Seminis Brand Guidelines: Asgrow, Petoseed, Royal Sluis & a California Seed Merger

A Connecticut seed farm, a Ventura tomato unit and a Dutch house.

Seminis is a young name built from old companies. The brand dates from the mid-1990s, but the businesses folded into it go back to the nineteenth century, and their histories explain why the company was, from the start, a maker of seed for commercial growers and food processors rather than for home gardens.

The oldest piece is Asgrow. The International Directory of Company Histories, in its entry on Seminis, traces it to the Everett B. Clark Seed Co., founded in 1856 on half an acre in Orange, Connecticut. In 1927 the founder’s son merged it with two other firms to form Associated Seed Growers, a developer, producer and wholesaler of vegetable seed. By its centenary in 1956 it had its headquarters in New Haven, but most of its seed was grown west of the Rocky Mountains, mainly in California and southern Idaho, and its biggest customers were freezers and canners. It took the name Asgrow Seed Co. officially in 1959 and was sold to the drug maker Upjohn in 1968.

The second piece is Petoseed. The same entry says that in 1950 Howard Peto and Vic Hollar bought a Colorado business, the R.H. James Seed Co., renamed it Peto-Hollar and opened a unit in Ventura, California, to produce tomato seed. The partnership was dissolved in 1953, the California branch became Petoseed, and in 1958 it set up head offices in Saticoy, in Ventura County. It went on to breed tomatoes, peppers, squash and onions, with research stations that by the mid-1990s reached from Chile to Thailand.

Petoseed also opened the site that still anchors the business today. Vegetable Growers News, reporting in September 2022 on the station’s fiftieth year, says the research station at Woodland, California, was started by Petoseed in 1972, at first to develop tomato hybrids for growers in San Diego County. A timeline in that report lists the industry’s first foundation seed department there around 1978, a cell biology lab in 1986 and a vegetable quality lab in 1990.

The third piece is Royal Sluis, a Dutch seed house founded in 1870. The International Directory of Company Histories says it was in financial difficulty when the Chicago-based George J. Ball, which also owned Petoseed, acquired it in July 1994.

Alfonso Romo’s seed consolidation.

The man who put these companies together was the Mexican businessman Alfonso Romo. English Wikipedia says Seminis was established in 1994 under his Savia group, then part of the conglomerate Empresas La Moderna, to consolidate companies in what it calls the fragmented fruit and vegetable seed industry. The International Directory of Company Histories dates the company to 1995, and the 2022 Woodland timeline in Vegetable Growers News also lists the Seminis brand as formed in 1995, so both years appear in the record: the first purchase came in 1994, and the combined company took shape the following year.

The steps are set out in the directory entry. Empresas La Moderna bought Asgrow from Upjohn in 1994, a business with vegetable lines such as peas, beans, processing tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce alongside field crops. In October 1995 it acquired the Petoseed and Royal Sluis brands from George J. Ball in a share exchange and took a majority of the new company, called Seminis, raising its stake further in 1998. Seminis based itself at Petoseed’s headquarters in Saticoy. Wikipedia adds two smaller takeovers, Bruinsma Seeds and Genecorp.

The old names did not disappear at once. In 1997, the directory says, Asgrow, Petoseed and Royal Sluis still had their own breeding, product development, marketing and sales teams, with Bruinsma and Genecorp run on a regional or specialised basis. Royal Sluis led in northern Europe, Petoseed in the dealer-led Middle East, and Asgrow and Petoseed in North and South America. Seed was grown under contract in several western US states and through subsidiaries and agents in Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Research was gathered in California. In 1996 the subsidiary Seminis Vegetable Seeds made Petoseed’s Woodland site its research headquarters, and that year it brought out its first genetically engineered product, a processing tomato developed with Zeneca Plant Science and the University of Nottingham, whose paste went on sale in British supermarkets. A 1996 agreement with Monsanto gave Seminis access to Monsanto’s gene technology, and Monsanto bought the field-crop arm, Asgrow Agronomics: Wikipedia dates the sale to 1996, the directory to January 1997. From then on Seminis was a vegetable and fruit seed company only. In 1997 Seminis Vegetable Seeds bought a 32-acre parcel in a business park in Oxnard, where it planned a new corporate office.

Seed brands and their marks.

Vegetable seed companies sell something their customers rarely see in finished form. A breeder’s product is a variety: a tomato, a pepper, a carrot or a cabbage with traits that took years of crossing and selection to fix. The seed itself is small, dry and uniform, so most of these companies present themselves through what the seed becomes, and through the places where it is tested.

That is why the same images recur across the category. Trial fields in rows, greenhouses filled with trained tomato and cucumber plants, and close views of leaves and roots show the work of selection. Catalogues and websites favour cut tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers photographed on white, so that colour, shape and the inside of the fruit can be compared. Named varieties carry much of the message.

The audience is professional. Breeders such as these sell to commercial growers, propagators, processors and retailers rather than to home gardeners, and their packs and brochures carry practical information on sowing, growing conditions and the traits each company claims for its varieties. Several firms also show the stages that follow breeding: seed production by contract growers, then cleaning, sorting, germination testing and packing.

Open days are the most public face of the trade. In the north of North Holland, where companies including Enza Zaden and Bejo belong to the Seed Valley network, breeders invite customers to walk their trial fields and greenhouses each year; in September 2023 NH Nieuws reported that Bejo’s open days in Warmenhuizen drew visitors from about 70 countries. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company, and marks clearly what rests on its own word.

From Nasdaq to Monsanto to Bayer.

Seminis changed hands several times within a decade. In 1999 Savia floated part of the company on the Nasdaq exchange while keeping control; the International Directory of Company Histories says the proceeds helped Savia reduce its own debts. In September 2003, English Wikipedia says, Savia took Seminis private again with investment from the firm Fox Paine & Company. On 23 March 2005 Monsanto announced that it had completed its acquisition of Seminis.

The next change came with Monsanto itself. In 2018, Wikipedia says, Bayer acquired Monsanto and all its seed brands, including Seminis. The same 2022 report describes the Woodland station as part of Bayer’s Crop Science division, which runs vegetable research and development there.

The Woodland station remains the clearest link between the old companies and the current one. Vegetable Growers News reported in 2022 that, after the mergers and acquisitions, Bayer had turned the site into a centre for vegetable research, with about 90,000 square feet of laboratory and research space, 68 greenhouses, three germplasm houses and nearly 400 acres of test fields. The same timeline credits the station with markers and pathology labs set up in 1995, the year it lists for the Seminis brand itself.

The identity has always had to sit above other names. In its first years Seminis was a holding name for Asgrow, Petoseed and Royal Sluis, each with its own teams and markets; later it became one brand inside Monsanto and then Bayer. Through those changes the business stayed with the market its founding companies served: seed for commercial vegetable growers and food processors.

For a design guide, Seminis shows how a name created by merger can outlast the companies that formed it and the owners that bought it. Compare Nunhems, another vegetable seed brand, and HM.CLAUSE, another vegetable seed business. For this guide we use field green, tomato red and seed husk with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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