A milk-delivery firm that turned to infant formula.

Similac began in a dairy. Ohio History Central, the online encyclopedia of the Ohio History Connection, records that Harry C. Moores and Stanley M. Ross founded the Moores & Ross Milk Company in Columbus, Ohio, in 1903, and that for its first twenty-two years the company bottled milk for home delivery.

The change came in 1925. A scientist named Alfred Bosworth had created a milk-based infant formula, and Moores and Ross began producing and selling it, at first under the name Franklin Infant Food. Ohio History Central says the name was changed to Similac two years later; English Wikipedia places the first release of Similac in the late 1920s and describes the name as standing for “similar to lactation”. Wikipedia also identifies Bosworth with Tufts University, citing a 1994 business-ethics book.

The formula soon reshaped the business. In 1928, Ohio History Central records, the company sold its ordinary milk operations to Borden and renamed itself M & R Dietetic Laboratories, concentrating on infant formula. Its marketing addressed medical doctors as well as parents.

Production grew beyond Columbus. Ohio History Central notes that the original Columbus factory became too small and that M & R built a second plant in Sturgis, Michigan. In 1956 the company created Ross Laboratories to continue its work on infant formulas, and in 1961 it opened its first factory outside the United States, making Similac at Zwolle in the Netherlands. A further plant followed at Casa Grande, Arizona, in 1984.

Wikipedia’s timeline of the product lists a concentrated liquid version of Similac in 1950 and an iron-fortified version in 1959, both from the Columbus company before it joined Abbott.

Ross Laboratories inside Abbott.

In 1964 Ross Laboratories merged with the Chicago-area pharmaceutical company Abbott Laboratories. English Wikipedia’s article on Abbott, citing the Chicago Tribune’s 1993 obituary of Richard Ross, says the merger made Ross a wholly owned subsidiary of Abbott and brought Similac under the Abbott umbrella. Abbott has owned the brand since then.

Inside Abbott, the Columbus business widened its range. Ohio History Central records that in the following years Ross Laboratories began making a soy-based infant formula called Isomil, which Wikipedia dates to 1966, along with vitamins and the electrolyte drink Pedialyte; in 1973 it introduced Ensure, a nutritional drink for adults. Similac stayed at the centre of the nutrition business as those newer names were added around it.

The Ross name itself was eventually retired. The Columbus Dispatch reported in November 2007 that Abbott’s Ross Products division was being renamed Abbott Nutrition. When Abbott split in two at the start of 2013, spinning off its research-based pharmaceuticals as AbbVie, the nutrition business, Similac included, stayed with the company that kept the Abbott name, as The New York Times reported when the split was announced in October 2011. Abbott is headquartered at Abbott Park, Illinois.

The brand has continued to add variants under the Abbott name. The New York Times reported in May 2015 that Abbott would offer a version of Similac Advance made without genetically engineered ingredients, and Wikipedia lists an organic Similac from 2006 and a line called Pure Bliss by Similac from 2016.

In February 2022 Abbott recalled some Similac powdered formula made at its Sturgis plant and closed the plant during the 2022 US formula shortage, reopening it that summer, as NPR reported in July 2022.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group make nappies, baby-care products, baby food and infant formula. Brands of this kind in general sit in a particular corner of the shop: the same aisle often holds products made by large household-goods and nutrition companies alongside smaller names, and a long-running brand may have passed between several owners over the decades while keeping the name, the colours and the characters that parents already know from the shelf.

A baby brand’s identity is usually carried by its packaging, its name and its imagery rather than by the product itself, which is rarely seen until the pack is opened. Drawn babies, photographs of infants, animal characters and soft colours appear across the category, and a mascot or illustration can stay on a pack long after the company behind it has changed.

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

A coined name on a can.

Similac’s identity starts with its name. The product began as Franklin Infant Food and was renamed within a couple of years, and the replacement is a coined word that, by Wikipedia’s account, compresses the phrase “similar to lactation”. Abbott has since attached variant names to it, from Similac with Iron to Similac Advance.

The brand’s advertising has addressed two audiences from the beginning. Ohio History Central records that M & R Dietetic Laboratories aimed its marketing at medical doctors as well as at parents, so the brand had to speak in a professional register as well as a domestic one.

Its more recent consumer advertising has taken a different line. In January 2015 Similac released an online film, reported by Adweek and by CNN, which CNN described as a face-off between judgemental mothers and fathers. Fortune wrote about the film in February 2015 under the theme of a “sisterhood of motherhood”. The film carried the brand’s name into a conversation about parenting rather than about the product itself.

The corporate name behind the can has changed several times while the brand name has not. Similac has been made by Moores & Ross, by M & R Dietetic Laboratories, by Ross Laboratories, by Ross Products and, since 2007, by Abbott Nutrition, all within Abbott since 1964 and all with Columbus as the nutrition business’s historic home.

For a design guide, Similac shows how a coined product name can outlast the companies that made it, staying fixed on the pack while the corporate names behind it changed. Compare it with Enfamil, Mead Johnson’s formula from Evansville, Indiana, and Gerber, the baby-food name from Fremont, Michigan. For this guide we use plum and warm gold on milk white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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