A wrapper business in Louisville.

Reynolds Wrap belongs to a company that began by wrapping other people’s products. English Wikipedia says Richard S. Reynolds Sr., a nephew of the tobacco businessman R. J. Reynolds, founded the U.S. Foil Company in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1919. At first it supplied lead and tin foil wrappers to cigarette and candy makers. In 1924 it bought the manufacturer of the Eskimo Pie, an ice-cream bar sold in a foil wrapper, and in 1928 it added Robertshaw Thermostat, Fulton Sylphon and part of Beechnut Foil to form Reynolds Metals.

The company moved its headquarters to New York City in 1931 and to Richmond, Virginia, in 1938, where it stayed for most of its history. Wikipedia says it began making aluminium foil for packaging in 1926. In 1940 it began mining bauxite, the ore of aluminium, in Bauxite, Arkansas, and the following year it opened an aluminium plant near Sheffield, Alabama, so that the business came to control its metal from the ore onwards.

The consumer roll came after the Second World War. Wikipedia dates the release of Reynolds Wrap Aluminum Foil to 1947 and, citing The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2009, says it was first made by a division called Reynolds Packaging, a business set up to supply foil for wrapping tobacco. The brand’s own history page puts the first sale a year earlier, saying the first box of Reynolds Wrap was sold in 1946, while the same site describes the company as helping cooks since 1947. Wikipedia also says Reynolds Wrap was first produced in Louisville, the city where the company had started.

Four of the founder’s sons — William G., Richard S. Jr., David P. and J. Louis Reynolds — worked in the business. Wikipedia says Richard S. Reynolds Jr. succeeded his father as president in 1948 and took operations abroad to countries including Venezuela and the Philippines, and that David P. Reynolds became president in 1976, the last member of the family to lead the company.

Alcoa, Rank Group and a public company.

Alcoa completed its acquisition of the company on 3 May 2000, as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Toledo Blade reported the following day. Wikipedia says Alcoa shed some non-metal packaging and printing businesses but kept the Reynolds consumer brand, along with the Reynolds Kitchens test kitchens across the street from the former headquarters, and that its Reynolds division also sold Cut-Rite wax paper.

Alcoa did not keep the consumer business for long. On 21 January 2008 it sold the unit to Rank Group, the investment company of the New Zealand businessman Graeme Hart, a sale the Financial Times had reported in December 2007. Wikipedia says Hart renamed the unit the Reynolds Packaging Group and merged his other packaging companies into it to create Reynolds Group Holdings. In September 2008, Wikipedia says, the group announced that a downtown Richmond foil plant that made Reynolds Wrap would close and that foil operations would move to Louisville.

The consumer side was later separated out. Reynolds Consumer Products went public on Nasdaq under the ticker REYN on 31 January 2020, according to Wikipedia, citing Reuters. The rest of Reynolds Group Holdings became Pactiv Evergreen through its own share listing later that year. Today the consumer company’s website presents Reynolds alongside other household names, among them Hefty bags.

The range has widened around the foil roll. Wikipedia records Reynolds Plastic Wrap from 1982. The company says that from the late 1960s it added oven bags, wax paper and baking cups, that in the 2000s it brought out slow-cooker liners, non-stick foil and parchment paper printed with a grid, and that in 2016 Reynolds Consumer Products introduced Reynolds Kitchens as a brand for a wider portfolio of kitchen products.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are household paper, food-wrap, bag and dish-care names: the rolls, boxes, cartons and bottles that sit in kitchen drawers, under sinks and beside the bath. Brands like these are bought again and again, often quickly and from a crowded shelf, so their names, colours and pack shapes have to be recognised at a glance from one shopping trip to the next.

Behind that familiarity, the companies have often changed. A name on a roll or a bottle may have started at a small mill or a metals business, passed through several owners, been split off into a new company or been folded into a much larger household-goods group, while the pack in the shopper’s hand still looks much as it did. Advertising, too, has often done as much as the pack to fix a name in memory.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, how its products and packaging have changed and how its advertising has presented it — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Cookbooks, gift wrap and an aluminium headquarters.

Reynolds Metals sold aluminium as an idea as well as a material, and its consumer foil was part of that effort. The design historian Grace Ong Yan, writing in the journal Design and Culture in 2012, describes how the company promoted aluminium after the war for its decorative appeal as well as its use, reaching into fashion, home improvement and architecture. Wikipedia, drawing on her article, says Reynolds marketed foil as gift wrap, promoted aluminium yarn for Vogue dress patterns, and published cookbooks such as Outdoor Cooking with Reynolds Wrap in 1950 and Casual Cooking in 1954 to encourage people to use the foil.

In 1958 the company launched “Designs for Giving”, a campaign for which it hired professional artists and designers to create patterns for aluminium gift wrap. Wikipedia names three of the designs: “Birds and Bees” for baby showers, “Born Lucky, Born Rich” for birthdays and “Flight of Fancy” for weddings or Christmas.

The same year brought the company’s most visible piece of design. The Reynolds Metals Company International Headquarters, completed in 1958 in Henrico County near Richmond, was designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Wikipedia says the Modernist building makes extensive use of aluminium, down to threads in the carpet, and that it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000, citing the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. It is now owned by the University of Richmond and houses the headquarters of Altria Group.

For a design guide, Reynolds Wrap shows how a kitchen staple can carry the history of an industrial company: a wrapper business, a metal producer and a publicity machine that sold aluminium through cookbooks, gift wrap and its own building. Compare it with Hefty, which now shares its owner, and Ziploc, another name in the kitchen drawer. For this guide we use wrap blue, foil silver and carton white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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