A fruit merchant from Calabria, a retiring macaroni maker and a family business in Lebanon County.

San Giorgio is an American brand of dried pasta whose roots are in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, a county seat east of Harrisburg. Its story is told in some detail by LebTown, the Lebanon County news site, in an article published on 15 January 2021 and updated two days later with immigration records supplied by a local historian. The brand’s own website tells a shorter version of the same story, and the International Directory of Company Histories, in a 2003 entry on New World Pasta, gives a third.

All three begin with Girolamo Guerrisi, an Italian immigrant from Calabria. LebTown says he arrived at Ellis Island in 1907, from the town of Cittanova, and stayed with a cousin in New York while he learned English and studied business methods. In 1912, the article says, he moved to Lebanon to set up the Keystone Fruit Company. The San Giorgio website gives the same year of arrival and says it took him two years of modest jobs in America to find his footing.

The pasta business began in 1914. LebTown says Guerrisi took over the management of the Keystone Macaroni Company, a small pasta plant on North Sixth Street, after its previous owner, anxious to retire, left him his stock in the business. The company’s own account describes Keystone as a one-man operation taken over from an elderly macaroni maker. The International Directory of Company Histories dates the founding of the San Giorgio Macaroni Company to the same year and says Guerrisi had saved enough from the fruit business to buy Keystone.

The plant grew in stages. LebTown says Guerrisi had the Keystone Macaroni Company incorporated and built an additional plant at Eighth and Water Streets, then opened another at Sixth and Spring Streets in 1925. He renovated his factories frequently and installed new machinery as mechanical dryers changed the trade, the article says, and local newspapers of the time credited his use of durum wheat semolina for the company’s early success.

The name came later than the business. According to LebTown, Guerrisi renamed the company San Giorgio in 1947, two years before his death. His five sons then ran the Lebanon plants, and the San Giorgio website says the sons had taken over the business by 1950. The company’s About page today opens with a photograph captioned San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, alongside historical photographs credited to the Lebanon Daily News.

Hershey, New World Pasta, Ebro, TreeHouse and Winland Foods.

The family years included one setback. On 25 October 1960, LebTown reports, a fire destroyed the six-storey plant at Eighth and Water Streets; the company rebuilt it and resumed production the following year.

Six years later San Giorgio passed to a chocolate maker. The Hershey Story, the museum in Hershey, Pennsylvania, published an account by Valerie Seiber on 15 January 2016 explaining that the Hershey Pasta Group operated as a division of Hershey Foods from 1966. The museum lists the San Giorgio Macaroni Company of Lebanon and Delmonico Foods of Louisville, Kentucky, as its 1966 purchases. Hershey executives Richard Zimmerman and Whit Simmons, the article says, had been asked to investigate acquisitions when they were offered San Giorgio; because the brand’s sales were limited geographically, Hershey bought Delmonico to reach other markets. The museum’s collection includes a San Giorgio recipe booklet from around 1960.

San Giorgio became the core of a larger group. The International Directory of Company Histories says Hershey bought Skinner Macaroni of Omaha in 1979 and merged it into its pasta unit to form San Giorgio-Skinner Inc., which in 1984 became an operating division under the name Hershey Pasta Group, led by C. Mickey Skinner. The museum’s list goes on to include American Beauty in 1984 and Ronzoni in 1990.

Hershey left pasta in 1999. The Hershey Story says the company sold its pasta division that year to the New World Pasta group, in a transaction that included the San Giorgio and Ideal by San Giorgio brands among others. LebTown says the original San Giorgio plant in Lebanon stayed open under New World until 2001, when it closed along with facilities in Louisville and Omaha.

Ownership then moved several more times. English Wikipedia, citing Ebro’s own announcement and a Forbes wire report of June 2006, says New World Pasta, which had filed for bankruptcy in 2004, was acquired in 2006 by Ebro Puleva of Spain, and that from 1 January 2017 New World and American Rice were merged into Riviana Foods. The Shelby Report reported on 17 December 2020 that TreeHouse Foods of Oak Brook, Illinois, had completed its purchase of the bulk of Riviana’s U.S. branded pasta business, including San Giorgio, Creamette, Prince and Skinner, together with a plant in St. Louis.

That ownership was brief. Food Business Middle East & Africa reported in August 2022 that TreeHouse had sold the bulk of its meal-preparation business, with pasta among the categories, to the European investment group Investindustrial. The business now trades as Winland Foods, which describes itself as a new company backed by Investindustrial. Winland Foods has owned San Giorgio since 2022; the Prince pasta website lists San Giorgio among the principal Winland pasta brands.

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 Venetian name, a regional following, a recipe booklet and a week declared by a state legislature.

The brand’s identity rests on a name rather than a founder’s surname. Guerrisi’s business traded as the Keystone Macaroni Company until he chose an Italian saint’s name in 1947, according to LebTown. The San Giorgio website links that name visually to Venice: the photograph at the top of its company story is captioned San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice.

For much of its life the brand was regional. The Hershey Story quotes a former Hershey executive, Jay Carr, from an oral history in the Hershey Community Archives, saying the pasta group’s strength was its strong regional brands and its weakness was that it had no single national one. The museum says customers stayed loyal to their regional brands, which made a national label difficult, and that Hershey sold its pasta under regional names. LebTown wrote in 2021 that San Giorgio is still distributed mainly in the Northeast, and the International Directory of Company Histories noted that in New York San Giorgio competed with Ronzoni, its sibling brand under Hershey.

Printed material carried the brand into kitchens. The recipe booklet in the Hershey museum’s collection, dated to around 1960, is one example. The present website keeps the idea alive with a recipe section, a guide called Pasta 101 and a homepage line that calls San Giorgio “the right way to pasta”. Its list of shapes runs from angel hair to ziti and includes pot pie squares and pot pie bows, along with a mix sold under the name Trio Italiano.

The anniversary that marked the brand’s place in Lebanon came from the state. LebTown says that in 1989 the Pennsylvania House of Representatives passed a measure designating 14 to 20 May that year as “Pasta Week” in Pennsylvania, recognising the 75th anniversary of San Giorgio pasta. The company marked the occasion with prizes, free pasta certificates and cookbooks, the article says. It adds that the factory supported local organisations through the 1980s, including the Good Samaritan Hospital and the Lebanon County United Way.

For a design guide, San Giorgio shows how a brand can keep a local name and a recipe-led voice through a chain of owners that ran from a Calabrian family to a chocolate company, a Spanish food group and an investor-backed manufacturer. Compare it with Ronzoni, a New York brand that joined it in the Hershey Pasta Group, and Mueller’s, another American pasta label of the same era. For this guide we use Venetian blue, semolina gold, sugo red and paper with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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