A merger of bakeries, a Chicago lawyer and a cracker in a sealed box.

Nabisco is the American cookie and cracker company behind Oreo, Ritz and Chips Ahoy!, and today part of Mondelēz International. Its name is a contraction of National Biscuit Company, the business formed in 1898. The International Directory of Company Histories, in its 1993 entry on the company, says the National Biscuit Company resulted from a merger of the midwestern American Biscuit Company, the eastern New York Biscuit Company and the smaller United States Baking Company, and that the new firm was based in Chicago.

The same entry names Adolphus Green, a Chicago lawyer who had negotiated the American Biscuit Company merger, as the chief architect of the 1898 deal and the chairman of the new company. Green, it says, insisted that every one of its bakeries follow exact recipes and uniform standards of production, so that the company could sell products identified nationally with its own name. In its early years the business was usually called N.B.C., the directory says.

Green launched the company with an ordinary product: the soda cracker. According to the directory, he gave the National Biscuit Company’s cracker an octagonal shape and packed it in small cardboard boxes lined with the company’s patented “In-er-Seal” waxed paper, at a time when crackers were sold loose from barrels or large crates. The name came from Philadelphia. Green commissioned the advertising agency N.W. Ayer & Son, which suggested Uneeda Biscuit, the directory says, and the agency promoted it with pictures of a rosy-cheeked boy in a raincoat and galoshes holding a box, to draw attention to a package meant to keep out the damp. Newspapers, billboards and posters asked, “Do you know Uneeda Biscuit?”

Some of that advertising outlasted the cracker barrels. Lost Landmarks, a local-history site in Troy, New York, documents painted Uneeda signs on the city’s buildings in photographs dated 2004 and 2007, and describes the later Uneeda Biscuit Boy in a yellow rain slicker, carrying a box of biscuits in a paper bag.

From N.B.C. to Nabisco Brands, RJR Nabisco, Kraft and Mondelēz.

The product line grew quickly. The directory dates Barnum’s Animal Crackers, sold in a box made to look like a circus cage, to 1902, and Lorna Doone and Oreo to 1912; Fig Newtons and Premium Saltines came from the bakeries that had formed the company. Headquarters moved from Chicago to New York in 1906. In 1928 the company bought the Shredded Wheat Company, and in 1934 it launched Ritz Crackers, according to the directory.

The company’s name caught up with its nickname in stages. The directory says that in 1941 the letters “N.B.C.” in the official trademark were replaced by the word “Nabisco”, already a popular nickname, partly to reduce confusion with the recently established National Broadcasting Company. Nabisco became the official corporate name in 1971. By then the company had opened a bakery and research centre at Fair Lawn, New Jersey, in 1958, and in 1975 it moved its headquarters to East Hanover, New Jersey.

A series of mergers followed. In 1981 Nabisco merged with Standard Brands, itself formed in 1929 from Fleischmann, Chase & Sanborn and Royal Baking Powder, to create Nabisco Brands. In 1985, the directory says, Nabisco Brands was bought by R. J. Reynolds in a friendly takeover, and the combined company took the name RJR Nabisco. In 1988 the investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts won control of RJR Nabisco in a leveraged buyout, the directory records.

The cookie business later joined Kraft. Dairy Industries International reported on 13 December 2000 that the US Federal Trade Commission had approved the takeover of Nabisco by Kraft Foods, then the North American food business of Philip Morris, and that Nabisco’s North American businesses would be integrated with Kraft Foods in Illinois. “This is a landmark event,” Betsy Holden, president and chief executive of Kraft Foods North America, said in remarks carried in the report.

The present owner dates from 2012. The Associated Press, in a report carried by the Christian Science Monitor on 3 October 2012, said Kraft Foods had decided that March to spin off its global snack business as Mondelēz International, home to Oreo, Cadbury and Nabisco, while the North American grocery business kept the Kraft name. Mondelēz has owned Nabisco since that split; English Wikipedia describes Nabisco as a subsidiary of Illinois-based Mondelēz, headquartered in East Hanover. In Canada, English Wikipedia says, Nabisco cookie and cracker products are branded Christie.

Design and documentation.

A cookie or cracker is usually met first as a package rather than as a biscuit: a printed paperboard box, a sleeve inside it, a plastic tray that holds rows of cookies upright, or, for gifts and holidays, a decorated metal tin. The package does most of the brand’s visual work on a shop shelf, where a name, a colour field and a photograph of the product have to be read from a distance and recognised again on the next visit.

Because a cookie or cracker name can pass between bakeries and food groups over the decades, the box and the logo often outlast the company that first printed them, while the recipe, the bakery and the owner change behind them. That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where the product is actually baked and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself, covering its founding story, its owners over time, where its cookies or crackers are made and how its packaging has changed, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A printer’s mark from a catalogue, a nickname that became a name, and a family of boxes.

Nabisco’s mark is older than its name. The International Directory of Company Histories says all of the National Biscuit Company’s merchandise was marked with its distinctive emblem: an oval topped by a cross with two bars. Green, it says, found the symbol in a catalogue of medieval Italian printers’ marks, where it was said to represent the triumph of good over evil. English Wikipedia describes the same device as an “orb and cross” derived from a medieval Venetian printer’s mark, and says it is imprinted on Oreo cookies as well as on Nabisco boxes and literature.

The emblem has been redrawn since. English Wikipedia credits the current update of the trademark to the American typographer and graphic designer Gerard Huerta, and Huerta’s own website lists Nabisco among the companies for which he has designed logos, alongside names such as HBO and Pepsi. Neither source gives a date for that work.

The word was a product name before it was a company name. The directory says “Nabisco” was a popular nickname by the time it replaced “N.B.C.” in the trademark in 1941, and English Wikipedia dates the use of Nabisco as the name of a cracker to 1901.

The Nabisco name also sits alongside product brands with guides of their own. Chips Ahoy! is one; Nilla Wafers, English Wikipedia says, were sold as Nabisco Vanilla Wafers until the name was shortened in 1967. The directory lists Triscuit among the Nabisco Brands lines offered in low-salt versions in the 1980s, and English Wikipedia lists Wheat Thins among Nabisco products.

For a design guide, Nabisco shows how an emblem taken from a printers’ catalogue can sit above a whole family of cookie and cracker brands that keep their own names and packs. Compare it with Oreo, which carries the emblem on the cookie itself, and with Keebler, another American cookie and cracker name. For this guide we use biscuit red, wax-paper cream and ledger navy with a bookish serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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