From a Greenville kitchen to a mayonnaise plant.

Duke’s began with sandwiches rather than jars. English Wikipedia says the mayonnaise was created by Eugenia Duke in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1917, and that in August of that year she and her daughter Martha started selling sandwiches at army canteens run by the YMCA. NPR, in a piece by Jarrett Dieterle and Maria Ribas published on 7 June 2018, describes the two of them turning a rented house kitchen into a sandwich line — egg salad, chicken salad and pimento cheese — for soldiers at nearby Camp Sevier, a training camp outside the city.

The company’s own timeline fills in the following years. It says the Dukes had moved to Greenville in 1910 for Harry Duke’s job with Southern Power Co., that in 1918 Eugenia Duke bought her first delivery truck, and that by 1920 she was selling sandwiches through drugstores and grocery shops and at a Duke’s Tea Room in the Ottaray Hotel downtown. NPR says the hotel arrangement brought her sandwiches to the women’s tea parties held in its lobby.

The turn to mayonnaise came in 1923. Both the company timeline and NPR credit a salesman named Boyd with pointing out that it was the mayonnaise, more than the sandwiches, that customers wanted, and with suggesting it be bottled and sold on its own. The company says Eugenia Duke then left the sandwich trade to concentrate on the spread, and that in 1926 she moved production from a facility on her property into her first proper plant. Wikipedia, citing The Boston Globe of 1 November 1928, records her as a speaker at a convention of mayonnaise manufacturers in Boston that year. NPR adds that she took part in the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave American women the vote in 1920.

Richmond, Charlotte and a private-equity sale.

Eugenia Duke did not keep the business for long. The company says that demand outgrew what she could handle and that she sold it to The C.F. Sauer Company on 9 February 1929, staying on as its chief salesperson; NPR describes Sauer as a family-owned spice producer based in Richmond, Virginia, and says she remained the mayonnaise’s spokesperson. Wikipedia, citing the Richmond Times-Dispatch of 25 December 2017, says Duke’s became Sauer’s flagship product.

The founder later started again under a different name. NPR says that by 1950 Martha had married and moved to California, that her parents followed, and that Eugenia Duke launched a new sandwich business there. Because she had already sold her name twice — to C.F. Sauer and to her bookkeeper, J. Allen Hart, who opened the Duke Sandwich Company — she called it The Duchess Sandwich Company.

Production stayed in the Greenville area. The company timeline records the completion of an expansion of its Greenville plant in 1990; Wikipedia places the plant in Mauldin, just south-east of Greenville, and says it appeared in a 2011 episode of How It’s Made about mayonnaise. A photograph caption on Wikipedia identifies the former Duke’s factory in Greenville as the building that is now the Wyche Pavilion. In 2017, Wikipedia says, the South Carolina legislature recognised the brand’s centennial.

Ownership has changed twice since then. The company says that in 2019, after more than a century of private ownership, C.F. Sauer was acquired by Falfurrias Capital Partners of Charlotte, North Carolina; Wikipedia cites a Richmond Times-Dispatch report of 2 August 2019 that the private-equity firm had completed the purchase. The food business has since traded as Sauer Brands. Wikipedia says Falfurrias sold Sauer Brands, including Duke’s, to Advent International in 2025, citing a Food Processing report of 7 January 2025 that announced the deal.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are American mayonnaise, salad-dressing and syrup names, the jars and bottles that sit in a refrigerator door or on a pantry shelf. Many began somewhere small and specific — a home kitchen, a restaurant dining room, a regional factory — before passing through larger food companies, and several are still loyally bought in one part of the country more than another.

Their identities are carried mostly by packaging rather than by advertising alone: the shape of a wide-mouthed jar or a squeeze bottle, a label colour that shoppers learn to spot from the end of an aisle, a script or serif name, and sometimes the memory of the restaurant or cook the product came from. Because owners change and recipes travel, the questions behind each name are worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where it is made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A jar people keep.

The pack carries much of the brand. NPR in 2018 described the yellow-capped jars as collector’s items, kept and reused by fans of the brand. The company’s timeline marks two label moments: in 2007, for the brand’s 90th anniversary, a red “smooth and creamy” ribbon was added to the label, and in 2017 the centennial was marked with a new label, a commemorative book and a celebration in Greenville. The timeline also notes the 1 Cup Pouch of 2015, which the company presents as a new format in a category that had earlier moved from glass to plastic jars.

The brand’s voice turned on one word. Wikipedia says the tang of the mayonnaise has been used in Duke’s advertising under the slogan “It’s Got Twang”, and the company timeline dates its brand campaign “Duke’s — It’s got Twang!” to 2020, followed in 2021 by “House of Twang”, a series looking behind the scenes at restaurants across the South. The same timeline says that in 2020 Duke’s became title sponsor of a regular-season college football game and a postseason bowl in Charlotte, which the Charlotte Sports Foundation named the Duke’s Mayo Classic and the Duke’s Mayo Bowl.

The range has widened under the same name. The company lists a Light mayonnaise from 1985, a Southern Sauces line from 2020 with regional barbecue flavours, flavoured mayonnaises and dressings from 2021, mustards from 2022 and seafood sauces from 2023, all carrying the Duke’s name and its yellow-and-red colours on the shelf.

For a design guide, Duke’s shows how a cap colour, a ribbon and a single word of copy can carry a regional brand far beyond its home town. Compare it with Hellmann’s, a mayonnaise built around a blue ribbon, and Sir Kensington’s, a newer condiment brand with a vintage crest. For this guide we use cap yellow and ribbon red on mayo cream with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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