Three partners from one Sicilian village, a street name and a mill town.

Prince is an American brand of dried pasta, sold today under the Winland Foods umbrella. Its name is an address. The brand’s own history says the business was born in 1912, when three immigrants from the same village in Sicily started a small spaghetti company in the North End of Boston, with a storefront at 92 Prince Street. The same history divides the work between them: Gaetano LaMarca was the administrator, Giuseppe Seminara the salesman and Michele Cantella the pasta maker. The Boston Globe, writing about the brand in September 2013, also gave 1912 and 92 Prince St. as the starting point, and described the founders as three immigrants from one Sicilian village.

The shop did not stay small for long. The Boston Globe reported that five years after the founding the company put up a seven-storey building on Commercial Street, where flour was delivered directly by train. Mass Moments, the Massachusetts history almanac published by Mass Humanities, dates that building to 1917 and says a railroad track entered it at the back, bringing semolina flour straight to the plant. At the turn of the twentieth century, the almanac notes, the North End was becoming Boston’s Little Italy, and most of the neighbourhood’s Italian immigrants worked in its markets, bakeries and shops or as fishermen.

The company outgrew the waterfront too. The Boston Globe, Mass Moments and Yankee magazine’s website NewEngland.com all date the move to a full-scale plant in Lowell, Massachusetts, to 1939. Lowell, a mill city north-west of Boston, became the brand’s working home. Mass Moments records that a sign at the city line read “Welcome to Spaghettiville”, and observes that although the brand is usually linked with the North End, Prince was based in Lowell for most of its existence.

A new owner arrived soon after the move. Mass Moments says that another Sicilian immigrant, Giuseppe Pellegrino, came to Massachusetts looking to buy a pasta factory, was so taken with the new Lowell plant that he lodged in a room inside it while working as an assistant to the founders, and within a year had raised the money to buy the business. The Boston Globe says the founders sold their controlling interest in 1941, and the business continued under Pellegrino. The brand’s own history agrees on 1941, saying Pellegrino joined the company that year and soon bought a controlling interest.

The Pellegrino years, Borden, New World Pasta, TreeHouse and Winland.

The Pellegrino family held the company for more than four decades. The brand’s history says Prince remained in the family’s hands until 1987, and The Boston Globe and NewEngland.com both reported that Pellegrino sold the business that year. By the following decade it belonged to Borden. Mass Moments records that on 16 July 1997 Borden announced a tentative deal to save the Lowell factory. Employees and investors had tried to buy the plant, the almanac says, but Borden was willing to sell the building and not the Prince name, and the deal fell through. Senator Edward Kennedy called it “a sad day in Spaghettiville”. The Boston Globe later summarised the episode in one line: the factory closed ten years after the 1987 sale, despite a bid by the workers to buy it.

Borden’s pasta brands then changed hands as a group. FoodNavigator reported on 1 August 2001 that New World Pasta had acquired the remaining pasta businesses of the Borden Pasta Group from Borden Foods Corp. The purchase covered Prince, Creamette and other American pasta brands, along with Borden’s pasta operations in Canada and Italy. The Boston Globe confirmed in 2013 that New World Pasta, then headquartered in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, had bought Prince in 2001.

New World Pasta itself was bought from overseas. AFX News, in a report carried by Forbes on 7 June 2006, said the Spanish group Ebro Puleva, later Ebro Foods, had agreed to acquire New World Pasta. Ebro held the brand through its Houston-based subsidiary Riviana Foods until 2020. On 11 December 2020, TreeHouse Foods announced in a press release that it had completed the acquisition of the majority of Ebro’s Riviana Foods U.S. branded pasta business. The brands listed included Prince, Creamette, San Giorgio, Skinner and No Yolks, together with a manufacturing plant in St. Louis.

TreeHouse did not keep the pasta business long. In a press release dated 3 October 2022, TreeHouse said it had completed the sale of a significant portion of its Meal Preparation business to the investment firm Investindustrial, and that the divested business had been renamed Winland Foods, Inc. The Prince website now describes the brand as part of the Winland Foods family of brands. Winland has owned Prince since that 2022 sale.

The centenary was marked under New World Pasta. The Boston Globe reported in September 2013 that the brand was celebrating its 100th anniversary with local events in Boston, a year after the milestone itself, because several of the company’s brands were reaching their hundredth years close together. Mayor Thomas M. Menino was expected to declare that Wednesday Prince Spaghetti Day at a North End event, and a Prince food truck served pasta in the city every Wednesday that September.

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.

A radio line from the 1950s, a 1969 television spot and a 2013 remake.

The brand’s enduring asset is a sentence. Mass Moments says Pellegrino had a knack for publicity and at first advertised mostly in Italian-language newspapers, because spaghetti and macaroni were then considered ethnic foods. In the early 1950s he decided to introduce non-Italians to pasta and hired a Boston advertising firm to make a radio commercial. The result was the slogan “In the North End of Boston, Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day.” The Boston Globe credits Pellegrino with penning the line about a decade after he took over the company.

The day was chosen, not observed. Mass Moments quotes Joseph Pellegrino Jr., the owner’s son, telling a Globe reporter that the line was written to get people who did not already eat much pasta to eat more of it. The almanac explains the reasoning: Catholic families ate fish on Friday, Monday was traditionally wash day, and so the advertising team settled on a day in the middle of the week. “It’s too late to change it now,” the son said. “It’s part of the national consciousness.”

Television gave the slogan a face in 1969. NewEngland.com, in an article updated in April 2022, describes the spot: a woman leans out of the window of a North End apartment and calls “Anthony! Anthony!”, and the boy races through the narrow streets of the Italian neighbourhood while his family prepares the weekly spaghetti dinner. The narrator explains that most days Anthony takes his time going home, but not on Wednesday. The boy was Anthony Martignetti, aged twelve, who Mass Moments says was approached by a camera crew on a North End street corner not far from his family’s home. NewEngland.com names Mary Fiumara, also a local, as the woman at the window, and says the commercial ran for 13 years. Later advertising carried the theme forward with the line “The Spaghetti Worth Running Home For”.

The spot was remade for the centenary. The Boston Globe reported on 3 September 2013 that New World Pasta had re-created the 1969 commercial with new twists: a mother still calls from a window while a boy runs through today’s North End, past a gelato cart near the Paul Revere statue, along Hanover Street and round the corner on Thatcher Street. Black-and-white footage of the original Anthony is set into colour scenes, and a grown-up Anthony, played by a different actor, sits down to eat with his own family. New World Pasta’s marketing director told the paper the aim was to pay homage to the original and modernise it for today’s consumers.

Place runs through the brand’s identity. The company name is the street of its original shop, the slogan names a neighbourhood and a day of the week, and the 1969 spot and its 2013 remake were both filmed in the streets of the North End. Mass Moments notes that to television viewers the company was forever associated with Boston’s Little Italy, even though it was making its pasta in Lowell.

For a design guide, Prince shows how an address and a weekday can carry a brand through a long run of owners, with a short scene of a boy running home doing the work of a mascot. Compare it with Creamette and San Giorgio, regional pasta brands that travelled the same route through New World Pasta, Riviana, TreeHouse and Winland. For this guide we use Prince Street red, semolina gold, window-sill cream and shutter green with a heavy slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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