A Tennessee couple, a family restaurant and a home bakery that outgrew the kitchen.

Mrs Baird’s is a Texas bread brand that began in a family kitchen in Fort Worth and has belonged since the late 1990s to Grupo Bimbo, the Mexican baker, through its American arm, Bimbo Bakeries USA. Its founder was Ninia “Ninnie” Baird. An online exhibit from the TCU Library, drawn from the Ninnie L. Baird Mrs. Baird’s Bakeries Papers in the university’s Special Collections, says she married William Allen Baird in 1886 and that the couple ran a restaurant and bakery business in Trenton, Tennessee, before moving to Fort Worth in 1901 in search of new opportunities.

In Fort Worth, Texas Co-op Power reported in a June 2008 history column by Judy Alter, William sold popcorn from a steam popcorn machine and later bought and ran restaurants, with Ninnie supplying the bread and pastries. When William was diagnosed with diabetes and could no longer run the restaurants, the magazine wrote, Ninnie began selling fresh bread from her home to support the family. Both Texas Co-op Power and the TCU exhibit date the start of the bread business to 1908; the TCU exhibit says the Bairds sold their restaurant that year and founded Mrs. Baird’s Bread. William Baird died in 1911, according to both, and the business carried on as a family enterprise under Ninnie.

The early operation was small and done by hand. Texas Co-op Power says Ninnie baked on a wood stove in her kitchen, her sons helped with the baking and the deliveries, and her daughters looked after the younger children and the house. In 1915, the magazine wrote, the family bought a commercial oven from Fort Worth’s Metropolitan Hotel, paying partly in credit for bread, and set it up in a wooden building in the backyard, so the baking moved out of the home kitchen. The TCU exhibit describes dough being mixed in a long wooden trough, left to rise, punched down and left to rise again before it was shaped into loaves, and an oven heated by a wood fire that was raked out before the bread went in.

Deliveries began on foot and by bicycle. Texas Co-op Power says the boys later turned the family buggy into a sales wagon, and the TCU exhibit names son Hoyt as its driver from 1917, often with his mother riding along to serve regular customers and find new ones. In 1917, the magazine wrote, the family bought a car, converted it into a delivery truck and painted it with the slogan “Eat More Mrs Baird’s Bread”.

Wholesale, a string of Texas bakeries, three generations of Bairds and a sale to Bimbo.

The move into wholesale came quickly. Texas Co-op Power says Mrs Baird’s began supplying wholesale accounts, chiefly a grocery chain, and gave up retail in 1918 to concentrate on them. The TCU exhibit says that by 1919 the family had outgrown the small kitchen and built a brick bakery at Sixth Avenue and Terrell Street in Fort Worth, fitted with a gas-fired oven and a bread wrapping machine, and that the building was enlarged again and again through 1928.

Growth across Texas followed under Ninnie’s sons. Texas Co-op Power and the company history in Gale’s International Directory of Company Histories both date a second bakery, in Dallas, to 1928; the TCU exhibit gives 1929 and says son Roland led it. In 1938, new bakeries opened in Fort Worth and Houston, with Dewey Baird in charge in Houston and Hoyt in Fort Worth, according to the TCU exhibit. Texas Co-op Power says the new Fort Worth bakery had plate glass windows through which passers-by could watch the bread being hand-twisted, a method the TCU exhibit dates to 1936 and describes as intertwining two pieces of dough into one loaf. Abilene followed in 1949, and bakeries in Lubbock, Victoria, Austin and Waco were bought later, the TCU exhibit says; it adds that the company began selling bread in New Mexico in the early 1980s.

Ninnie Baird stayed at the head of the company. Texas Co-op Power wrote that in the 1950s she remained chairwoman of the board, kept an office at the Fort Worth plant, and that her sons had to convince her each time they wanted to open a new plant. She died in 1961, the magazine reported. The Gale history says her grandson Vernon Baird became president in 1969 and another grandson, Allen Baird, took charge in 1978, and that in May 1995 the company appointed Larry Wheeler, formerly of Pillsbury, as president and chief executive, a post until then held by members of the family.

