Premium Mustard Mills, a chemist from Württemberg and a run of Chicago addresses.

Plochman’s is an American mustard brand from the Chicago area, made today by Plochman, Inc. in Manteno, Illinois. Its yellow mustard is sold in a plastic bottle shaped like a small barrel, and that bottle has carried the brand for most of its modern life. The name on the label belongs to a real family, but the business it describes is older than the family’s involvement.

The company traces its start to 1852, when Premium Mustard Mills was founded in Chicago. That date comes from the company’s own timeline, which the Kankakee Daily Journal reprinted in April 2022. The same timeline says the mills’ factory survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the three-day fire that destroyed a large part of the city.

The Plochman family arrived in the following decade. The company says Moritz Plochman, a trained chemist, emigrated to the United States from the Kingdom of Württemberg, in what is now southwestern Germany, and that two years later he bought Premium Mustard Mills and pledged to make only “first-class” mustards. The Chicago Tribune, in an obituary of his grandson published on 18 September 2007, said the family’s ownership dated to 1883, citing the company’s website, and that Moritz later changed the business’s name to Plochman’s Mustard.

Mustard was not the only thing Moritz made. According to the company timeline, between 1890 and 1901 he produced horseradish, chow-chow and a range of sauces at the mustard mills, and ran a separate business, Sterling Springs Bottling Works, that made root beer, sarsaparilla and other drinks. The timeline says he then moved the mustard company to a site near Lake Michigan and later to Clinton Street in Chicago to keep up with demand, especially for yellow mustard, before passing the business to his son Carl.

The firm moved again in the 1930s, the company says, to Cicero, a town west of Chicago. Its timeline adds that in 1933 a new kind of grocery store, the supermarket, began selling Plochman’s mustard. By then the brand was in its second generation of family management, with a third to follow.

Three generations of Plochmans, then a Swiss owner and a plant in Kankakee County.

The Chicago Tribune’s 2007 obituary of Frederic W. Plochman set out the family succession. It described him as a former co-owner of Plochman’s Mustard and said he and his brother Carl took over the company in the 1960s, as the third generation to run it. Fred, the paper said, had trained as an artist, with a degree from Northwestern University and a master of fine arts from the Art Institute of Chicago, and taught art for about a year before joining the family business.

The company’s timeline names a fourth generation. It says that after the Kosciusko brand of mustard joined the Plochman’s family of products in the late 1980s, Carl Plochman III, known as Terry, became chief executive and president. The company’s website still lists a Kosciusko spicy brown mustard among its products.

Family ownership ended in 2010. The timeline printed by the Daily Journal in April 2022 says that in 2010 HACO, a food manufacturer headquartered in Switzerland, acquired the brand, and the company’s website names the buyer as HACO, Inc., of Gümligen. HACO has owned Plochman’s since 2010.

The Swiss parent has a long history of its own. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, in an entry dated 16 October 2007, says Haco was founded in 1922 in Bern as a cooperative, at the instigation of the chemist Oscar Bally-Forcart, and first made pharmaceuticals. It became a joint-stock company in 1923 with its factory at Gümligen, in the municipality of Muri bei Bern, and has worked with the retailer Migros since 1929, supplying products that Migros sells under its own brand. The dictionary lists Haco’s food lines as coffee and tea extracts, malt drinks, bouillons, soups, sauces, seasonings and ready meals, and says it opened a plant in Malaysia in 2005 to serve export markets in Asia and North America.

The mustard is still made in Illinois. The Daily Journal reported on 9 April 2022 that Plochman’s had been based at its plant in Manteno, in Kankakee County, since 1997, and that the site produced salad dressings as well as mustard. The paper said the company’s products had recently reached Costco stores and shelves in Spain and Israel, and quoted the plant manager, Martin Faye, saying: “This is a mustard company.” The company says its mustards are made exclusively in the United States.

Design and documentation.

Dried pasta, mustard and salad dressing are pantry goods that sit side by side on a grocery shelf, and each category has settled into a familiar kind of pack. Dried pasta is often sold in a printed paperboard box or a clear bag, so the shape of the noodle and the name on the front have to work together. Mustard usually comes in a glass jar or a squeeze bottle, where a narrow label has to carry the name, the style and the colour of the condiment at a glance.

Salad dressing is most often sold in a tall bottle with a wraparound label, and the dressing itself can show through the glass or plastic. Across all three categories, the label tends to do much of the work that a logo does elsewhere: it names the product, marks the flavour or shape, and signals the brand behind it.

Each guide in this group looks at who started a brand, who owns it now and where its products are made, separating what independent sources record from what a company says about itself.

Plastic in 1957, a trademark in 1971, a clear barrel in 1995 and a new label in 2020.

The package is the brand. The Chicago Tribune reported in 2007 that Fred and Carl Plochman were part owners with their father in 1957, when the company began packing its mustard in yellow plastic bottles, and that the barrel shape of those bottles had defined the brand ever since.

The company describes the same moment as a new use for plastics, and dates the next step to 1971. Shortly after the new generation of Carl Jr. and Fred took charge, its timeline says, Plochman’s was awarded a trademark on the Squeeze Barrel bottle. The shape, in other words, became a protected part of the identity, alongside the name.

The barrel then changed colour for a new range. The company says that in 1995 it introduced a clear squeeze barrel for its specialty mustards, keeping the silhouette while letting the product show through.

The label has moved on more recently. The company’s timeline says Plochman’s introduced redesigned labels in 2020, presented as the same mustard with a new look and new flavours. In 2022, the company says, it began using TikTok and email newsletters to reach customers.

Design ran in the family in another way. The Tribune obituary said Fred Plochman, after retiring from the condiment company, founded Plocky’s Fine Snacks, named after his grandfather’s nickname, and that there he could use his artistic training directly: he designed the company’s bags and advertisements himself.

For a design guide, Plochman’s shows how a container can do the work of a logo: a squat barrel in mustard yellow is recognisable on a shelf or a ballpark counter before the name is read, and a clear version of the same shape can extend the range without losing it. Compare it with French’s, another American yellow mustard built on colour, and Gulden’s, a brown mustard from the same shelf. For this guide we use barrel yellow, seed brown, hot dog red and bun cream with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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