A margarine from Kraft, a radio sponsorship and a cookbook.

Parkay is an American brand of margarine and buttery spreads. It began as a Kraft product. The Pitch, the Kansas City weekly, described in October 2009 a spiral-bound Parkay Margarine Cookbook from 1980, and said the book opened with a history of margarine and the story of how Kraft created Parkay, which it introduced in 1937. English Wikipedia gives the same year for the launch.

The corporate name behind the brand changed several times while it stayed with Kraft. English Wikipedia says Parkay was made and sold under the Kraft brand name by National Dairy Products Corporation from 1937 to 1969, then by Kraftco Corporation from 1969 to 1976, Kraft, Inc. from 1976 to 1990 and Kraft General Foods from 1990 to 1995. It then lists Nabisco Brands as the owner from 1995 until the sale to ConAgra.

Radio carried the name early. English Wikipedia says that in the 1940s and 1950s Parkay was the long-time sponsor of the radio comedy The Great Gildersleeve. Wikipedia also illustrates its article with a Parkay advertisement from 1942 carrying the line “Better get some more Parkay!”

The Pitch tied the cookbook to a period when, it wrote, Kraft was having great success marketing Parkay with television commercials, naming two that featured actors who would later become sitcom stars, Tracey Gold and Vic Tayback; in the Tayback spot he holds a late-night conversation with the talking tub. The cookbook itself, the paper said, was “chock full” of recipes made with Parkay.

The product range has moved with the times. English Wikipedia says Parkay is sold in spreadable, sprayable and squeezable forms. A ConAgra announcement carried by Just Food on 18 October 2001 introduced Parkay Fun Squeeze, a squeezable buttery-flavoured spread in colours the company called “Electric Blue” and “Shocking Pink”, aimed at children and due in stores nationwide that November. The same release described Parkay as a brand of ConAgra Dairy Foods.

Kraft, Nabisco and, from 1998, ConAgra.

Parkay changed hands in 1998, when Nabisco sold its margarine business. Food Online reported on 17 August 1998 that ConAgra, Inc. had completed the acquisition of the Egg Beaters and tablespreads businesses from Nabisco, Inc. The margarine brands in the deal, the report said, included Parkay, Blue Bonnet, Fleischmann’s, Touch of Butter, Chiffon and Move Over Butter. ConAgra was headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, at the time, the report added. English Wikipedia dates ConAgra’s ownership of Parkay from 1999.

ConAgra has owned Parkay since that 1998 purchase. Its stewardship shows up in the trade press of the following decade. The 2001 Fun Squeeze release placed the brand in the ConAgra Dairy Foods division. In August 2002 Hank Stuever of The Washington Post, in a column reprinted by The Christian Science Monitor on 14 August 2002, described ConAgra Foods as Parkay’s current owner, and quoted Dave Bachtel, a brand manager in ConAgra’s dairy-foods division, on the history of the campaign. Bachtel told him that because Parkay had changed owners since 1973, he was not clear which advertising people had come up with the talking tub.

Stuever went on to answer that question himself. He wrote that the idea came, in part, from an advertising man named Dale Landsman at the agency Needham, Harper & Steers, which later became DDB Worldwide, and that, according to a Chicago Tribune report, Landsman pitched the talking-tub concept to Parkay. For the 2002 revival, Stuever reported, ConAgra brought in the agency Grey Worldwide to reposition the tub.

MediaPost reported on 24 November 2008 that Parkay was “the ConAgra brand” behind a new television campaign, and quoted ConAgra’s spokesman Jeff Mochal and its vice-president and general manager Karl Sears on the product. That campaign promoted a new formulation of the spread that includes milk; MediaPost said ConAgra’s marketing put the emphasis on milk as an ingredient.

Design and documentation.

Butter spreads and packaged cheese share a shelf and a set of design problems. A spread is usually sold in a plastic tub with a printed lid, or as wrapped sticks in a small carton; cheese is sold in vacuum-sealed blocks, in slices, in wedges wrapped in foil, or in a round box that holds several portions. In each case the pack is small, handled every day and stored in a refrigerator, so the brand has to read clearly from the front of a lid, the end of a carton or the face of a block.

That is why so much of the identity in this category sits in a few repeated elements: a name in a set type style, a colour that runs across the whole range, and sometimes a drawn character or symbol that customers can find among many similar packs. Behind those elements, the companies themselves may have changed owners, merged or moved production more than once.

Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now, where its products are made and how its packs and advertising have changed, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A one-word argument, a line that names the brand and a run of guest stars.

The brand’s defining device is a container that answers back. Hank Stuever, writing in August 2002, dated the start of the campaign to 1973, the year of the Watergate hearings, and described its formula: a tub of Parkay murmurs “Butter”, the people in the kitchen insist it is “Parkay”, they taste it, and the tub has the last word, announcing “Parkay!” Stuever noted that the earliest version was so low-tech that the actors had to open the tub so it could say its lines. English Wikipedia describes the tub in the early commercials as mechanically animated and gives the announcer’s tagline as “Parkay Margarine from Kraft — the flavor says…”, with the tub finishing the line: “butter”.

The line became the brand’s written promise. MediaPost reported in November 2008 that Parkay was still playing off its longtime message, “The label says Parkay, the flavor says butter.” The guest list grew over the years. MediaPost listed campaigns that put the tub opposite actors playing Laurel and Hardy in 1982, the American football player Deacon Jones in 1983, William Daniels in 1990–91, Crystal Bernard in 1997 and Al Franken in 1999. English Wikipedia adds a 1976 commercial with Todd Bridges and similar spots with Vic Tayback and Mel Stewart, and says the PBS children’s series The Electric Company spoofed the campaign, with cast member Skip Hinnant as the voice of the food. Wikipedia also says the slogan is referenced in Gang Starr’s 1993 single “DWYCK”.

Under ConAgra the tub was revived more than once. Stuever reported in 2002 that the tub had returned after a hiatus of almost three years, that it now talked mainly about itself, and that a television spot showed it waiting in a canvas director’s chair while the set was readied for its scene. The same campaign put tubs fitted with motion-activated chips into stores; MediaPost later described the 2002 effort as focused on in-store promotions, with the tub’s voice calling out to shoppers passing the dairy case. Bachtel told Stuever that the campaign “doesn’t change a whole lot” over the years and that such things become “very much a part of Americana.”

MediaPost said the 2008 commercial, a 15-second spot, began airing on national daytime and cable television and online, marking the anniversary of the tub’s 1973 television debut. In it a dairy farmer is startled by an unusual moo from the Parkay Talking Tub in one of the stalls of his barn. The tub tells him the new Parkay is “better”; the farmer replies, “You mean ‘butter’,” and the tub answers, “Parkay.” Karl Sears of ConAgra called the tub “the perfect ambassador” for the reformulated spread.

For a design guide, Parkay shows how a brand can build an identity on a single, repeatable exchange: one object, two words and a punchline that returns to the brand name every time. Compare it with Blue Bonnet, a margarine that came to ConAgra in the same 1998 deal, and Velveeta, a Kraft brand from the same dairy aisle. For this guide we use spread yellow, toast brown, dairy cream and kitchen green with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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