A coffee and spice business in Des Moines, an aunt, a mother and a chemical engineer.

Tone’s is an American brand of spices, seasonings and extracts, owned today by B&G Foods, whose 2016 purchase of the brand included a manufacturing facility in Ankeny, Iowa. It takes its name, apostrophe and all, from a family. The International Directory of Company Histories (volume 21, St. James Press, 1998) says that in 1873 Jehiel Tone, who was born in New York and had worked for a coffee and spice company in Michigan, persuaded his brother I.E. Tone to head west with him and start a business of their own.

The brothers settled in Des Moines, which had just become the capital of Iowa, and made it the home of Tone Brothers. At first, the directory says, the firm sold only coffee and spices, and its original staff consisted of the two brothers, “Aunt Mary” and “Mother”. Within its first twenty-five years it had set up a sales force marketing coffee, tea and spices, and it was selling roasted coffee to customers who had previously bought green beans and roasted them over wood stoves at home.

The second generation brought science into the firm. In the late 1890s, the directory says, I.E. Tone’s son Jay E. Tone Sr. graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a chemical engineer and brought that training to the family business, which soon sold extracts as well as coffee, tea and spices, lemon extract among them. The company, still based in Des Moines, began to sell its products in other Midwestern states, and by the 1930s it was importing coffee, tea and raw spices from several countries.

Jay Tone Sr. became president in 1939. Soon afterwards, according to the directory, he and his brother Fred introduced “pressure packed” ground coffee in cans, which addressed the common problem of coffee spoiling. He remained president for three decades, and for close to a century after 1873 the business stayed in the hands of the Tone family.

Mid-Continent Bottlers, local investors, Rykoff-Sexton, Burns Philp, ACH and today’s owner.

Family ownership ended in 1969. The directory says that soon after Jay Tone Jr. took over as president, the company was sold to Mid-Continent Bottlers, another Des Moines business, which kept a Tone family member in charge, first Jay Tone Jr. and then Jay Tone III. Under the new owner coffee and tea were dropped and Tone concentrated entirely on spices; a new headquarters was set up in Des Moines, and a new division was formed to sell to foodservice distributors and chefs as well as to retail customers.

Ownership then changed hands repeatedly. In 1978, the directory says, the Milwaukee company Universal Foods bought Mid-Continent, and in 1979 Tone was acquired by a group of Des Moines investors, under whom Hal Ashby, from outside the Tone family, became company president. F. Christopher Kruger was named president in 1985. Early in 1989 the business was sold to Rykoff-Sexton, a foodservice manufacturer and distributor formed by the merger of S.E. Rykoff & Co. of Los Angeles and Sexton of Chicago. Rykoff-Sexton dropped sidelines such as candy and pasta and formed a pepper-sourcing joint venture with Devon Plantations in India, and a new plant in Ankeny was completed in 1994.

In mid-1994 Rykoff-Sexton announced that it would sell Tone to the Australian group Burns, Philp & Company. Volume 21 of the directory cites a PR Newswire release of 28 October 1994 on the completed sale, while volume 63 (2004) lists the purchase under 1995. Burns Philp, which had already acquired Spice Islands and Durkee, built a further facility at Ankeny, completed in 1996, for Tone’s products and other newly acquired lines. Volume 21 says McCormick responded to the new competitor by paying retailers for shelf space, in what several analysts described as a “spice war”, and in 1997 Burns Philp announced its intention to sell its North American spice operations.

That sale took years. just-food reported on 4 March 2004 that Burns Philp had put its North American herbs and spices unit, Tones, up for sale and appointed Credit Suisse First Boston to advance it. ACH Food Companies, the American arm of Associated British Foods, says in its corporate history that it acquired Tone Brothers in 2004; a timeline on the Durkee foodservice website dates the purchase to 2005.

On 21 September 2016 B&G Foods of Parsippany, New Jersey, announced an agreement to buy ACH’s spices and seasonings business, including the Tone’s, Spice Islands and Durkee brands and a manufacturing facility in Ankeny, according to the release as carried by NJB Magazine, and it said on 21 November 2016 that the acquisition had been completed. B&G Foods has owned Tone’s since 2016.

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.

Individual packages, pressure-packed cans, flip-top lids and a family name kept on the label.

The look of Tone’s has long been tied to its packaging. The International Directory of Company Histories says the company introduced individual packages for spices in its nineteenth-century years and sold them in orange-and-black boxes. Later packaging changes followed the products: the pressure-packed coffee cans introduced soon after 1939, and, in the 1980s under the Des Moines investors, clear plastic, hermetically sealed spice containers with flip-top lids. The directory also records a process the company developed in that period to grind spices cryogenically, freezing them at extremely low temperatures before grinding.

The range widened with its customers. In the 1980s, the directory says, consumers became interested in new spices, particularly blends with an international twist, and Tone developed fajita and taco seasonings and an Italian blend. Under Rykoff-Sexton it added a line of salt-free and MSG-free spice blends. By the late 1990s Tone was producing a wide range of seasonings and mixes, and it supplied national warehouse club chains as well as the foodservice trade.

The name itself is the family surname in the possessive, a form that has outlasted both the coffee business and the family’s ownership. In 1997, the directory says, Burns Philp placed Tone under its newly created foodservice division, where it existed “as a brand name only”. Through ACH Food Companies and now B&G Foods the name has continued on spices and seasonings, and the 2016 announcements located the manufacturing facility that came with it in Ankeny.

For a design guide, Tone’s shows how a family surname and an early colour pairing, orange and black on a small spice box, can anchor a brand through a string of owners who each changed what sat inside the pack. Compare it with Spice Islands, which has shared its owners since the 1990s, and B&G, the Manhattan pickle brand that gave today’s owner its name. For this guide we use spice-box orange, label black, paprika rust and kraft cream with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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