A New Orleans grocer and his extract.

Zatarain’s began with a New Orleans merchant, Emile A. Zatarain Sr., whom English Wikipedia describes as an entrepreneur of Basque descent. The sources give two starting dates. Wikipedia says he opened a grocery in New Orleans in 1886, and that the business’s early success was root beer: citing a 2015 NOLA.com history, it quotes his great-great-granddaughter Allison Zatarain as saying he introduced Papoose Root Beer at an exposition in New Orleans on 7 May 1889, under a name he trademarked. The company history published by Funding Universe dates the founding of the business itself to 1889, the year also given in Wikipedia’s summary box.

The drink soon became an ingredient. Wikipedia, citing New Orleans CityBusiness in 2015, says Zatarain found it more cost-effective to sell his root beer blend as an extract, sold in barrels to restaurants and markets where it was mixed with carbonated water. He formed a company called Papoose Pure Food Products and built a factory in the city, and began to import and pack olives, pickles and spices. Funding Universe lists root beer extract, seasonings and bleach among the business’s earliest products, and says the range later took in Creole mustard and pickled goods.

The family kept control until the 1960s. Both Wikipedia and Funding Universe say the business was incorporated on 29 May 1922 as E.A. Zatarain & Sons, Inc., trading as Zatarain’s Pure Food Products, as Zatarain’s sons took on more of its daily running. Ownership passed to Emile A. Zatarain Jr. and his wife, Ida May Bennett Zatarain, who, the two sources say, created recipes for products such as Remoulade Sauce and Olive Salad. Wikipedia says the company still makes root beer extract for home brewing alongside its seasonings.

Out of the family, across the river.

The family sold the business in 1963. Funding Universe, citing New Orleans CityBusiness, says that by the 1960s Zatarain’s was short of capital and relied on outdated packaging equipment, and that James Grinstead Viavant, founder of the Avondale Shipyards in New Orleans, bought Zatarain’s Pure Food Products from the family that year. Viavant merged it with his Pa-Poose Products company and another recent purchase, Pelican State Lab, owner of a fish-frying mix called Fish-Fri, which was brought under the Zatarain’s label. Production moved to a modern plant on a five-acre site in Gretna, Louisiana, across the Mississippi from New Orleans; bleach, dyes and pickled goods were dropped, and in 1967 the company became Zatarain’s, Inc.

The 1980s brought a quick succession of owners. Funding Universe and Wikipedia say Viavant sold the business in May 1984 to Central Soya, a company based in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which sold it about eighteen months later to Wyndham Foods, a San Francisco holding company. Wikipedia then records a sale in 1987 to Martha White Foods of Brentwood, Tennessee, and several further owners in the late 1980s, including American Brands. In 1993, the two sources say, Zatarain’s was taken private in a buyout by Zatarain’s Partnership LP, a group made up of Citigroup Venture Capital and several Zatarain’s employees.

The present owner arrived in 2003. The New York Times reported on 9 May 2003 that McCormick & Company had agreed to buy the brand, and Funding Universe says the acquisition was completed in June of that year; the Times-Picayune’s report of the same day, as listed by Funding Universe, carried the headline that the food-mix operation would stay in Gretna. McCormick has owned Zatarain’s since 2003, and Funding Universe records the business as a wholly owned McCormick subsidiary with its address in Gretna. Wikipedia, citing New Orleans CityBusiness in July 2015, notes an expansion of the company’s Gretna facility that year.

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.

How the boxes named the cooking.

The products that carry the name today are rooted in Louisiana cooking. Wikipedia groups them as crab and shrimp boils — a mesh bag of spices, formerly cheesecloth, used to season boiled seafood, plus a liquid concentrate — Creole mustard, a stone-ground brown mustard, the seasoned cornmeal Fish-Fri, and seasonings and blends, together with ready-to-serve dinners such as jambalaya, gumbo and red beans and rice, sold frozen or as a dry boxed mix to which water is added.

The boxed dinners shaped how the brand describes itself. Funding Universe says the company rolled out boxed rice dinners in 1985, under Wyndham Foods, and that Zatarain’s briefly labelled some of its products with the word “Cajun” in the mid-1980s. Wikipedia says the boxes used “Cajun” to follow a cooking trend popularised by the New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme, and that when the fashion faded the company moved to describing its products as “Louisiana-style” or “New Orleans-style”.

The names on the boxes have also been defended in court. In 1983, Wikipedia says, Zatarain’s sued Oak Grove Smokehouse for trademark infringement over Fish-Fri, and the court held that Fish-Fri qualified for protection but that Oak Grove’s use of “Fish Fry” was a fair use. In October 2017 the NBA announced that the New Orleans Pelicans had named Zatarain’s as their jersey patch sponsor, carrying the name onto the city’s basketball court.

For a design guide, Zatarain’s shows how a regional food name can keep its sense of place through a century of changing owners, from a family grocer to a shipyard founder, holding companies and a spice multinational. Compare it with Ben’s Original, another Southern rice brand on the pantry shelf, and McCormick, its owner since 2003. For this guide we use cayenne red and gumbo brown with mustard gold on rice cream with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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