Flavourings sold door to door, then spices.

McCormick started small and in Baltimore. The company says that in 1889 its founder, Willoughby M. McCormick, and three young workers began the business in a cellar and sold their flavours and extracts door to door. English Wikipedia, citing the company’s history, describes the start as one room and a cellar, and lists the first products as root beer, flavouring extracts, fruit syrups and juices. The move into the trade that now defines the name came later: Wikipedia says that seven years after the founding McCormick bought the F.G. Emmett Spice Company and entered the spice business.

The firm took a formal shape early in the new century. Wikipedia, citing a company history published by FundingUniverse, says Willoughby McCormick and his brother Roberdeau incorporated the company in Maine in 1903, and that it was reincorporated in Maryland in 1915. Between those dates came the setback the company still tells: the Great Baltimore Fire of February 1904, which Wikipedia says destroyed most of the company’s assets and records. The company rebuilt a five-storey building on the same site within ten months.

Baltimore stayed at the centre of the story. The company’s own timeline marks 1921 as the year of what it calls the “New House of McCormick”, a landmark building in Baltimore that it says held a printing plant, an analytical laboratory, a mechanic shop, an assembly hall and a cafeteria. Wikipedia illustrates its article with a photograph of the downtown headquarters in 1951, captioned with the company’s red and white spice tins and bottles displayed on the roof.

The second generation took over in 1932. Willoughby’s nephew Charles P. McCormick, who Wikipedia says began working for the company in the summer of 1912 and joined the board in 1925, was elected president and chairman of the board that year. The company’s timeline says that in 1933, in the middle of the Depression, it raised wages, cut hours, began profit sharing and launched a formal Multiple Management Board, and that “C.P.” started a tradition of giving out turkeys at Thanksgiving.

A national name built by acquisition.

McCormick became a coast-to-coast brand by buying one. Wikipedia says the company acquired A. Schilling & Company, a San Francisco coffee, spice and extract house, in 1947, which let McCormick distribute across the United States. The western products kept the Schilling name for decades: Wikipedia says McCormick used it for its Western division until the 1990s, that the last containers marked Schilling were produced in 2002, and that since then the company’s products have been sold under the McCormick name nationwide.

The company has owned a growing family of other names alongside its own. Wikipedia records that it acquired the British company Paterson Jenks and the Schwartz spice line in 1984, purchased an interest in the Old Bay seasoning brand in 1990, bought Ducros of France in 2000 and Zatarain’s of Louisiana in 2003, and added Lawry’s in 2008. In 2017 it bought Reckitt Benckiser’s food division, bringing French’s and Frank’s RedHot into the group; the Baltimore Business Journal reported the deal closed in August 2017. In November 2020 McCormick agreed to buy Cholula.

The headquarters left the city in stages. Wikipedia says McCormick moved its manufacturing and corporate offices from Baltimore’s Inner Harbor to Hunt Valley, Maryland, in 1970, moved its corporate offices to Sparks, Maryland, in 1991, and returned to Hunt Valley with a new global headquarters that, The Baltimore Sun reported, held its grand opening on 2 October 2018. McCormick & Company is a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange and has owned the McCormick name since 1889.

A larger change was announced in 2026. On 31 March 2026 Unilever and McCormick said they had entered into an agreement to combine Unilever’s foods business with McCormick; Unilever’s announcement said the combined business would house McCormick, Knorr and Hellmann’s among its brands.

Design and documentation.

American baking brands have long been sold as much through their packaging as through what sits inside it. Flour came home in printed sacks that carried a mill’s name, an emblem and sometimes a slogan, so the bag itself did the work of a sign. Leavening, cornstarch and spices travelled in tins, cans and small paper boxes, each with a label meant to be read from across a grocery shelf.

Many of these brands chose to give the product a face. Painted portraits, cartoon figures and invented home cooks stood in for the company and spoke to the person doing the baking. Recipe booklets and recipes printed on the side of a box gave a single ingredient a list of uses, and they let a brand speak at length in a way a small label could not.

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

A spice rack that doubled as a sign.

The colours are the most visible part of the identity, and the company once put them on its building. The 1951 photograph used by Wikipedia shows the downtown Baltimore headquarters with the company’s red and white spice tins and bottles displayed on its roof.

The packaging itself has been used as a message. In 2007, Wikipedia says, citing USA Weekend of 28 September that year, McCormick ran an advertising campaign that encouraged people to throw out old spices by pointing out that any of its packs listing the address “Baltimore, MD 21202” were more than fifteen years old. The campaign turned a line of small print on the label into a way of dating the jar.

The name has also been simplified over time. The retirement of the Schilling label in the West, completed with the last Schilling-marked containers in 2002, left a single McCormick name on spice packs across the United States, while the company kept other names, such as Schwartz in Britain and Ducros in France, for its businesses abroad. The company’s current corporate site presents that history through a short illustrated timeline, from the cellar of 1889 and the 1921 Baltimore building to the Schilling purchase of 1947 and its 130th anniversary in 2019.

The founding story remains the brand’s fixed point. The company tells it in the same terms each time — Willoughby M. McCormick, three young workers, a Baltimore cellar and flavours sold door to door — and Wikipedia’s account of the 1904 fire and the rebuilding within ten months adds a second chapter that ties the name to the city where it began.

For a design guide, McCormick shows how a family name and a red-and-white spice pack can carry a company from a Baltimore cellar to a group of brands sold far beyond Maryland. Compare it with Schwartz, its British spice line, and French’s, another name in the McCormick group. For this guide we use spice red and paprika dark on tin white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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