Three Chicago bake shops, a cheesecake and a daughter’s name.

Sara Lee is a real person’s name. English Wikipedia says that in 1935 Charles Lubin and his brother-in-law, Arthur Gordon, bought a small chain of Chicago neighbourhood bakeries called Community Bake Shops, and grew the original three stores into seven. Lubin wanted to expand further. He named a cream cheesecake after his eight-year-old daughter, Sara Lee Lubin, and changed the name of the business to Kitchens of Sara Lee.

The American Society of Baking, which inducted Lubin into its Baking Hall of Fame in 2006, dates the cheesecake to 1949: its inductee page says Lubin succeeded that year in creating a commercially produced cream cheesecake and named it after his eight-year-old daughter. The Society says that two years later he introduced an all-butter pound cake and a coffee cake, and that by 1953 he had perfected a frozen formulation and begun a national expansion of a frozen sweet baked product. It credits Lubin with mechanically producing laminated sweet doughs and with baking in foil pans, and says the business had operations in Canada within ten years and manufacturing in Australia by 1972.

The brand’s current owner tells the story in more detail on its heritage page. Sara Lee Frozen Bakery says Lubin parted ways with his brother-in-law in 1949; that a buyer from Texas visiting Chicago in 1952 asked for the products to be shipped to him, which fresh cakes could not survive; and that in 1953 Lubin introduced a reformulated frozen line and designed foil pans so that a cake could be baked, frozen and sold in the same pan. It says fresh routes were franchised within a radius of about 300 miles of Chicago in 1954, and that Lubin began advertising on television in 1960. The company quotes Sara Lee herself, who has appeared in television advertising for the bakery, recalling that her father told her the product “had to be perfect because he was naming it after me.”

Consolidated Foods, Sara Lee Corporation and a two-way split.

The bakery became part of a larger company in the mid-1950s. Wikipedia says the Consolidated Foods Corporation bought Kitchens of Sara Lee in 1956, and the company says Lubin stayed on as chief executive until he retired on 15 August 1965. In 1985, Wikipedia says, the whole corporation took the name Sara Lee Corporation; the brand’s heritage page adds that Kitchens of Sara Lee was renamed Sara Lee Bakery at the same time. Wikipedia gives the brand’s long-running slogan as “Everybody doesn’t like something, but nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee”.

The name then divided along product lines. Wikipedia says that on 9 November 2010 Sara Lee agreed to sell its North American fresh bakery business to Mexico’s Grupo Bimbo. Under the deal Sara Lee kept the right to use its name on frozen desserts and meat products, while Grupo Bimbo would use the Sara Lee name for fresh-baked products around the world except Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Australian Food News reported on 11 November 2010 that Sara Lee had agreed the sale and would concentrate on its protein and coffee businesses. English Wikipedia’s article on Bimbo Bakeries USA says the sale was completed in November 2011, and lists Sara Lee among that company’s brands for the North American fresh bakery unit. Grupo Bimbo has owned the Sara Lee fresh bakery business in North America since 2011.

The corporation itself split next. Wikipedia says Sara Lee announced on 28 January 2011 that its North American operations would take the name Hillshire Brands and its international coffee and tea business would become D.E Master Blenders 1753, a separation completed in 2012; the same year Hillshire sold its Australian bakery operations to McCain Foods. Hillshire, along with the Sara Lee operations, was acquired by Tyson Foods in 2014. On 1 June 2018, Wikipedia says, Tyson announced the sale of the Sara Lee, Van’s, Chef Pierre and Bistro Collection brands to Kohlberg & Company. Kohlberg’s news release of 30 July 2018 announced the closing of that sale and the start of operations of Sara Lee Frozen Bakery, headquartered in Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois, with manufacturing in Traverse City, Michigan, and Tarboro, North Carolina. Powder & Bulk Solids reported the sale on 1 August 2018. Sara Lee Frozen Bakery has run the frozen line since 2018.

Design and documentation.

The guides in this group look at American snack cakes: small cakes, pies, rolls and buns baked in quantity, sealed in printed wrappers and sold from supermarket shelves, gas-station and convenience-store racks and lunchbox-sized multipacks. Their identity rarely sits in the cake itself, which often looks much the same from one bakery to the next. It sits in the packaging, the name and the characters that travel with them.

Most of the visible design work happens on a thin cellophane or film wrapper that has to carry a name, a flavour and a picture in very little space, and then on the carton that groups several wrapped cakes together. Mascots, cartoon figures and named characters appear often in this category, and a single brand can pass through several bakeries and owners while keeping the same name on the pack.

Each guide follows the same approach: who started the name, who has owned it since, and how its wrappers, logos and advertising have changed over time, using dated independent sources where they exist and marking plainly what rests only on a company’s own account.

Bread aisle and freezer case under the same signature.

Since the 2010 deal, the Sara Lee name has appeared on two kinds of shelf under two owners. In the bread aisle in North America it belongs to Grupo Bimbo’s American arm, which Wikipedia says operates from Irving, Texas, alongside brands such as Arnold, Oroweat and Thomas’; the same article notes an Artesano line of sliced bread and buns under the Sara Lee name. In the freezer case, the cheesecakes, pound cakes and pies belong to Sara Lee Frozen Bakery, whose website, saraleedesserts.com, presents the brand’s heritage from the 1935 bake shops onwards.

The frozen side has kept close to Lubin’s own products. The company’s heritage timeline traces a line from the 1949 cream cheesecake and the 1951 All Butter Pound Cake through to the 1956 founding of Chef Pierre, a maker of frozen pies started by Peter C. Dendrinos in Muskegon, Michigan, which Consolidated Foods acquired in 1978 and merged with Sara Lee in 1988. It also records the bakery’s civic set pieces: a cake in the form of a giant book presented to the City of Chicago in 1972 for the centenary of the Chicago Public Library, and a bicentennial birthday cake for the United States in Freedom Hall, Philadelphia, on 4 July 1976. Kohlberg’s 2018 release names Sara Lee, Van’s, Chef Pierre and Bistro Collection as the brands of the frozen business, with a particular focus on premium desserts for food service.

For a design guide, Sara Lee shows how a personal name chosen for one cheesecake in 1949 can outlive the company that carried it, and how a single signature can be shared between two owners who divide the market by product, with fresh bakery under Grupo Bimbo and frozen desserts under Sara Lee Frozen Bakery. Compare it with Bimbo, which has owned the North American fresh bakery business since 2011, and Entenmann’s, another family bakery name now under Bimbo Bakeries USA. For this guide we use Sara red, cream, pound-cake gold and charcoal with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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