An emigrant’s creamery, a son’s milk route and a home-style pickle.

Vlasic is an American pickle brand owned today by Conagra Brands. English Wikipedia dates the brand’s introduction to 1942, and it traces the name back to a Detroit family business that began not with pickles but with milk.

Wikipedia says Franjo “Frank” Vlašić, a Bosnian Croat, emigrated from Livno, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to Detroit, Michigan, in 1912. At the time, Wikipedia notes, Bosnia and Herzegovina was a condominium of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Detroit he worked in a factory, and with the savings from that job he started a small creamery. His son Joseph acquired a milk route in 1922, and Wikipedia says that route eventually grew into a dairy distribution business across the state.

The move into pickles came through that distribution work rather than through farming. Wikipedia says that in 1937 the Vlasic business was approached to distribute a home-style pickle. The family later marketed its own fresh-packed pickle in glass jars, and Wikipedia says its first plant was built in Imlay City, Michigan. Wikipedia says the business expanded rapidly in the years after the Second World War, a growth it ties to a rise in how many pickles Americans ate per head over the same period.

Michigan has stayed part of the brand’s story. Wikipedia says the cucumbers used in Vlasic pickles are grown in the state, including around Mount Pleasant and Kalamazoo, and are processed at the plant in Imlay City. The brand is spelled Vlasic, while Wikipedia spells the emigrant founder’s surname with its Croatian diacritics as Vlašić.

A soup company, a spin-off, a private owner and Conagra.

The family did not keep the business. Wikipedia says Vlasic Pickles was sold to the Campbell Soup Company in 1978 Campbell, whose brands include Swanson today, kept Vlasic until 1998. On 30 March 1998, Wikipedia says, the brand was spun off into a new public company, Vlasic Foods International.

The spin-off kept developing the pickle line. Wikipedia says that on 13 April 1999 the company introduced Vlasic Hamburger Stackers, made from specially cultivated cucumbers about sixteen inches (41 cm) long and more than three inches (7.6 cm) across, so that a single pickle chip could cover an entire hamburger.

The independent company did not last long. Wikipedia says that in early 2001 Vlasic Foods International voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and that a plan to sell its pickle and barbecue-sauce units to H. J. Heinz was dropped by April of that year. Wikipedia says Vlasic has been part of Pinnacle Foods since 2001. By 2002, the economist Timothy Taylor wrote on his blog Conversable Economist in February 2024, the private investment firm Hicks Muse owned the Vlasic Pickle Company.

Pinnacle Foods later changed hands as a whole. The Shelby Report reported on 26 October 2018 that Conagra Brands had completed its acquisition of Pinnacle Foods, after Pinnacle shareholders voted to approve the deal at a meeting on 23 October. The report listed Vlasic among the brands Conagra added, alongside Birds Eye, Duncan Hines and Earth Balance. Conagra Brands has owned Vlasic since 2018. Wikipedia says that at the Conagra Brands Investor Day on 10 April 2019, co-chief operating officer Tom McGough announced that Vlasic Pickle Chips, made from vacuum-fried pickles, were in development.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are all American pickle names. Pickle brands in general reach people through a glass jar more than through any other object: a cylinder of brine, cucumbers and spice that sits on a shelf or in a chilled case, with a paper or printed label and a metal lid. Some pickles are sold shelf-stable in the ordinary grocery aisle, while others are kept refrigerated from the plant to the store, and that choice shapes where a jar is placed, how it is shipped and how the label has to read from a distance.

Because brine and cucumbers look much the same from one jar to the next, much of a pickle brand’s identity is carried by the label, the lid, the colour of the type and sometimes a mascot or a slogan. Many pickle names began as regional brands sold close to the farms and plants that supplied them, and some have since passed to national food companies. The questions worth asking are plain ones: who started it, who owns it now, and where the pickles are packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what a company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A 1974 mascot, a borrowed voice and a Super Bowl dinner party.

The brand’s mascot is a bird. Wikipedia says a stork was introduced as Vlasic’s mascot in 1974. The idea, Wikipedia says, merged the old story of the stork that delivers babies with the notion that pregnant women have a strong appetite for pickles. Vlasic used that link directly in its marketing, describing itself, in the line Wikipedia quotes, as “the pickle pregnant women crave … after all, who’s a better pickle expert?”

The stork has its own way of speaking and its own prop. Wikipedia says the modern Vlasic stork talks in a style reminiscent of Groucho Marx and holds a pickle the way Marx held a cigar. The character’s original voice was the actor Ron Masak; Wikipedia says the role has since passed to Doug Preis.

The mascot has also appeared outside Vlasic’s own advertising. Wikipedia says the stork was shown in “Icons”, a MasterCard commercial broadcast during Super Bowl XXXIX in 2005, in which the stork and a group of other advertising icons from food and cleaning products sit down to dinner together.

The product side of the identity is simpler. Wikipedia’s history puts the glass jar at the centre from the family’s early fresh-packed pickles, and it places production at the Imlay City plant using cucumbers grown in Michigan. Its owners since 1978 have been Campbell, Vlasic Foods International, Pinnacle Foods and Conagra Brands.

For a design guide, Vlasic shows how a single character, with a voice and a prop, can carry a grocery brand through several changes of owner while the jar and the family name stay in place. Compare it with Birds Eye, which joined Conagra in the same 2018 Pinnacle deal, and Claussen, the Chicago refrigerated pickle that Vlasic’s owner sought to buy in 2002. For this guide we use dill green, mustard gold, jar cream and label red with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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