James T. Williams, a thinner macaroni and a name taken from “the cream of the crop”.

Creamette is an American brand of dried pasta that began in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The company that sells it today says on its website that Creamette was founded in Minneapolis in 1912, under the heading “A Family Tradition Since 1912”, and describes its purpose as making good pasta accessible to everyday families.

A detailed local account comes from the North Loop Neighborhood Association, which covers the warehouse district on the north side of downtown Minneapolis. In an article in its Historic North Loop series, written by the volunteer Mike Binkley from newspaper archives, public records and the digital collections of the Hennepin County Library, it credits the product to a North Loop grocer named James T. Williams, whose store stood on Washington Avenue North.

The article explains what made the macaroni different. Thick dried pasta then took more than 30 minutes to cook, it says, while Williams’s lighter macaroni, with thin walls and a large opening, cooked in about 12 minutes. He called it “the cream of the crop”, the article says, and that phrase gave the product its name, Creamettes. The International Directory of Company Histories, in a 2003 entry on New World Pasta, likewise says Williams redesigned the macaroni to have a thinner wall and a larger centre hole, so that it cooked faster than other brands, and that it became popular across the Midwest.

The North Loop article says the macaroni was initially sold through a North Loop company called Mother’s Macaroni, on Third Avenue North, and that within a few years Williams bought out Mother’s and eventually renamed it The Creamette Company. The International Directory of Company Histories says the brand was initially made by the Minnesota Macaroni Company, founded in Minneapolis in 1916, which Williams later bought with his brother. Tasting Table, in an article of 23 December 2025, says Creamette got its start with Williams in his Minneapolis grocery store in 1896, and describes his product as an elbow macaroni with thinner walls and a wider tube.

The family stayed at the centre of the brand. The North Loop article says Williams and his wife, Louise, had five children, and quotes their grandson John Linstroth recalling visits to his grandfather’s office, which had a large glass window, and reaching up to touch the macaroni as it came out of the presses on the factory floor.

The Williams family, Borden, New World Pasta, Ebro, TreeHouse and Winland Foods.

Creamette stayed in the family for decades. The International Directory of Company Histories says the Williams family ran it until 1979, when it was sold to Borden; the North Loop article places the sale in the late 1970s.

The next owner came from the Hershey side of the pasta trade. The International Directory of Company Histories says that in July 2001 New World Pasta, the company formed from Hershey’s former pasta division, agreed to buy Borden Foods’ remaining pasta business, which included the Prince brand and Creamette macaroni, after Borden had sold other brands to the American Italian Pasta Company. English Wikipedia lists Creamette with Prince, Catelli and Lancia as the four Borden brands New World Pasta bought that month.

New World Pasta, based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, filed for bankruptcy in 2004, Wikipedia says, and was acquired in 2006 by Ebro Puleva, the Spanish food group now called Ebro Foods. From 1 January 2017, according to the same article, which cites the Houston Business Journal, New World Pasta and American Rice were merged into Ebro’s Houston-based subsidiary Riviana Foods.

Ebro then broke up its North American pasta brands. The Shelby Report said on 17 December 2020 that TreeHouse Foods, based in Oak Brook, Illinois, had completed its purchase of the bulk of Riviana’s U.S. branded pasta business. The brands it listed included Creamette, Skinner, No Yolks, American Beauty, San Giorgio and Prince, and the deal also covered a manufacturing plant in St. Louis. Wikipedia says the Catelli and Lancia brands went to Barilla in 2021.

TreeHouse kept the brands for less than two years. Food Business Middle East & Africa reported in August 2022 that TreeHouse had sold the bulk of its meal-preparation business, with pasta among the categories, to the European investment group Investindustrial. That business now trades as Winland Foods, which describes itself on its website as a new company backed by Investindustrial and working in pasta, sauces, dressings, syrups and other pantry categories. Winland Foods has owned Creamette since 2022. Tasting Table described Creamette as a Winland Foods brand in December 2025, and the Prince pasta website names Creamette among Winland’s principal pasta brands.

Design and documentation.

Dried pasta, mustard and salad dressing are pantry goods that sit side by side on a grocery shelf, and each category has settled into a familiar kind of pack. Dried pasta is often sold in a printed paperboard box or a clear bag, so the shape of the noodle and the name on the front have to work together. Mustard usually comes in a glass jar or a squeeze bottle, where a narrow label has to carry the name, the style and the colour of the condiment at a glance.

Salad dressing is most often sold in a tall bottle with a wraparound label, and the dressing itself can show through the glass or plastic. Across all three categories, the label tends to do much of the work that a logo does elsewhere: it names the product, marks the flavour or shape, and signals the brand behind it.

Each guide in this group looks at who started a brand, who owns it now and where its products are made, separating what independent sources record from what a company says about itself.

Peg Williams on the packaging, a warehouse by Long and Kees and a sign that outlived the factory.

Two images carry the Creamette story beyond the box: a child’s face and a factory sign. The North Loop Neighborhood Association says the little girl with big dark eyes who appeared on Creamette boxes was Peg, a daughter of James and Louise Williams, and that her likeness stayed on the packaging for decades. Her son, John Linstroth, told the association he enjoyed showing people the packaging and saying, “this is my mother.”

The building is the second image. The North Loop article says the Creamette Company moved in 1916 into a warehouse on North 1st Street that had been built in 1896 for the Champion Company, which stored its line of binders, mowers and reapers there. Some twenty years after it was built, the article says, it became a noodle factory. The building was designed by the Minneapolis architects Long and Kees, whose other work in the city includes City Hall and the Lumber Exchange building, according to the association.

The company worked from that building for several decades. After the sale to Borden, the North Loop article says, the Creamette sign stayed on the building, and it remains there today. In 1998 the adjacent building was torn down to make way for a new residential building named Creamette Historic Lofts, and the association prints a 1998 photograph of the site from the Hennepin County Library. Linstroth told the association that the family took pride in the sign’s survival and that the city had considered it important to the history of Minneapolis.

The modern brand keeps a plain, family-centred tone. The Creamette website frames its history as a family tradition, promises “pasta you can trust” and pairs its product range with recipes and a store locator. The name itself has shifted slightly over time: the North Loop article calls the original product Creamettes, in the plural, while the brand trades today as Creamette.

For a design guide, Creamette shows how a regional pasta label can draw its identity from a product idea, a family portrait and a piece of city architecture, and keep a name coined by its founder through a long chain of corporate owners. Compare it with Mueller’s, another American pasta brand, and Prince, which came to New World Pasta from Borden alongside Creamette in 2001. For this guide we use mill red, durum gold, cream and warehouse grey with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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