A TVA engineer, a war-time job on rations and a wrong turn on the way to Jackson.

Pictsweet is an American brand of frozen vegetables made by The Pictsweet Company of Bells, Tennessee, a small town in Crockett County in the west of the state. The business is tied to one family, the Tankersleys. The Knoxville News Sentinel reported on 3 May 2016 that the brand was founded in 1945 in West Tennessee by James Odell “Tank” Tankersley, and that the idea behind it took shape earlier, in Knoxville, where he had worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

The newspaper told the story through the founder’s daughter, Nancy Eubanks. She said her father had grown up in Marshall County, south of Nashville, and came to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville in 1930 to study engineering. Knoxville city directories cited by the paper show him working through the 1930s and early 1940s at the TVA in a series of roles, among them junior civil engineer, draftsman, junior mechanical engineer and employee of the research department. During the Second World War, his daughter said, the TVA assigned him to work on preserved food for Army rations, and that was where his interest in food processing began.

After the war, the News Sentinel reported, Tankersley heard that the country around West Tennessee was good for growing strawberries and, around 1945, began looking there for an agricultural business. On one trip, trying to reach a hotel in Jackson, he came upon an empty Works Progress Administration building in Bells that he had not noticed before. It became his first processing plant. His daughter recalled that he was lost when he found it.

The early years were a period of trial and error. Eubanks told the paper her father even tried freezing tomatoes, and that the business eventually concentrated on Southern vegetables, naming black-eyed peas, lima beans and greens. She also recalled an early job of her own at the plant, packing strawberries into small cans for freezing. The company, the News Sentinel said, was initially called Winter Garden, and it became a major employer in Bells. Members of the family worked in it from the start, and several of the founder’s children and grandchildren were still working for the company when the paper spoke to Eubanks in 2016.

Winter Garden, United Foods, Stokely-Van Camp and a family company again.

For two decades Winter Garden was part of a larger public company. The International Directory of Company Histories, in its entry on United Foods, Inc., says the parent began in 1956 as United Industries Company, a grain-storage business based in Houston, Texas, which took the name United Foods in 1961 and listed its shares on the American Stock Exchange. Through the 1960s it bought frozen food processors across the country. In November 1971, the directory says, it acquired Winter Garden Freezer Co. of Tennessee, and afterwards moved its headquarters from Houston to Memphis; before the end of the decade it moved again, to Bells.

The family took charge of the whole group in March 1978. The directory says a new management team was put in place that month, led by J. O. Tankersley as chairman and chief executive and James I. Tankersley as president and chief operating officer. At that time, according to the same entry, United Foods sold its vegetables under the regional brand names Dulany, Prime Froz-n and Winter Garden, and packed private-label vegetables for grocery chains.

The Pictsweet name came into national use in the 1980s. In October 1982, the directory says, United Foods bought the frozen vegetable division of Stokely-Van Camp, with plants in Fairmont, Minnesota, and Albany, Oregon, and as a result began selling frozen vegetables throughout the United States under the Pictsweet and Stokely brands. By the late 1980s its brands had been consolidated into Pictsweet as the national label, with Dulany in the East, Tennessee in the Midwest and South, and Winter Garden in the Southeast. In 1988 it launched Pictsweet Express, a line of vegetables for the microwave.

Manufacturing moved several times. The directory says that in 1991 the company closed its plants at Modesto and Salinas in California and consolidated West Coast processing at a leased facility in Santa Maria, which it later bought; the Center for Land Use Interpretation, in an undated entry, says the Santa Maria plant was built by Alpac in 1977 and bought by Pictsweet in 1991. After the Fairmont plant closed in December 1992, the directory lists processing and cold storage at Bells, Ogden in Utah and Santa Maria. The Center’s entry adds plants at Monte Alto, Texas, and Bridgeville, Delaware, and says the company also packs vegetables for retailers’ own labels.

The family remains in control. In 2016 the News Sentinel said the family of Jim Tankersley owned the company and that he was its president, and the law firm Bass, Berry & Sims, which acted for it, describes The Pictsweet Company as family-owned in its note on the purchase of Fresh Frozen Foods from Inventure Foods, a cash transaction that closed in March 2017.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sit in three corners of the freezer and the baby-food shelf: bagged frozen vegetables, pints and tubs of ice cream and gelato, and food for babies sold in jars and squeeze pouches. Each of those formats asks a lot of a small surface. A frozen bag is read through frost and at a glance from an open case; an ice-cream pint is turned in the hand, its lid seen from above; a jar or pouch is bought by a parent who wants to know quickly what is inside.

Names in these categories have often started with a family, a farm or a single shop and later passed to larger food companies, sometimes more than once. A label can therefore outlast several owners, and the place on the front of a pack is not always the place where the food is now grown, churned or packed.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, where its food is made and how its packs and logos have changed — and marks plainly what rests on the company’s own word.

From regional labels to one brand, built to compete on something other than price.

The Pictsweet identity grew out of a portfolio of regional names. The International Directory of Company Histories lists the brands United Foods carried in the early 1980s, after the Stokely-Van Camp purchase, as Dulany in the East, Tennessee and Everfresh in the Midwest and South, Prime Froz-n, Soup Ladle, Freezer Queen, Stokely under licence, Pictsweet and Winter Garden. The frozen entrée business, Freezer Queen, was sold in February 1986, and over the rest of the decade the list was cut down until Pictsweet stood as the national brand, with three regional names alongside it.

The reasoning behind that choice is recorded in the same entry. During the 1990s, it says, the company developed Pictsweet into a national brand in order to distinguish its products on a basis other than price. By 1991 Pictsweet and the microwave line Pictsweet Express were the company’s two dominant brands, according to the directory. It describes strong competition in the 1990s from the owners of the Birds Eye and Green Giant brands, as well as from regional American processors and privately owned Mexican processors.

The vegetables themselves remained the brand’s regional signature. The founder’s daughter, speaking to the Knoxville News Sentinel in 2016, said the business made its way by concentrating on the produce of the South, from black-eyed peas to lima beans and greens. Bells has remained the company’s home: the English Wikipedia entry for Bells records it as the headquarters of the Pictsweet Farms brand, and the Center for Land Use Interpretation lists distribution centres in nearby Brownsville and in Ogden.

The spelling varies in print. The News Sentinel wrote the name with a capital S in the middle, as PictSweet; the directory and the law-firm note use Pictsweet, and the law firm names the company The Pictsweet Company; Wikipedia’s entry for Bells refers to the PictSweet Farms headquarters. In the 2016 article, the founder’s daughter Julia Wells was described as having worked in marketing for the company, one of several family members the paper named among its staff.

For a design guide, Pictsweet shows how a family company can fold a cluster of regional labels into one national name while keeping its home town and its Southern crops at the centre of the story. Compare it with Birds Eye and Green Giant, the two frozen-vegetable brands the company competed with in the 1990s. For this guide we use field green, pea pod, cotton cream and Tennessee red with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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