A clothing salesman in wartime St. Louis.

Reddi-wip is the work of Aaron S. Lapin, a businessman from St. Louis, Missouri, known as “Bunny” — lapin is French for rabbit, as The New York Times noted in its obituary of him in July 1999. Lapin had started out as a clothing salesman, the Times reported, and moved into the food business in the early 1940s.

His first food product was a wartime one. During the years of rationing he sold Sta-Whip, which the Times described as a substitute for whipping cream made mostly from light cream and vegetable fat. For bakers and other commercial customers who wanted to whip it, he also offered a refillable aerating gun he called the Fount-Wip.

The aerosol can turned that business into a brand. In 1946, the Times reported, the Crown Cork and Seal Company introduced a seamless, lined and lithographed aerosol canister, the Spra-tainer, and Lapin became one of its early customers. He filled the cans with whipped cream under the name Reddi-wip and at first sold it through milkmen in St. Louis; distribution soon spread across the United States and Canada.

Sources differ on the date. The Times obituary’s summary says Lapin created Reddi-wip in 1946, while English Wikipedia dates the product to 1948 and credits Lapin and Aaron Block with developing a valve suited to whipped cream, with fluting to shape the stream and a tilt-to-open action. Wikipedia also says Lapin was granted a patent for “dispensing valves for gas pressure containers.”

Success came quickly, the Times reported: in 1951 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called him “Bunny Lapin, Whipped Cream King.”

A red-and-white can and a valve business.

The can’s look was settled early. The New York Times wrote in 1999 that Reddi-wip had an “iconic red-and-white label, designed in 1954,” and that the product had made Lapin famous along with it. English Wikipedia says Reddi-wip reached national distribution in 1954, the same year.

Lapin’s company was as much about valves as about cream. The firm he founded, the Clayton Corporation, packed Reddi-wip and also made and sold its own valves, the Times reported. It put shaving cream into an aerosol can under the name Reddi-Shave, but Lapin chose not to market it so as not to compete with shaving-cream makers who might buy his valves.

The partnership did not last. In 1963, the Times reported, Lapin lost control of the company and his post as president, sold his interest in Reddi-wip and started another business, the Bunlap Corporation, which sold aerosol foods including Touch ’N Shake, a milkshake, and Touch ’N Spred, a cinnamon-flavoured spread. Those products did not take off, and Lapin later reacquired the Clayton Corporation and concentrated on valves; through its Convenience Products unit in St. Louis it went on to sell aerosol products such as Touch ’n Foam insulation. Lapin died in Los Angeles in July 1999, the Times reported.

Reddi-wip itself passed to a larger food company. English Wikipedia, citing a report in The Decatur Herald of 14 October 1969, says Hunt-Wesson acquired Reddi-wip, Inc. from Marcus Lipsky, Lapin’s brother-in-law; the encyclopedia’s text gives the year as 1968, while the newspaper report it cites is dated 1969. Wikipedia says the cans were packed in Chicago by Hunt-Wesson Foods and Beatrice Foods until 1982, when operations moved to Holland, Michigan.

American dairy, on the shelf.

American dairy brands sit in a crowded chiller cabinet, and their packaging has to be read at a glance. Butter comes in boxes of sticks and in tubs, sour cream and cottage cheese in round plastic tubs, cream cheese in foil-wrapped bricks and tubs, milk and cream in gable-top cartons and plastic jugs, and whipped toppings in aerosol cans.

Pastoral imagery is a common thread: cows, barns, green fields, farm names and the sense of a particular place. Some brands belong to farmer-owned cooperatives and put that ownership on the pack with a co-op seal or a line about the farm families behind them; others belong to large food groups that have bought and sold names over many decades.

Colour does practical work too. Many milk and cream ranges use a colour for each fat level, so that whole, reduced-fat and fat-free versions can be told apart on the shelf, and flavour lines extend that system further.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time and where its products are made — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Conagra brand since 1990.

Hunt-Wesson was part of the Norton Simon group, and Reddi-wip followed the group’s path into Beatrice Foods and then into ConAgra, now Conagra Brands. English Wikipedia’s history of Conagra records its purchase of Beatrice in 1990, and its Reddi-wip article says the brand came to Conagra through that line. Conagra has owned Reddi-wip since 1990; in 1999 the New York Times reported that the cans were made by Beatrice Foods in Waukesha, Wisconsin, a Conagra subsidiary. The same Hunt-Wesson line links Reddi-wip to Hunt’s, the tomato brand that Conagra also owns.

The range has grown well beyond the original cream. Wikipedia lists Original, Extra Creamy, Fat Free, Zero Sugar and Barista varieties, and in June 2018 the trade titles Dairy Herd and Food Dive reported that Reddi-wip was adding non-dairy toppings made with coconut and almond. The brand’s website, archived in 2024 and carrying a Conagra Brands copyright line, splits its products into dairy whipped topping, non-dairy whipped topping and Barista, and gives a page to what it calls “The Real Cream Difference.”

The name itself is spelled two ways. Conagra’s packs and website write “Reddi-wip,” with a lower-case “w”; English Wikipedia’s article uses “Reddi-Wip.” The brand’s own form, with its hyphen and lower-case second word, is the one used throughout this guide.

The Times described the red-and-white label of 1954 as “iconic” in 1999, and red and white remain the colours of the can; the valve that shapes the whipped cream as it leaves the can was part of the product from the start, by Wikipedia’s account.

For a design guide, Reddi-wip shows how a package — the aerosol can itself — can become the product’s identity. Compare Hunt’s, which shared its Hunt-Wesson parent, and Philadelphia, another American dairy name that has passed between food groups. For this guide we use a can red and a white with a script, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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