The sale came at the end of the decade. The Gale history says Grupo Industrial Bimbo agreed to buy Mrs Baird’s in March 1998 and that the agreement was signed that May. Bimbo’s own website says it purchased the Mrs Baird’s Bakeries company in Texas in 1998, and English Wikipedia’s Grupo Bimbo article dates both the purchase and the birth of Bimbo Bakeries USA to that year. The TCU exhibit gives 1999 for the family’s sale. According to the Gale history, Bimbo then moved its US headquarters from Carrollton to the Mrs Baird’s base in Fort Worth and placed the bakery within Bimbo Bakeries USA, while family members kept senior roles and seats on the board.

Bimbo says it has owned Mrs Baird’s since 1998. Texas Co-op Power described the company in 2008 as a division of Bimbo Bakeries USA, a subsidiary of Grupo Industrial Bimbo, and the brand’s website today carries a Bimbo Bakeries USA copyright. That puts Mrs Baird’s in the same American group as Entenmann’s. The family’s name continues in philanthropy through the Ninnie L. Baird Foundation, which the magazine and the TCU exhibit both mention.

Design and documentation.

Packaged bread and Asian-style grocery goods sit side by side in many American supermarkets, yet they reach shoppers through very different kinds of packaging. A sliced loaf usually travels in a soft, printed bag gathered at the neck and closed with a twist tie or a small plastic tag, so the bag itself has to carry the name, the variety and the colour cues that help a shopper pick one loaf from a long shelf of similar ones.

Asian-style sauces, by contrast, are often sold in glass or plastic bottles with a wrap-around or front label, while dried and fresh noodles come in flat bags, trays or boxes with a window or a photograph of the cooked dish. In both cases the label has to work at arm’s length, in an aisle where many similar products compete for attention.

Each guide in this group sets out what independent sources record about a brand — who started it, who has owned it and where its products are made — separately from what the company says about itself, and treats the palette shown here as an unofficial interpretation rather than an official specification.

Punctuation, painted slogans and a founder kept in view.

Much of the Mrs Baird’s identity is typographic and verbal rather than pictorial. Texas Co-op Power made a point of the name’s punctuation in its 2008 column: there is never a period after “Mrs” in the company name, the magazine noted. The brand’s current website uses that form, “Mrs Baird’s”, in its title, and pairs it with the line “Texas born. Texas bread.”, which it marks as a registered trademark.

The slogans have shifted across the decades. The converted delivery car of 1917 carried “Eat More Mrs Baird’s Bread”, painted on its side, according to both Texas Co-op Power and the TCU exhibit. Texas Co-op Power gives “Quality, Freshness, Service” as the company slogan around the Second World War, and the Gale history quotes the company’s pride in “Quality, Freshness, and Service” in the 1990s.

Promotion reached well beyond the bread bag. The TCU exhibit shows ration book holders handed out during the Second World War, a well-worn book cover that promoted bread and jam as an after-school snack, and a necktie promotion carrying the words “Our Best for You”, whose design Vernon Baird reviewed with the company’s vice president of advertising, Morris Walker. The exhibit also includes a print by the artist Bud Biggs that introduced the brand’s move into New Mexico in 1981. The Gale history says the company’s television and print advertising featured members of the Baird family, building on its standing as a family-run Texas bakery.

The founder’s kitchen became a display piece. The TCU exhibit records a replica of Ninnie Baird’s original kitchen built at the Fort Worth plant on South Freeway, and a replica horse-and-buggy delivery wagon, made in the 1970s, that often appeared in grocery stores selling Mrs Baird’s products. The current website keeps her in view with a section headed “From Ninnie’s Kitchen”.

The hand-twisted loaf belongs to the same story. Texas Co-op Power tied it to the plate glass windows of the 1938 Fort Worth bakery, where the twisting could be watched from the street, and the Gale history says bakers were still twisting two long pieces of dough into each loaf by hand in the 1980s, after the plants had been modernised.

For a design guide, Mrs Baird’s shows how a founder’s name, written with its own punctuation habit, and a run of plain-spoken slogans can carry a regional bread brand through decades of family growth and a change of owner. Compare it with Bimbo, its owner since 1998, and Entenmann’s, a Brooklyn-born stablemate at Bimbo Bakeries USA. For this guide we use Texas blue, hearth red, crust tan, oven brown and flour white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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