Two Brandeis scientists, a patented oil blend and a New Jersey brand company.

Smart Balance is an American brand of buttery spreads, peanut butter and cooking oils, owned today by Conagra Brands. Its oil blend came from a university laboratory. A Brandeis University news release of 5 November 2008 says the nutritionist K.C. Hayes, together with the research scientist Dan Perlman, developed and patented the Smart Balance blend of oils. An earlier Brandeis release, dated 31 January 2005, likewise says Hayes had collaborated with Perlman in creating and patenting the blend used in Smart Balance.

Brandeis has also described the partnership from Perlman’s side. A profile published by the university’s innovation office says Perlman graduated from Brandeis in 1968, worked at the University of Wisconsin and at MIT, and returned to Brandeis in 1978, where his research moved towards applied food science. The profile says his work on fats brought him to collaborate with Hayes, whom it describes as Professor Emeritus of Biology (Nutrition), leading to the creation of the Smart Balance blend products, and it names Smart Balance among the consumer products that came out of his research.

The brand was taken to market by a private company called GFA Brands. When a buyer for that company emerged in 2006, the trade publication just-food described GFA in a report of 27 September 2006 as a US food company producing, among others, the Smart Balance and Earth Balance brands. The report said GFA’s product line took in margarine, popcorn, mayonnaise, peanut butter and cooking oils, along with natural and organic foods sold under the Earth Balance name, and that GFA also owned the brands Smart Beat, Nucoa, Fanning’s, H-O and Spin Blend. It named Bob Harris as GFA’s chief executive and said the shareholders of its holding company included the private-equity firm TSG Consumer Partners.

The link with Brandeis continued after the brand changed hands. The 2008 Brandeis release announced a multi-year sponsored research agreement between the university and Smart Balance, Inc., together with a collaboration and licence to develop a second-generation blend for the brand, with the research to be carried out in Hayes’s laboratory.

Boulder Specialty Brands, Boulder Brands, Pinnacle and Conagra.

The brand gave its name to its owner. just-food reported on 27 September 2006 that Boulder Specialty Brands had signed a definitive agreement to acquire GFA Brands, and that Boulder intended to change its own name to Smart Balance once the deal was complete. Its chairman and chief executive, Stephen B. Hughes, was quoted saying the acquisition was a significant step in the company’s strategy, and that the company looked forward to expanding Smart Balance and Earth Balance into a wide range of food and beverage categories. In a later interview with just-food, published on 17 September 2013, the acquisition of Smart Balance was described as the deal that started the business in 2007.

FoodNavigator reported on 4 October 2012 that Smart Balance, then a New Jersey-based firm, planned to split into two business segments, move its headquarters to Boulder, Colorado, and change its name to Boulder Brands. The company had bought the gluten-free businesses Glutino in August 2011 and Udi’s in June 2012. Under the new structure, a Smart Balance unit covering the spreads and beverages would be led by John Becker, while a Natural Brands unit would take in Earth Balance, Glutino and Udi’s. The magazine said staff at the company’s Paramus, New Jersey, office, home to its finance, operations and research and development departments, would remain in place.

Boulder Brands was itself acquired in 2016. NJBIZ reported on 15 January 2016 that Pinnacle Foods, based in Parsippany, New Jersey, had completed its tender offer for Boulder Brands of Boulder, Colorado, and that Boulder would become a wholly owned subsidiary of Pinnacle. The article listed Smart Balance and Earth Balance among the Boulder brands, alongside Udi’s and Glutino, and Birds Eye, Wish-Bone and Duncan Hines among Pinnacle’s own.

The present owner arrived in 2018. In a release datelined Chicago on 26 October 2018, Conagra Brands announced the completion of its acquisition of Pinnacle Foods, and The Shelby Report reported the closing the same day. Conagra Brands has owned Smart Balance since that acquisition. Archived copies of the brand’s website from 2020, 2022 and 2024 carry a Conagra copyright line, where a copy from around 2017 had carried the name of Boulder Brands USA.

Design and documentation.

Butter spreads and packaged cheese share a shelf and a set of design problems. A spread is usually sold in a plastic tub with a printed lid, or as wrapped sticks in a small carton; cheese is sold in vacuum-sealed blocks, in slices, in wedges wrapped in foil, or in a round box that holds several portions. In each case the pack is small, handled every day and stored in a refrigerator, so the brand has to read clearly from the front of a lid, the end of a carton or the face of a block.

That is why so much of the identity in this category sits in a few repeated elements: a name in a set type style, a colour that runs across the whole range, and sometimes a drawn character or symbol that customers can find among many similar packs. Behind those elements, the companies themselves may have changed owners, merged or moved production more than once.

Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now, where its products are made and how its packs and advertising have changed, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Butter blends, milk, popcorn and a slogan about using it like butter.

The word balance also appears in the name of Earth Balance, the sister brand that GFA sold alongside Smart Balance, according to just-food’s 2006 report. The brand’s own website, as archived over two decades, shows how far the name was stretched and then pulled back. In 2008 the home page promoted a Butter Blend Stick that combined real butter with Smart Balance buttery spread for cooking and baking, and a “Smart Balance Food Plan” presented with Bob Greene, the personal trainer, and his Best Life programme.

The range kept widening under Boulder Brands. FoodNavigator reported in October 2012 that John Becker had led the development and launch of Better Butter, and that the company had a new Smart Balance Spreadable Butter that year. In its 2013 interview, just-food said the new entity had sold cooking oil, peanut butter and popcorn under the Smart Balance name alongside its core spreads, and that the company had moved its Smart Balance milk line to a licence arrangement with the co-packer Byrne Dairy. An archived copy of the website from around 2017 listed buttery spreads, spreadable butter, buttery sticks, peanut butters, milks, oils and cooking sprays, popcorn, mayonnaise and eggs among the brand’s products.

An archived copy of the website from 2022 organised the products into three groups: buttery spreads, peanut butters, and oils and sprays. The same page carried the lines “Use It Like Butter, Love It Even More!” and “Make Your Food a Little Smarter.”

The corporate path behind the name runs in four dated steps: Smart Balance named the company in 2007, that company became Boulder Brands in 2012, Boulder Brands became part of Pinnacle Foods in 2016, and Pinnacle Foods became part of Conagra Brands in 2018.

For a design guide, Smart Balance shows how a descriptive, two-word name built around a blend can carry a product from a university patent to a national grocery shelf while its owners change around it. Compare it with Country Crock, an American spread that also changed hands several times, and Land O’Lakes, a butter brand from the dairy side of the same aisle. For this guide we use balance blue, leaf green, tub ivory and buttery gold with a humanist sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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