A patent, a Chicago workshop and a stew from Lithuania.

The Crock-Pot began as someone else’s product. Its starting point was a patent filed by Irving Nachumsohn, a Chicago electrical engineer who, according to Smithsonian magazine in November 2019, applied for it on 21 May 1936 and was granted it on 23 January 1940. The patent, U.S. 2,187,888, describes a “Cooking Apparatus”. Smithsonian says Nachumsohn worked for Western Electric, passed the patent bar exam himself rather than hire a lawyer, and eventually set up his own business, Naxon Utilities Corp., to develop his ideas full time.

The idea came from family memory. Both Smithsonian and English Wikipedia tell the story Nachumsohn heard from his mother about her home town in Lithuania, where Jewish families prepared cholent, a stew of meat, beans and vegetables, before the Sabbath and carried it in crocks to the local bakery, so it could cook overnight in the residual heat of an oven that was no longer being stoked. Smithsonian adds a domestic detail from his daughter Lenore: in the family’s own household the slow cooker was a way to make meals in summer without turning on the oven.

The product reached shops in the 1950s, Smithsonian says, more than a decade after the patent. By then Nachumsohn had a new name. In 1945, the magazine reports, wartime attention on Americans with German surnames led Nachumsohn to shorten the family name to Naxon, which is why the cooker was sold as the Naxon Beanery — a squat crock with a fitted lid and a heating element built around its inner chamber. English Wikipedia names it the Naxon Beanery All-Purpose Cooker and says an earlier version was called the Boston Beanery.

Naxon’s business ranged well beyond beans. Smithsonian lists an electric frying pan, a version of the lava lamp and a moving-message sign called the “telesign”. When the Chicago Tribune published his death notice on 25 September 1989, it described him as a longtime resident of the West Rogers Park neighbourhood who had also worked during the Second World War on an oxygen flow indicator for aircraft.

Rival, a recipe booklet and the colours of the 1970s.

The name Crock-Pot belongs to the company that bought the Beanery. When Naxon retired in 1970, Smithsonian says, he sold his business for cash to Rival Manufacturing of Kansas City, Missouri, a firm known for die-cast kitchen gadgets with names such as the Juice-O-Mat and the Can-O-Mat. English Wikipedia says the purchase brought Rival Naxon’s 1940 patent. The magazine quotes Rival’s then-president, Isidore H. Miller, as saying the Beanery had been nearly forgotten by the time of the sale.

Rival did not simply relabel it. Smithsonian says the company’s home economists were asked to test what the cooker could do, and English Wikipedia says Rival brought in Alex MacMaster, from Boonville, Missouri, to turn the bean cooker into a production model large enough to cook a whole family meal, and that he also designed the machines for the production line. At the 1971 National Housewares Show in Chicago, according to Smithsonian, Rival unveiled the result with a new name, a refreshed appearance and a booklet of tested recipes. English Wikipedia dates the reintroduction under the trademark “Crock-Pot” to 1971.

The name does the descriptive work on its own: a crock, the glazed pottery vessel, and a pot. The recipe booklet framed the appliance as a way to cook rather than a piece of hardware, and Smithsonian notes that Crock-Pots went home in the distinctly 1970s colours Harvest Gold and Avocado. The magazine also cites a 1975 advertisement in The Washington Post that pitched the cooker as “perfect for working women”.

The design changed in 1974, when, according to English Wikipedia, Rival introduced removable stoneware inserts, making the pot easier to clean. One avocado-coloured Rival Crock-Pot from about that time is now in the collection of the National Museum of American History in Washington: Smithsonian says Robert and Shirley Hunter of Pennsylvania received it as a Christmas gift around 1974. The magazine quotes the museum’s curator Paula Johnson, of the Division of Work & Industry, on the cooker’s place at family potlucks in her Minnesota home town. The magazine also mentions a miniature version, the Crockette.

Design and documentation.

Small kitchen appliances and tableware reach people through a few repeated surfaces. An appliance is usually first met as a printed box on a shop shelf, with a photograph of the product, a name in large type and a short line about what it does. Once the box is opened, the name moves to a smaller badge: a moulded or printed mark on a lid, a hinge, a front panel or a control dial, sitting beside the switches and settings the owner will use every day.

Tableware works differently. Cutlery and flatware are often sold in a fitted box or a presentation case, with a pattern name printed on the lid or a card, while the maker’s mark is stamped small on the back of a handle. Plates and glasses may carry a backstamp or an etched mark that most people never look at.

Because of that, a name in this trade can travel a long way from the company that first used it. Each guide here sets out what can be checked about who started a brand, who owns it now and where its products are made, and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A name that outgrew its maker.

Crock-Pot has changed hands several times without changing its name. The Rival company that renamed the cooker was itself bought in 1999 by Holmes Products of Massachusetts, a maker of fans, heaters and humidifiers. In 2005, English Wikipedia says, citing The New York Times and the Boston Business Journal of that June, Holmes was sold to Jarden Corporation. English Wikipedia’s Rival article says that under Jarden the Crock-Pot was set up as a brand in its own right, and its slow cookers no longer carried the Rival logo.

Newell Brands has owned Crock-Pot since 2016, when Newell Rubbermaid completed its acquisition of Jarden and took the Newell Brands name, placing the cooker in the same group as Rubbermaid and Yankee Candle. English Wikipedia says the trademark is held by Sunbeam Products, the Newell appliance company that also handles Sunbeam and Oster, and that “crock-pot” is sometimes used in the English-speaking world as a generic word for any slow cooker, although it remains a registered mark.

The brand’s public voice has had to catch up with its own fame. Smithsonian reports that in January 2018, after an episode of the NBC drama This Is Us made a slow cooker part of its plot, the company joined Twitter to respond to the reaction on social media. The same article describes the cooker as a staple of American potlucks and points to the long run of slow-cooker recipes shared online.

Read as an identity, the Crock-Pot rests on three things set down between 1970 and 1974: a compound name built from two plain words for a cooking vessel, a recipe booklet that sold the appliance as a way of cooking, and a removable stoneware crock whose glazed surface became the thing people pictured. The colours that shipped with it, harvest gold and avocado, fixed it in its decade.

For a design guide, Crock-Pot shows how a patent from a small Chicago workshop, renamed and repackaged by a Kansas City gadget maker, can become a trademark strong enough to stand for a whole category while its ownership moves from company to company. Compare it with Rival, the company that gave it its name, and Mr. Coffee, the Cleveland coffeemaker that followed a similar path into the same group. For this guide we use stoneware brown, avocado and harvest gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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