From a tinsmith’s warehouse to a packing company.

Van Camp’s traces its roots to Indianapolis in 1861. English Wikipedia says that in that year Gilbert C. Van Camp, working with Calvin Fletcher and Martin Williams, built a cold-storage warehouse in the city to keep fruit, meat and other perishables. Van Camp was not a grocer by training. Wikipedia’s biography of him, drawing on the Encyclopedia of Biography of Indiana of 1899, says he learned the miller’s trade as a young man, then became a tinsmith, making much of the tinware and stoves he sold, and worked at that trade around Greensburg, Indiana, from 1845 to 1860.

The move into canning came quickly. Wikipedia says that in 1862 the business began canning raspberries, blackberries, peaches and tomatoes in six-gallon cans, which were sold to retail grocers; the grocers resold the contents by the pint and the quart and returned the cans to be refilled. When the company’s own fruit farm could not keep up, packers were sent out with wagons loaded with cans and cooking pans to can fruit in the orchards and haul it back to Indianapolis. Wikipedia, citing a 1998 social history of the period, also says Van Camp secured a contract to supply Union troops during the Civil War.

The business went through several names. Wikipedia says it moved into larger quarters in 1868, was renamed G. C. Van Camp & Son around 1877 or 1878, and went bankrupt in 1879. After a reorganisation, Gilbert Van Camp launched the Van Camp Packing Company in 1882, narrowing its line to canned tomatoes, corn and peas. A fire destroyed the business in 1891, and the family started again.

Two stories of a can of beans.

The product that carried the name forward was pork and beans in tomato sauce, and its origin is told in more than one way. Wikipedia’s biography of Gilbert Van Camp, citing an article in Printers’ Ink of 14 October 1908, says that in 1894 an Indianapolis jobber brought a load of canned baked beans to the Van Camp plant to be reprocessed, and that Frank Van Camp, the founder’s son, found them flat and added some of the company’s ketchup, giving rise to “Van Camp’s Pork and Beans with Tomato Sauce”.

The Metropolitan News-Enterprise of Los Angeles took a different view. In a column published on 20 July 2006, Roger M. Grace wrote that a 1935 federal trademark application gave 1882 as the year Van Camp’s beans entered commerce — the year the Van Camp Packing Company was launched. Grace noted that the company advertised the product as “Boston Baked Beans Prepared with Tomato Sauce”, that some advertisements told buyers to heat the cans in boiling water, and that a 1898 decision of the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recorded the Van Camp Packing Company as making catsup since 1888. He also questioned the chronology then given on the brand owner’s website, pointing out that Frank Van Camp had not been born in 1861.

On selling the beans, the sources agree more closely. Wikipedia, citing Printers’ Ink, says that in December 1894 the Van Camps placed a small advertisement in the Indianapolis News looking for house-to-house canvassers to sell cans of pork and beans. The company went on to advertise with street-car cards, outdoor signs and three-sheet posters, and in 1896 its advertisements began running in national magazines. Frank Van Camp later left the family business, and Wikipedia says he went on to found Van Camp Seafood, the tuna company behind Chicken of the Sea.

The ownership changed in the twentieth century. Wikipedia says that in 1933 the business was acquired by James and John Stokely, who ran the Stokely canned-tomato company in Newport, Tennessee, forming Stokely-Van Camp, Inc., with headquarters in Indianapolis. In the 1970s Stokely-Van Camp agreed to produce, market and distribute a new drink called Gatorade. In 1983 the Quaker Oats Company bought Stokely-Van Camp, makers of Van Camp’s and Gatorade, and in 1995 Quaker sold Van Camp’s to ConAgra, which has owned the brand since then.

Design and documentation.

Canned and shelf-stable meal brands in general live or die on a few square inches of label. A can or a box sits in a long run of near-identical shapes on a pantry shelf, so the label has to do the work that a bottle’s silhouette or a shop’s window might do elsewhere: a band of colour that can be spotted from the end of an aisle, a name set large enough to read at a glance, and a picture of what is inside.

Many of these brands also lean on a face or a figure — a mascot, a cartoon character or a portrait of a cook or founder — and those images can outlast several owners, or be redrawn and retired as tastes change. Colour coding often does quieter work, telling one variety from another within the same range.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its food is made and how its labels and characters have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family name kept on a single category.

The range under the Van Camp’s name has narrowed over time. Wikipedia says a number of foods have been sold under the name over the years, including a pasta product called Tenderoni, and that by 2005 the range consisted of canned cooked beans: pork and beans, baked beans, kidney beans, a vegetarian version of the pork-and-beans recipe, chili and Beanie Weenies, which Wikipedia describes as beans with slices of frankfurter in tomato sauce.

The look of the brand has deep roots too. Wikipedia illustrates its article with a Van Camp’s Pork & Beans label from around 1900, a reminder that the name had been printed on cans for decades before the Stokely, Quaker and ConAgra years. The early advertising Wikipedia describes — want ads, street-car cards, posters and national magazine pages in the 1890s — sold the beans under the family surname, and the possessive “Van Camp’s” is the form the brand uses today.

The Stokely years also link the name to another drink. Wikipedia’s article on the Quaker Oats Company describes Stokely-Van Camp, at the time of Quaker’s purchase in 1983, as the maker of both Van Camp’s and Gatorade; after Quaker sold the bean brand to ConAgra in 1995, the two names went separate ways, with Gatorade staying at Quaker.

For a design guide, Van Camp’s shows how a family surname in the possessive can carry a single, plain product through Stokely, Quaker and ConAgra ownership. Compare it with Bush’s Beans, a family bean canner from Tennessee, and Campbell’s, another nineteenth-century canning name. For this guide we use tomato red and bean brown with label gold and a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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