A creamery worker, an injury, a first flock and a plant in Willmar.

Jennie-O is an American brand of turkey products made by Jennie-O Turkey Store, which is based in Willmar, Minnesota, and owned by Hormel Foods. The brand began with one man’s flock. The St. Paul Pioneer Press, reporting on its founder in December 2006, traced the business to Earl B. Olson, the son of Swedish immigrants, who grew up on a farm near Murdock, Minnesota, and went to work at a cooperative creamery in western Minnesota after graduating from the West Central School of Agriculture.

The newspaper said the turning point was an accident. In 1939, scalding water spilled on Olson’s legs at the creamery, and the compensation he received paid for his first flock of turkeys. The trade paper Meatingplace gave the same account in December 2006, saying Olson bought his first flock with insurance money from the 1939 accident and regarded it as the starting point of his success. The Pioneer Press said he kept enlarging the flock year after year until, about a decade later, a collapse in the turkey market left him heavily in debt.

Olson’s answer was to expand rather than retreat. According to the Pioneer Press, he took out a loan and bought a struggling turkey plant in Willmar, after the cooperative creamery where he worked declined to buy it. The company’s own history gives the year as 1949 and says the plant was the Farmer’s Produce Company; the newspaper says Olson gave the plant that name after he bought it. Jennie-O says that in 1950 dairy and other poultry products were phased out so that the business could concentrate on turkey alone.

The brand name came next. Jennie-O says that in 1953 Olson converted the Farmer’s Produce plant into a USDA-inspected turkey plant and named the brand JENNIE-O after his daughter, Jennifer. The Pioneer Press said that by the mid-1950s, after buying plants in other Minnesota towns, Olson had renamed his business Jennie-O Foods after his only daughter. The company’s timeline puts the formal change of the company name later, saying Farmer’s Produce Company became Jennie-O Foods, Inc. in 1971.

A family company, a Wisconsin rival and two owners merged under Hormel.

Through the 1950s and 1960s the company grew in Minnesota. Jennie-O says Farmer’s Produce bought a second plant in 1954 and a third in 1966, and that Olson’s son Charles joined the sales staff in 1963 and became president in 1974. In 1973, the company says, it built the Willmar Avenue plant and a corporate office in Willmar to accommodate expanding processing.

The family era ended in 1986. The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that Olson sold the business that year to Hormel Foods, the meat company based in Austin, Minnesota, where Jennie-O remained a subsidiary. The newspaper added that Olson served on Hormel’s board for about a decade and kept an office at Jennie-O as a consultant. Jennie-O’s own timeline records the same sale, saying Jennie-O Foods, Inc. was purchased by Hormel Foods Corporation in 1986.

The other half of today’s company came from Wisconsin. Jennie-O’s history names a second founder, Wallace Jerome, who it says began raising turkeys in 1922, moved his hatchery business in 1937 to form Jerome Hatchery, and founded The Turkey Store Company in 1941. The company says Jerome bought a second plant in 1950 and named it Badger Turkey Industries, which became Jerome Foods in 1964. His son Jerry joined in 1974 and became president in 1980, the history says, and THE TURKEY STORE brand was introduced in 1984. In 1998 Jerome Foods took the name The Turkey Store Company.

The two businesses came together under Hormel. Jennie-O says that in 2001 The Turkey Store Company was purchased by Hormel Foods and merged with Jennie-O Foods to form Jennie-O Turkey Store, and Meatingplace described Jennie-O in 2006 as purchased by Hormel and merged with the Turkey Store Co. Hormel Foods has owned Jennie-O since 1986 and the combined Jennie-O Turkey Store since 2001; a Hormel Foods release of January 2014 describes Jennie-O Turkey Store, based in Willmar, as a wholly owned subsidiary of Hormel Foods.

The business has stayed rooted in the two states where its founders started. An archived careers page on the Jennie-O website, captured in April 2015, listed locations in Willmar, Spicer, Faribault, Melrose, Montevideo and Pelican Rapids in Minnesota and in Barron, Wisconsin.

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 first name on the pack, a switch from beef and a television spot filmed on an Iowa trail.

Jennie-O says Earl Olson named it in 1953 after his daughter, Jennifer, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that she was his only daughter. The company writes the brand in capitals, JENNIE-O, in its own timeline and releases, the same way it writes THE TURKEY STORE, the Wisconsin brand that joined it in 2001. The combined business name, Jennie-O Turkey Store, keeps both founders’ brands side by side.

Product development has been part of the story the company and its founder’s family tell. The Pioneer Press reported in 2006 that Olson’s family regarded inventing new products as his true joy and cited turkey ham as a Jennie-O creation. Jennie-O’s timeline says the company developed a turkey hot dog in 1984, using a seasoning recipe it kept secret and a custom-built continuous oven.

Meatingplace reported on 21 September 2010 that Jennie-O Turkey Store was launching “Make the Switch”, an advertising push encouraging consumers to swap hamburgers for turkey burgers. The trade paper said a series of digital and television spots would begin airing that week, timed to coincide with prime-time network premieres, with the advertisements also running on selected websites. Meatingplace quoted Steve Lykken, then senior vice president of the retail division, describing the flavour of turkey burgers as juicy and craveable.

The campaign returned in new cycles. In a release dated 13 January 2014, Hormel Foods said the latest cycle of Make The Switch challenged people to replace ground beef with JENNIE-O ground turkey in favourite recipes such as tacos. Its centrepiece, the company said, was a national television commercial called “Taco Ride”, paying homage to a weekly bicycle ride along Iowa’s Wabash Trace Nature Trail from Council Bluffs to Mineola. The company said it filmed the ride along the trail and turned the destination restaurant, Tobey Jack’s Mineola Steakhouse, into a turkey taco party for the riders.

For a design guide, Jennie-O shows how a family first name and a single letter for the surname can carry a whole category, from a Willmar processing plant to television spots built around one swap at the dinner table. Compare it with Hormel, the Austin company that has owned the brand since 1986, and Butterball, another American turkey brand. For this guide we use prairie green, roast amber, plant-floor cream and barn red with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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