dessert known as Watergate Salad, also called Pistachio Delight, was created by the Kraft kitchen for the back of the Jell-O Pistachio Flavor Instant Pudding box, and that Molly White suggested its name came from the media in the 1970s. The same paper listed no-bake dishes such as a banana pudding made with vanilla wafers and a gelatin poke cake as continuing favourites with Cool Whip buyers, and printed a strawberry pie that folds thawed topping into strawberry gelatin.

Recipes have remained part of how the brand is presented. White told the Post-Gazette in 2016 that Pinterest was full of Cool Whip recipes, from elaborate desserts to dishes for a church dinner or a bake sale. The Kraft Heinz site today pairs its product list with trending recipes, among them a taffy apple salad, a flag cake and a chocolate cream pie, under the line that the brand makes desserts “dreamy”. Smithsonian, writing in 2019, closed its Mitchell profile with a “Tang Pie” that combines his two products: powdered drink mix, a tub of Cool Whip, sour cream and condensed milk in a prebaked shell.

The Post-Gazette also described the brand as a lasting part of holiday tables, recalling a lime gelatin and pineapple salad and pumpkin pie topped from the tub.

For a design guide, Cool Whip shows a freezer-aisle staple presented through its tub, its recipe pages and the dessert table. Compare it with Jell-O, a General Foods dessert stablemate, and with Kool-Aid, another Kraft Heinz pantry name. For this guide we use freezer blue, berry red and whipped white with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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