A place name, a trademark registration and a company incorporated in California.

Spice Islands is an American brand of herbs, spices and seasonings, owned today by B&G Foods of Parsippany, New Jersey. Its name is borrowed from geography rather than from a family. English Wikipedia says the name is taken from the “Spice Islands” of Indonesia, also known as the Maluku Islands, the original home of spices such as nutmeg and cloves. The brand’s own website, in a version archived in April 2010, said Spice Islands had been stocking shelves “since 1941”.

That year has a paper trail. A federal court opinion in Spice Islands Company v. Spice Land Products, Inc., decided in the Eastern District of New York on 28 March 1958, records that the trademark “Spice Islands” was first registered in the United States Patent Office on 23 May 1941 by Frederick H. Johnson, who by the time of the case was the company’s president. The same opinion says the company itself, Spice Islands Company, was incorporated in the State of California on 6 September 1949, eight years after the mark was registered.

The 1958 opinion gives a picture of how far the brand had travelled in under two decades. It describes a complete line of spices marketed and sold throughout the United States and in many foreign countries, and it lists the kinds of shops that carried it: department stores, fancy fruit stores, grocery stores, butcher shops, hardware stores and gift shops. The list places the gift counter and the hardware store alongside the grocer and the butcher.

The case itself arose because, according to the opinion, Spice Islands served notice on the New York packer Spice Land Products on 16 May 1953 to stop using the name “Spice Land”, and sued when the firm refused.

In the opinion’s account, the brand name came first and the company second. Johnson’s federal registration of the words “Spice Islands” dates from 1941, while the corporation that carried the same words, Spice Islands Company, was formed in California in 1949; by 1958 the company used Spice Islands as both its trade name and its trademark, and its counsel in the case included a San Francisco lawyer, William G. MacKay, alongside the New York firm Mock & Blum.

From Specialty Brands and Burns Philp to ACH Food Companies and today’s owner.

The brand later passed through a series of corporate owners. The International Directory of Company Histories (volume 63, St. James Press, 2004) says that in 1988 the Australian group Burns, Philp & Company, acting through its Fleischmann business, agreed to acquire Specialty Brands Inc. from its then parent, United Biscuits, and that the purchase gave Burns Philp control of the Spice Islands brand of herbs and spices. The directory presents the deal as part of a decision by Burns Philp’s management in the late 1980s to move into herbs and spices, a field they saw as a natural extension of their yeast and vinegar business.

Burns Philp kept buying. The same volume lists the purchase of Durkee-French from Reckitt & Colman in 1992, of Germany’s Ostmann and the Netherlands’ Euroma in 1994, and of the Iowa spice house Tone Brothers. An earlier volume of the directory (volume 21, 1998) says that under Burns Philp in the mid-1990s Tone became the distributor of Durkee spices, Fleischmann’s yeast and Spice Islands products, and that a new facility completed in Ankeny, Iowa, in 1996 was designed for Tone’s products and for other newly acquired Burns Philp lines. A timeline on the Durkee foodservice website, run by the current owner, says Burns Philp consolidated all of its North American herb and spice operations at the Ankeny facility in 1996.

The arrangement did not last. Volume 21 says that in 1997 Burns Philp announced its intention to sell its North American spice operations, naming Tone’s, Durkee and Spice Islands among them. In a May 1997 letter to shareholders, the directory reports, chairman Alan McGregor wrote that the company did not have “the time or resources required to generate the returns necessary from the herb and spice businesses”. Volume 63 records that in March 2004 Burns Philp announced it would sell its North American holdings, by then grouped under the Tone’s name, and just-food reported on 4 March 2004 that the unit had been put up for sale.

ACH Food Companies, the American arm of Associated British Foods, says in its corporate history that it acquired Tone Brothers in 2004; the Durkee timeline dates that purchase to 2005. The ACH history lists Spice Islands among its spice and seasoning brands, alongside Durkee, Tone’s and Weber seasonings.

The present owner arrived in 2016. B&G Foods announced on 21 September 2016 that it had agreed to buy ACH’s spices and seasonings business, including the Spice Islands, Tone’s and Durkee brands, Weber sauces and seasonings sold under licence, and a manufacturing facility in Ankeny, according to the release as carried by NJB Magazine and Food Industry Executive. A further release on 21 November 2016 said the acquisition had been completed that day. B&G Foods has owned Spice Islands since 2016, and English Wikipedia says the spices are manufactured in Ankeny.

Design and documentation.

Spice jars, seasoning shakers and boxed potato pouches share a problem: the product inside is a dry powder, a blend or a flake that looks much the same from one maker to the next, so much of what a shopper sees on the shelf has to be carried by the container and its label. A cap colour, the shape of a tin, a band of type across a carton or a pouch that stands upright can do more work than any description of the contents.

Many of these packs are long-lived. A jar or carton may keep its basic form for decades while the company behind the name changes owners, moves its plants or widens its range far beyond the product it began with. That makes the plain questions worth asking of each name: who started it, who owns it now, and where its spices, blends or potatoes are actually grown, milled and packed.

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 labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

An archipelago for a name, recipe books for advertising and a trading-company voice.

The name has done much of the brand’s visual work. It points to a place rather than to a person: the Maluku archipelago, which English Wikipedia describes as the original home of nutmeg and cloves. Its neighbours in this series, McCormick and Tone’s, both carry a family surname; Spice Islands carries a destination.

Advertising followed from early on. The 1958 court opinion says the Spice Islands trade name and trademark had been advertised extensively in the United States for years by means of newspapers, magazines, store catalogues, recipe books, folders, price lists and in-store demonstrations. Recipe books and demonstrations sit in that list beside the more familiar newspaper and magazine space, and the same opinion records that the products themselves were stocked by department stores and gift shops as well as by grocers.

The brand’s own voice in the twenty-first century kept the travel theme. Its website, as archived in April 2010 under the copyright of ACH Food Companies, said Spice Islands had “scoured the lush tropics”, the desert lands of Africa and the regions of India in search of spices. It called Spice Islands “a trading company”, said it had studied the beginnings of the spice trade, and said it sourced its spices during prime harvesting. The same page pointed to newer lines: adjustable grinders, organics and what it called “world flavors”.

Production, meanwhile, moved to Iowa. Since Burns Philp’s ownership in the 1990s the brand has shared owners with Tone’s and Durkee, and the 2016 B&G Foods announcement placed the manufacturing facility that came with the three brands in Ankeny, where English Wikipedia says Spice Islands spices are made. The archipelago in the name, in other words, is a reference to where spices such as nutmeg and cloves come from, while the spices themselves are manufactured in the American Midwest.

For a design guide, Spice Islands shows how a place name, rather than a family name, can carry a spice brand through a string of corporate owners, with recipe books and catalogues doing the storytelling. Compare it with Tone’s, its stablemate at Ankeny, and McCormick, the Baltimore spice house named after its founder. For this guide we use island teal, nutmeg gold, parchment and clove brown with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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