Two Southern millers, one merger and a boil-in-bag.

Success is an American brand of boil-in-bag rice and grains made by Riviana Foods, the Houston company that The Shelby Report described on 1 April 2026 as a subsidiary of Spain’s Ebro Foods. Ebro Foods has owned Success since 2004, when it acquired Riviana.

Riviana is older than the brand. The company history of Riviana Foods published by Funding Universe, drawn from the International Directory of Company Histories, says that on 2 September 1965 two rice companies, River Brand Rice Mills and Louisiana State Rice Milling, merged through a stock exchange under the River name, which was later changed to Riviana Foods Inc., with Frank A. Godchaux III as chairman. The history says Riviana then concentrated its milling and packaging in Houston, Memphis and Abbeville, Louisiana, moved into convenience foods and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange by 1968.

Success came out of that push into convenience. Riviana’s own timeline says that in 1971 the company began test marketing new rice products under the Success brand, describing them as an instant parboiled rice with the convenience of quick-cooking rice in a boil-in-bag. English Wikipedia, in its article on Ebro Foods, dates Riviana’s introduction of Success Rice to 1977, describing it as the company’s parboiled, boil-in-bag rice brand.

Trade reports describe the bag in similar terms. When the trade magazine Packaging Strategies reported on the brand on 3 May 2022, it described Success as known for its pre-portioned, BPA-free boil-in-bags, which it said offer a “no-measure, no mess” way of cooking. The Shelby Report used almost the same words in 2026, referring to the brand’s “no-measure, no-mess bag format,” and the Success website today sums the brand up as “No Measure, No Mess.”

Colgate, a family buy-back and Ebro.

The brand has lived through several owners at company level. The Funding Universe history says that in June 1976 Colgate-Palmolive bought Riviana through a share exchange, with Riviana meant to continue as a quasi-independent division under its own management. In 1977, the history says, Riviana reorganised and created a unit called Riviana Rice USA, and in 1978 it built a new parboil plant as it tried to win back ground in rice.

Colgate later began selling what it had bought. The history says that over the following years Colgate sold all of Riviana’s domestic subsidiaries except Hill’s Pet Nutrition, and that in 1986 an investor group controlled by the Godchaux family, operating as Lastarmco, bought Riviana’s remaining holdings apart from Hill’s. The new private company took the name Riviana Foods Inc. again in 1987. The same history lists Success among Riviana’s familiar brands, alongside Mahatma, Carolina, River and Water Maid, and says that in 1988 the company opened a research and development facility in Houston as it went after the convenient instant-rice market, then led by General Foods.

The next change brought Success under a Spanish parent. Wikipedia says Ebro Foods entered the United States market in 2004 by acquiring Houston-based Riviana Foods, whose brands it lists as including Mahatma, Success, Minute Rice and Water Maid; Riviana’s own timeline also gives 2004. Wikipedia says Riviana went on to buy Minute Rice from Kraft Foods in 2006, which put Success and Minute under the same owner. The Shelby Report listed Riviana’s portfolio in April 2026 as including Minute, Mahatma, Carolina, RiceSelect and Tilda.

On manufacturing, the Success website’s sustainability page refers to “our Memphis manufacturing plant,” which it says Riviana is expanding and updating, and it presents the brand’s environmental programme under the line “Growing for Tomorrow.” The same page says Success uses the How2Recycle labelling system to give recycling instructions on its boxes and bags.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are nut and rice names: snack nuts sold in cans, jars and bags, and rice and grain mixes sold in boxes and pouches. In this part of the grocery aisle the package often does as much of the brand’s work as the name, because the food inside can look much the same from one label to the next.

A nut or rice brand’s identity is usually carried by a container, a colour, a character or a line of copy that a shopper can find quickly on a crowded shelf. Many of these names have also changed hands over the years, passing from founders and families to cooperatives, food groups or larger companies, while the pack on the shelf has kept some of its older look. That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its food is grown, packed or made.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, its packaging and its advertising — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A punning slogan, a media programme and a simpler box.

The brand’s line plays on its name and its format at once. The Success website carries the slogan “Success is in the Bag!” with a registered-trademark symbol, and its recipe section runs under the heading “Recipes for success!”

Riviana has also marketed Success alongside Minute Rice. Progressive Grocer reported on 12 March 2013 that the Minute Rice and Success Rice brands had chosen iVillage as content partner for a programme called “Simplify Yourself.” iVillage was to provide webisodes, articles, slideshows and recipes, and the programme was to be promoted across NBCUniversal platforms, including television advertising on E!, Oxygen and Style Network. Riviana’s vice-president of marketing, Paul Galvani, told the magazine that making family meals convenient “is what we do with Minute and Success Rice products.” The cookbook author Katie Workman was named as the programme’s featured food contributor.

The line has widened beyond white rice while keeping the bag. A Riviana press release on PR Newswire dated 14 March 2017 announced Success Tri-Color 100 percent Quinoa, “packaged in the same boil-in-bag” as the rest of the Success line; the company said the blend of white, red and black quinoa came from Peru. In April 2026, The Shelby Report said Riviana was rolling out a restaurant-style Sticky Rice under the Success Boil-in-Bag name, starting in the eastern United States. Riviana’s director of marketing, Erica Larson, told the paper that “sticky rice is having a moment.”

The packaging was refreshed in 2022. Packaging Strategies reported on 3 May 2022 that Riviana had unveiled new packaging for the brand’s core products, including its White Rice, Brown Rice, Quinoa and Jasmine Rice. The magazine said the brand had modernised and simplified the overall look, with consistent vibrant colours and updated messaging, and wanted the rice and quinoa themselves at the forefront of the pack. The new messaging stressed “Just One Ingredient”, meaning rice or quinoa with no added flavours or preservatives, and added How2Recycle information for the box and the bag. Larson, then senior brand manager, called it “the next evolution of the Success Rice brand.”

For a design guide, Success shows how a single packaging idea — a pre-portioned bag — can become the brand’s name, its slogan and its organising message since the 1970s and through several corporate owners. Compare it with Minute Rice, its sister instant-rice brand under Riviana, and Mahatma, Riviana’s long-running rice label. For this guide we use steam navy, harvest gold, grain white and paddy green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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