A Buffalo-born meat man, a partnership in a rebuilt market and a packinghouse of his own.

Hormel is the American meat brand that carries the name of its founder, George A. Hormel, and of the company he started, now Hormel Foods Corporation of Austin, Minnesota. Its story is told in detail by MNopedia, the online encyclopedia of the Minnesota Historical Society, in an entry by the historian Anita Talsma Gaul first published in December 2021.

MNopedia says George Albert Hormel was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1860, to German immigrant parents, and that as a young child he moved with his family to Toledo, Ohio, where his father opened a tannery. Economic hard times after the Panic of 1873 pushed him out of school and into work. He went to Chicago to work in the meat market of his uncle, Jacob “Jay” Decker, and it was there, the encyclopedia says, that he learned how to process and pack meat. He later worked briefly as a wool buyer in Kansas City before returning to Chicago and taking a job as a travelling hide buyer.

The hide-buying trips brought him to southern Minnesota. In 1887, MNopedia says, Hormel learned on a work trip to Austin that a customer’s meat market had burned. The owner had rebuilt the shop but no longer wanted to run it, so Hormel borrowed money and bought a share in the business. With the owner’s son, Albrecht Friedrich, he opened the Friedrich and Hormel meat market. The two men dissolved their partnership in 1891, and Hormel used the proceeds to set up his own pork packinghouse on the outskirts of Austin, trading as Geo. A. Hormel and Company.

The encyclopedia describes a careful start. During his years running the meat market, it says, Hormel kept detailed records of each animal processed and the cuts sold from each carcass, and concluded that pork held strong profit potential because every part of the pig could be used. He began by specialising in one product, sausage, which used parts of the animal that would otherwise go to waste. MNopedia says that in the early years he did whatever the business needed, from buying livestock and butchering to grading meat and cleaning the hog pens, until by about 1900 the company had grown enough for him to trade his overalls for a business suit.

Incorporation, a family succession, a new name and a growing portfolio.

The company was formally incorporated in 1901, according to MNopedia, and in 1903 Hormel expanded the plant and installed new equipment. The encyclopedia places the business within a wider shift in American meatpacking, away from the great terminal stockyards of Chicago and towards smaller packers in smaller cities that bought livestock directly from farmers. When George Hormel’s son Jay came back from service in the First World War, MNopedia says, his father handed him more control of daily operations, and in 1927 George appointed Jay acting president and moved with his wife, Lillian, to Beverly Hills, California.

A second MNopedia entry, on SPAM, written by Mary Laine and first published in April 2018, records the change of name that gives the company its present title. In 1993, it says, the company’s name changed to Hormel Foods Corporation. The Los Angeles Times still referred to the firm as Geo. A. Hormel & Co., based in Austin, in June 1988.

The Austin plant was also the site of a long labour dispute. MNopedia records that members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local P-9 went on strike at the company’s Austin plant on 17 August 1985, in a dispute that continued for thirteen months.

Hormel has also bought other brands. The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported in December 2006 that in 1986 the turkey processor Jennie-O of Willmar, Minnesota, was sold to Austin-based Hormel Foods, and that it remained a subsidiary, since merged with the Turkey Store Co. MPR News reported on 11 February 2021 that Austin-based Hormel Foods, which it described as known for meat brands such as Spam and Applegate, was buying the Planters nut business from Kraft Heinz, along with brands including Corn Nuts and Cheez Balls and production plants in California, Arkansas and Virginia.

The company is still based in Austin. A Hormel Foods press release of 12 March 2024 describes the company as based in Austin, Minn., and lists among its brands Planters, Skippy, SPAM, Hormel Natural Choice, Applegate, Justin’s, Wholly, Hormel Black Label, Columbus and Jennie-O. Hormel Foods has owned the Jennie-O business since 1986, and Planters joined the list after the purchase it agreed in 2021.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are all meat and poultry names, sold from the chiller cabinet, the deli counter and the freezer. Meat and poultry brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family packing houses that still carry a founder’s name or a home town to labels that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single name can appear on bacon, ham, sausages, sliced deli meat and frozen dinners alike.

A meat brand’s identity is usually carried less by one package than by a name, a colour and a promise printed on a label, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually processed and packed.

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

A sealed ham, a chili, a stew, a can named in a contest and bacon packed for the microwave.

Several of the company’s long-running products came in cans. MNopedia says the company introduced Hormel Flavor Sealed Ham, a canned ham, in 1927, followed by Dinty Moore stew and Hormel Chili in 1935, and by SPAM in 1937. Mary Laine’s entry on SPAM says the George A. Hormel Company introduced the luncheon meat to use up a surplus of pork shoulder, and that in the late 1930s Jay Hormel awarded Kenneth Daigneau a prize for suggesting the name. What Daigneau meant by it is unclear, the entry says, though it is thought to be an abbreviation of spiced ham.

The same entry notes that early advertising for SPAM relied on catchy phrases and full-page colour advertisements, and it quotes a 1960s advertisement promising that “you can serve it cold, you can serve it hot, you can slice it, dice it, bake it, fry it.” Among the objects the Minnesota Historical Society illustrates with the entry is a coin bank in the form of a can, made to promote the dedication of a SPAM plant in Austin on 12 September 1982.

Packaging and convenience shaped the brand again in the 1980s. The Los Angeles Times reported on 2 June 1988 that Hormel was launching a New Traditions line of frozen sandwiches and biscuit breakfasts under the line “real food, real fast, at home.” The paper described Hormel Microwave bacon, packed in separate plastic-enclosed packets lined with a paper-like material to absorb the grease, and quoted Hormel’s promotional claim that it “could easily make frying bacon obsolete.” It also described Top Shelf, fully prepared entrées made to sit on a pantry shelf without refrigeration.

The deli range has had its own redesign. In a release dated 12 March 2024, Hormel Foods said the Hormel Natural Choice line of deli meats was getting a packaging redesign with a refreshed logo, a TRUETASTE Commitment and lighter packaging, part of what the company calls its 20 By 30 Challenge goals. The release describes the redesign as food-forward.

For a design guide, Hormel shows how a founder’s surname, set on cans, chili, deli packs and bacon boxes, can hold together a range that has grown across a century while the company stays in the town where it began. Compare it with SPAM, the canned meat launched from the same Austin plant, and Jennie-O, the Willmar turkey brand Hormel has owned since 1986. For this guide we use packinghouse red, chili gold, creamery cream and Cedar River navy with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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