A cracker baker, a wheelbarrow and a family name on the bag.

Stauffer’s is a cracker and cookie brand from York, Pennsylvania, made by D. F. Stauffer Biscuit Co., today part of the Japanese food group Meiji. The brand carries the name of its founder. Meiji America, the group’s North American business, says on its website that the company was founded by David F. Stauffer in 1871 and has stayed at its headquarters in York. The Philadelphia Inquirer marked the company’s 150th year in May 2021 with a visit to the York factory by the food writer Jenn Ladd.

The company has told its early story in its own words for many years. Its “About Us” page of 2002, preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, says that in 1871 David F. Stauffer was baking crackers by the barrel for his customers in York, and that he also delivered them door to door in a wheelbarrow. The same page says he entered the “cake and cracker business” that year. Tasting Table, in an article by Rebecca Treon published in May 2026, adds the later stages of delivery: from the wheelbarrow to horse-drawn wagons, and eventually the railroad.

The animal crackers came early. English Wikipedia says Stauffer’s produced its animal crackers in York in 1871, and Tasting Table gives the same year for when David F. Stauffer began making them at his bakery. The company’s 2002 page dated them to “around the turn of the century”. The Shelby Report, the grocery trade paper, described Stauffer’s in April 2021 as a York baker of animal crackers founded in 1871.

The Inquirer article explained how the crackers are made. Jeff Patzer, the company’s vice president of engineering, told the paper that the dough is laminated, folded over on itself, and that this layering, together with a lower amount of sugar, is what separates an animal cracker from a cookie. He listed the animals in order, from elephant and bear through to rhino and tiger. Before 1987, the paper reported, Stauffer’s cut the shapes with a long stamp that travelled back and forth over the dough; today a rotary cutter feeds a continuous oven, and the crackers move from cutter to packaging without being handled.

A family business, a Japanese partner and a Meiji subsidiary.

The company stayed in the family for generations. Its 2002 website said that later generations of the Stauffer family still ran the company, “in partnership with co-owner, Meiji Seika of Japan.” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 2021 that the Japanese snack maker Meiji bought a stake in the family-owned company in the 1990s, and said many of the mechanical advances on the factory floor date from that period.

Full ownership followed in the mid-2000s. Stauffer’s own website, in a version archived in March 2008, said the company had become fully owned by Meiji in February 2004 and described it as a division of Meiji Seika Kaisha of Japan. The Inquirer gives the year Meiji became sole owner as 2005. Meiji has owned the company outright since then, and Meiji America, which it says was founded in 2011 as the group’s North American division, now describes Stauffer’s as a wholly owned subsidiary of Meiji America Inc. The parent group, Meiji America says, was founded in Japan in 1916; its confectionery is covered in our Meiji guide.

The factories have changed over the years. The company’s 2002 website named its bakeries: the main plant in York, one in Blandon, Pennsylvania, and one in Cuba, New York. By 2008 its site listed York, Cuba and Santa Ana, California, where it said its west coast bakery had started producing crackers and cookies in 2001. Meiji America now says the Stauffer’s range is made in the U.S.A., and it sells Stauffer’s alongside Meiji’s own snack brands in the United States, such as Hello Panda, Yan Yan and Chocorooms.

The York plant is the one the press visits. The Inquirer described dough mixed in large batches, a long continuous baking oven, and lines that carry the crackers up to a second floor, where they fall into bags and jugs. It reported that the plant bakes for other companies under contract as well as for its own range, and that it added working days when demand for animal crackers rose at the start of the pandemic. Long-serving employees told the paper they remembered tying bags with a twist-tie machine and putting lids on jugs by hand.

The company ties itself to its region. Meiji America says that by staying in York, Stauffer’s helped Central Pennsylvania become known as the “Snack Food Capital of the World.” The Shelby Report said in 2021 that the company planned to go peanut-free later that year and to use resealable pouches for some products.

Design and documentation.

A cookie or cracker is usually met first as a package rather than as a biscuit: a printed paperboard box, a sleeve inside it, a plastic tray that holds rows of cookies upright, or, for gifts and holidays, a decorated metal tin. The package does most of the brand’s visual work on a shop shelf, where a name, a colour field and a photograph of the product have to be read from a distance and recognised again on the next visit.

Because a cookie or cracker name can pass between bakeries and food groups over the decades, the box and the logo often outlast the company that first printed them, while the recipe, the bakery and the owner change behind them. That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where the product is actually baked and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself, covering its founding story, its owners over time, where its cookies or crackers are made and how its packaging has changed, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A plastic bear, a nostalgic label, collectable tins and a new name.

Stauffer’s signature container is shaped like an animal. The Philadelphia Inquirer introduced the company in 2021 as the York firm “behind the plastic bear jug” of animal crackers, and its report followed the jugs through the plant: a machine shakes crackers into lanes, a chute weighs them, and each jug is filled, sealed and lidded mechanically. Employees told the paper that before automation, a worker worked a foot pedal to let crackers flow into the bear-shaped jugs while someone else held each one still.

Anniversaries have brought the past onto the pack. The Shelby Report reported in April 2021 that, to mark 150 years, Stauffer’s was releasing limited-edition commemorative bear jugs in original and chocolate, with a nostalgic label that paid homage to the company’s packaging of the 1800s. Annabelle Lopez, an associate product manager, said in the announcement that the company was proud still to make the animal crackers and snacks America knows, and Ken Vlazny, senior vice president of sales and marketing, said customer feedback shaped its new products. The Inquirer added that the company hoped to invite employees’ families into the plant to celebrate, as it had done for an earlier anniversary.

The holidays have their own packaging. Stauffer’s website in 2008 called its holiday tin collection its signature item, produced once a year and sought after by collectors, and named the chocolate stars, gingerbread men and white fudge cookies sold for the season. Meiji America’s news page in October and November 2025 announced holiday shortbread and iced gingerbread cookies in red and green packaging, and fudge stars in silver and gold.

The newest change is to the name on the bag. Meiji America’s media centre, read in October 2026, presents Stauffer’s Simply Animals as the next stage of the animal crackers families have eaten since 1871, with a refreshed name, modernised packaging and a new mascot, Bryson the Bear, while the red bag stays. The company says the crackers contain no artificial colours or high-fructose corn syrup and are made in a peanut-free facility in the United States. Other lines sit beside them under the Stauffer’s name, among them SNAPS ginger cookies and Whales baked cheddar crackers.

For a design guide, Stauffer’s shows how a family name, a single colour and a container shaped like the product inside can carry a brand across more than a century and a change of owner. Compare it with Nabisco, the biscuit company behind a rival animal cracker, and Meiji, the Japanese group that owns Stauffer’s. For this guide we use bag red, cracker tan, jug blue and ginger brown with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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