Shedd-Bartush Foods, Beatrice and a crock on the label.

Country Crock is an American brand of spreads sold in tubs and sticks, owned today by Flora Food Group, the company formerly called Upfield. English Wikipedia gives the brand’s full name as Shedd’s Country Crock, and that older name points to where it began. The Shedd’s name belonged to Shedd-Bartush Foods of Detroit, Michigan. According to the History of Soy Oil Margarine published by the SoyInfo Center, written by the historians William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi, Shedd-Bartush Foods began manufacturing an all-soy margarine called Willow Run in Detroit in 1945. English Wikipedia adds that the company also sold Shedd’s peanut butter, salad dressing and prune juice.

The Detroit business did not stay independent. The SoyInfo Center history says Shedd’s Foods was acquired by Beatrice Foods, the Chicago-based food group, in 1959, and that Willow Run margarine was still sold across the country at natural-food stores by the late 1970s.

The brand’s own owner gives a date for Country Crock itself. Flora Food Group’s published company history lists 1954 as the year “Americans open their fridges to Country Crock,” and says the brand was originally launched by the Shedd’s company, then owned by Beatrice Foods, before it became part of the group’s portfolio in 1984. The SoyInfo Center history, for its part, dates the Beatrice acquisition of Shedd’s Foods to 1959.

The 1984 change of hands is the hinge in the brand’s story. English Wikipedia says Beatrice sold the Shedd’s business to Unilever in 1984, following Beatrice’s merger with Esmark, and that the Shedd’s peanut butter business went separately to the Algood Food Company.

The brand name was later stretched beyond the spread. English Wikipedia says Country Crock was originally used for spreads such as margarine, and for cheese for a limited time, and that it was later extended to side dishes, particularly mashed potatoes and pasta, made by Hormel under licence.

Unilever, KKR, Upfield and Flora Food Group.

Unilever owned Country Crock from 1984 until 2018. Food Business News reported on 15 December 2017 that Unilever had entered into an agreement to sell its Spreads business unit to the investment company KKR. The article listed the brands in the unit as Becel, Flora, Country Crock, Blue Band, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, Rama and ProActiv. It quoted Unilever’s chief executive, Paul Polman, saying that “after a long history in Unilever” the company had decided the future of the business lay outside the group, and it said Nicolas Liabeuf, chief executive of Spreads, would continue to lead it. Both parties expected the deal to be completed by mid-2018.

The sale closed on schedule. The law firm Simpson Thacher, which represented KKR, said in a note dated 16 July 2018 that the acquisition of Unilever’s global Spreads business had closed on 2 July 2018, and it again named Country Crock among the brands in the business. Under KKR the former Unilever unit took the name Upfield. Flora Food Group’s own history page records 2018 as the year the company was established, “previously called Upfield.” A press release issued by Upfield in September 2019 was datelined Hackensack, New Jersey, and described Upfield North America as “the makers of Country Crock.”

The company then broadened beyond spreads. Its history page says Violife, a plant-based cheese brand, joined the group in 2020, and that in 2022 it opened a food research and development centre in Wageningen, in the Netherlands. For the North American business, the same page says the company invested in its manufacturing capability in 2024 with the acquisition of a facility in Hugoton, Kansas.

The name on the parent changed later the same year. Asian Trader reported on 17 September 2024 that Upfield Group had announced it was changing its name to Flora Food Group, after its flagship brand, and described the business as a Dutch food company. The magazine quoted the group chief executive, David Haines, calling the name change “an exciting and logical step in the large-scale transformation we have delivered,” and saying that Flora was one of the group’s longest-standing brands. Flora Food Group has owned Country Crock since that rename, and the brand has belonged to the same business, under the Upfield and Flora Food Group names, since KKR’s purchase closed in July 2018.

Design and documentation.

Butter spreads and packaged cheese share a shelf and a set of design problems. A spread is usually sold in a plastic tub with a printed lid, or as wrapped sticks in a small carton; cheese is sold in vacuum-sealed blocks, in slices, in wedges wrapped in foil, or in a round box that holds several portions. In each case the pack is small, handled every day and stored in a refrigerator, so the brand has to read clearly from the front of a lid, the end of a carton or the face of a block.

That is why so much of the identity in this category sits in a few repeated elements: a name in a set type style, a colour that runs across the whole range, and sometimes a drawn character or symbol that customers can find among many similar packs. Behind those elements, the companies themselves may have changed owners, merged or moved production more than once.

Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now, where its products are made and how its packs and advertising have changed, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A couple seen only by their hands, a 2019 product and a television pitchman.

The brand’s television advertising was set at home. English Wikipedia says that during the 1980s and 1990s a series of commercials for the margarine showed a married couple sitting at their dinner table talking about the spread, with only their hands on screen. It says the wife was voiced by Casey DeFranco and the husband by the actor Jack Riley, known for playing Elliot Carlin on The Bob Newhart Show.

A new product line followed under Upfield. In a press release dated 10 September 2019 and datelined Hackensack, New Jersey, the company announced Country Crock Plant Butter, a dairy-free product made with plant-based oils and featuring oils from olives, avocados and almonds. The release said the product was gluten-free, kosher-certified and certified plant-based by the Plant Based Foods Association, and that it would be sold in stores across the United States in tubs, with olive oil or almond oil, and in sticks, with olive, almond or avocado oil. Brian Orlando, chief marketing officer for Upfield North America, was quoted saying the company had set out to make a dairy-free butter that home cooks, chefs and bakers could cook, bake and spread with.

The launch came with a campaign built around people who described themselves as butter lovers. The release said one of them was Lynn Rupley Smith, a state fair baking champion who had won blue ribbons in August 2019 with pies made using the new product, and that the brand was also working with the television personality Antoni Porowski, who tested it in a home cook’s family recipes. The Counter, in an article by Sam Bloch published the same day, called Porowski the company’s pitchman and noted that it was his second venture into food marketing that year, after work for the fish-stick brand Gorton’s. The same article reported that the National Milk Producers Federation had criticised the plant butter name in a statement.

The parent’s 2024 rename left the brand name alone: Flora Food Group’s published history lists Country Crock by name among the brands with which it expanded across spreads, creams and dairy alternatives in 2023, alongside Flora, Becel, Rama, Blue Band and Violife.

For a design guide, Country Crock shows how a name built on a farmhouse kitchen object can carry a spread through changes of owner, from Detroit to Unilever to a Dutch food group, while the domestic picture stays the same. Compare it with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, its stablemate in the same Unilever spreads sale, and Land O’Lakes, a Midwestern butter brand. For this guide we use farmhouse green, spread yellow, crock cream and kitchen-table brick with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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