A home-kitchen pie crust from Depression-era Seattle.

Krusteaz began with pastry rather than pancakes. The company says the story started in 1932, when Rose Charters of Seattle set out to make a pie crust that was simple to prepare, and called the product Krusteaz by joining the words “crust” and “ease”. The Kent Reporter, writing on 14 September 2022, repeated the same account of the name, and English Wikipedia records that the brand name was originally “Crust Ease” before it was respelled as Krusteaz. The odd spelling has stayed on the packs ever since.

The founding story has more than one person in it. English Wikipedia, citing a February 2020 report by Jackie Varriano in The Seattle Times, says the brand was reportedly started by four members of a Seattle bridge club, and that the co-founder whose name is known, Ada Rose Gilbreath Charters, came from a pioneer family in Columbia County, grew up on a farm near Dayton, Washington, and studied at Washington State University when it was still called Washington Agricultural College. The same article says that she and her husband, James Charters, were the original owner-operators of the business.

The company’s own history follows the couple out of the kitchen. It says Rose and James began by selling the mix to friends, neighbours and local cafés, outgrew their home kitchen and then opened a manufacturing plant in Seattle. In a press release issued on 14 September 2022, the company placed the original Krusteaz pie crust on grocery shelves in the early 1930s, when Seattle was in the grip of the Great Depression, and described Charters as “an entrepreneurial woman”. The release used her story to explain why, ninety years on, the business wanted its corporate name to match its oldest product.

From Continental Mills to The Krusteaz Company.

For most of its modern history the brand belonged to a company with a different name. English Wikipedia describes Krusteaz as a product line of Continental Mills, based in Tukwila, Washington, just south of Seattle. Citing a December 2016 article in the Puget Sound Business Journal, Wikipedia places the Charters at the start of that business, and the company today calls itself a third-generation, family-owned maker of breakfast, baking and snack brands.

The range moved from pastry to the breakfast table in the 1940s. The company says it introduced a “just add water” pancake mix in that decade. English Wikipedia, citing a 2018 report by KCPQ-TV in Tacoma, says the shelf-stable flour and dried buttermilk mixture behind it was developed in 1946 or 1947 in the home economics department of the University of Washington, and lists biscuits, pancakes, waffles, cobbler and dump cake among the things it was meant to make.

Manufacturing spread out from Seattle over the following decades. Wikipedia, citing The Seattle Times of 23 July 1986, says the company built a facility in the Kent Valley that year. The company says that by the 1990s its biscuits, muffins, brownies, breads and desserts were sold well beyond the Pacific Northwest. In its 2022 release it listed plants in Kent, Washington, Effingham, Illinois, Manhattan, Kansas and Hopkinsville, Kentucky, with its headquarters in Tukwila.

On 14 September 2022, the brand’s ninetieth anniversary, Continental Mills announced that it was changing its name to The Krusteaz Company. “Our mission as an organization is to build the most beloved and wow-inspiring brands in the industry, including Krusteaz as our flagship brand,” said Andy Heily, the company’s president and chief executive, in the release; he added that the company describes Krusteaz as “by makers for makers”. The Kent Reporter covered the change the same day. The release named other brands made by the company, among them Kretschmer wheat germ, Albers cornmeal and grits, Alpine cider and WildRoots trail mixes, alongside private-label and licensed products. The copyright line on the brand’s own website still carries the Continental Mills name.

Design and documentation.

American breakfast brands speak a shared visual language that grew up on the grocery shelf. Pancake and baking mixes have long been sold in upright cardboard boxes whose front panels work like small posters, with a stack of pancakes, a pat of butter or a pour of syrup shown large enough to read from the end of an aisle. Warm colours — golden yellows, browns, reds and creams — recur because they borrow the look of the food itself.

Syrup brings its own design problem, because the bottle stays on the table for the whole meal. Shapes, handles, caps and labels therefore do as much brand work as the logo, and some bottles are recognised by silhouette alone. Mascots and characters, from cheerful cooks to friendly figures drawn for children, have given many breakfast names a face, while short, sing-song slogans carry them through radio, television and the side of the box.

Ownership adds another layer. Many familiar breakfast names have passed between millers, food groups and investment firms over the decades while keeping the same box colours, bottle shapes and slogans on the shelf. Each guide in this group looks at how one name has used those tools, and at who owns it today.

A regional mix that took its breakfast to the people.

Krusteaz built much of its reputation in person, at breakfast. The company says that in the 1960s it sent out the Krusteaz Old Fashioned Kurtesy Kitchen, a fully equipped “traveling diner” that served free pancake breakfasts around the Northwest. The playful spelling of “Kurtesy” echoed the brand’s own respelled name, and the company’s history page still tells the story with a joke about the ice cream man being unable to compete.

Pancakes cooked for a crowd remained part of the brand’s place in the region. English Wikipedia, citing a July 1999 feature in The Seattle Times about flapjack fund-raisers, notes that Krusteaz mix is used in community pancake feeds, the large charity breakfasts held by clubs, schools and fire stations. The company’s own history describes the mixes later reaching army-base breakfasts and crews working on the Alaska pipeline, and it presents that spread from a Northwest tradition to shops across the United States as the main thread of its story.

The 2022 renaming made the brand itself the centre of the company’s identity. Rather than invent a new corporate name, Continental Mills took the one coined for a pie crust ninety years earlier, and Andy Heily tied that choice to the business’s “culture of ingenuity”. The company’s range now runs from pancake and waffle mixes to muffins, quick breads, cookies, dessert bars, cornbread and crumb cakes, along with gluten-free mixes, and the release placed the Krusteaz name at the head of all of them.

For a design guide, Krusteaz shows how a coined word — two plain kitchen words run together and respelled — can carry a brand from a single home-made product to a whole range, and in the end give its name to the company itself. Compare it with Bisquick, another American baking mix named for what it promised the cook, and Hungry Jack, a pancake-mix and syrup brand that has passed between several owners. For this guide we use crust red and oven brown on batter gold with a soft serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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