A cracker salesman, English shop cakes and a Brooklyn market bakery.

Drake’s is a brand of American snack cakes now owned by McKee Foods, the maker of Little Debbie. English Wikipedia says the business began as The N.E. Drake Baking Company, incorporated on 14 November 1896 in New York City by Newman E. Drake, with its first bakery in Harlem on West 135th Street. Wikipedia says Drake had entered the baking trade in 1888, when he joined the Vanderveer and Holmes Biscuit Company, and later travelled abroad as a salesman for that cracker business. On a trip to England in 1893–94, it says, he saw commercially baked fine cakes sold in grocery stores and wanted to bring the idea to America.

The first company did not last long under the Drake name. Wikipedia says the National Biscuit Company, later Nabisco, had bought the Harlem bakery by November 1900 and later sold its cakes under other names. On 4 December 1902 Drake started again as Drake Brothers Company, with his brother Charles and his brother-in-law Frank S. Vreeland, and by May 1903 he was baking at Wallabout Market in Brooklyn. Wikipedia says the firm made pound cakes, macaroons and other cakes for grocery stores, opened a bakery in the Roxbury neighbourhood of Boston in 1905, and in 1909 commissioned a piece of ragtime sheet music for piano, “Drake’s Cake Walk”. In May 1913 the brothers announced a new five-storey brick and concrete bakery on Clinton Avenue in Brooklyn, with the ovens on the top floor and shipping at street level.

Because much of the cake was sold by the pound, Wikipedia says, it could easily be swapped by a grocer for another baker’s product. Drake answered with pan liners perforated with the Drake’s name, so that shoppers could identify the cake, and put the trademark on trucks, in advertising and on everything that left the bakery.

A duck in a chef’s hat, a run of owners and a 2013 return.

The duck is a documented part of the visual identity. Wikipedia says that in the early 1900s Drake wanted something new for the doors of his delivery trucks, and that Joseph Gross, a German immigrant who painted lines and designs on horse wagons and motor vehicles, drew the original Drake’s logo: a duck wearing a chef’s hat and holding a tray of cakes. In 1981, it says, Drake Bakeries held a contest to name the duck, and the winning name was Webster.

Packaging changed as the company grew. Wikipedia says Drake Bakeries, Incorporated was formed on 29 July 1924 with Ralph Ward as president, and that in 1925 the company promoted a policy of removing cakes from shelves after 48 hours, introduced cartons it called the “Fresh Cake” package and began a series of collectable cards, two of them featuring Babe Ruth. In 1929, it says, Drake’s began advertising that its cakes were wrapped in cellophane, so that shoppers could see what they were buying in a “flavor-sealed” package. The Borden Company took control of Drake Bakeries on 8 August 1929 through its purchase of a holding company.

The product names came in stages. Wikipedia says Devil Dogs were first registered as a trademark in 1926 by another Brooklyn company and were advertised under the Drake’s name by 1956; Yankee Doodles came from the Yankee Cake Company of Providence, Rhode Island, which became a Drake subsidiary. Coffee Cakes appear in Drake’s advertising from December 1930. Ring Dings launched in January 1958, Funny Bones on 12 April 1961 and Yodels on 15 August 1962. The company also ran a cake stand at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

Ownership then changed hands several times. Wikipedia says Borden sold Drake Bakeries to Ralston Purina in 1986; a management group backed by Rock Capital Partners bought it in 1987; the Montreal food company Culinar, owner of the Canadian cake brand Vachon, bought it at the end of 1990; and Hostess owner Interstate Bakeries completed its purchase on 16 August 1998. Hostess Brands filed for bankruptcy in January 2012 and moved to liquidation that November. Family Business Magazine, citing Bloomberg, reported on 10 April 2013 that a federal bankruptcy judge in White Plains, New York, had approved the sale of the Drake’s brands to McKee Foods, which has owned Drake’s since 2013. Grocery Dive reported on 23 September 2013 that Devil Dogs, Coffee Cakes, Ring Dings and Yodels were returning to stores that day, with McKee using the original formulations and packaging.

Design and documentation.

The guides in this group look at American snack cakes: small cakes, pies, rolls and buns baked in quantity, sealed in printed wrappers and sold from supermarket shelves, gas-station and convenience-store racks and lunchbox-sized multipacks. Their identity rarely sits in the cake itself, which often looks much the same from one bakery to the next. It sits in the packaging, the name and the characters that travel with them.

Most of the visible design work happens on a thin cellophane or film wrapper that has to carry a name, a flavour and a picture in very little space, and then on the carton that groups several wrapped cakes together. Mascots, cartoon figures and named characters appear often in this category, and a single brand can pass through several bakeries and owners while keeping the same name on the pack.

Each guide follows the same approach: who started the name, who has owned it since, and how its wrappers, logos and advertising have changed over time, using dated independent sources where they exist and marking plainly what rests only on a company’s own account.

A name on the pan liner and a mascot on the truck.

Wikipedia’s history of Drake’s describes several identity devices in turn: the perforated pan liners that carried the name onto the cake itself, the trademark painted on trucks and used in advertising, the 1925 “Fresh Cake” carton and the 1929 cellophane wrapper sold as “flavor-sealed”. The duck in a chef’s hat, drawn by a wagon painter for a truck door, was named Webster through a contest in 1981.

Two of the cake names, Devil Dogs and Yankee Doodles, came from other Brooklyn and Providence bakeries, Wikipedia says, while Ring Dings, Funny Bones and Yodels were launched by Drake’s itself between 1958 and 1962. The brand also reached television and film. Wikipedia says Drake’s Coffee Cakes are mentioned in the Seinfeld episode “The Suicide”, first aired on 29 January 1992, and that in “The Dinner Party”, aired on 3 February 1994, George Costanza suggests bringing Ring Dings to a dinner party; it adds that a character in the 1993 film A Bronx Tale is nicknamed after a Drake’s coffee cake. Under McKee, Wikipedia says, Drake’s was sold mainly in the Northeastern United States and expanded into the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions in 2016.

For a design guide, Drake’s shows a bakery whose name, duck mascot and cake names have passed through a long run of owners, and which McKee brought back in 2013 with its original packaging. Compare it with Little Debbie, its sister brand at McKee Foods, and Tastykake, another early Northeastern snack-cake bakery. For this guide we use blue, duck yellow, red and white with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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