Duncan Hines: A formidable competitor to Betty Crocker

In contrast to make-believe homemaker Betty Crocker, Duncan Hines was a real flesh-and-blood guy. Except he never measured up in “culinary skills.” 

Duncan Hines was neither a chef nor a baker. “He could barely cook,” wrote Nicole Jankowski of National Public Radio News. And in Hines’ wildest dreams, he never would have imagined he would go down in history as a “cake mix mogul.”

 

Hines was born in 1880 in Bowling Green, Ky. Through the Great Depression years, he was just a hard-working businessman trying to survive…and find a decent meal on the road. 

He was working as a traveling salesman for RR Donnelley & Sons, a large printing company based in Chicago, when it dawned on him that there was a wealth of useful information contained in the tiny journal that he kept in his coat pocket. 

Hines had eaten at so many local restaurants that he had begun “keeping score”…many blue plates ago. 

Jankowski said: “Hines considered himself an authority on a great many things: hot coffee, Kentucky country-cured ham and how to locate a tasty restaurant meal (in 1935) for under a dollar and a quarter.”

 

“Desperate for a clean place to dine, Hines became an investigative epicurean and self-made restaurant critic,” Jankowski said. 

“He meticulously recorded the names of the most pristine diners, the inns with the tastiest prime roast beef, where to find the stickiest honey buns and where to stop for fried chicken (Kentucky-style).”

 

In 1935, Hines and his wife, Florence, sent out a pamphlet with their Christmas cards containing a list of 167 restaurants across 33 states that he could safely recommend,” Jankowski said. 

In 1936, Hines published his first edition of “Adventures in Good Eating.” It contained the names and locations of 475 restaurants that had merited “Hines’ rigorous seal of approval.” 

“Each year, Hines broadened his exploration and published an updated edition. Millions of discerning travelers kept his book in their glove compartments to guide them as they rumbled down gravelly country roads in unfamiliar locations,” as rural America was still “a land of culinary mystery and inconsistency,” Jankowski noted. 

In the 1950s, Hines joined with Roy H. Park to form Hines-Park in Ithaca, N.Y., allowing “the Duncan Hines name to appear on everything from cartons of ice cream to the now-famous cake mixes.”

The Duncan Hines logo has been tweaked several times during the history of the brand. 

The above logo was used from 2004-2019.

 

In 1957, the entire franchise was sold to Procter & Gamble. The Duncan Hines brand is now owned by Conagra Brands…and is nipping at the heels of Betty Crocker for market supremacy.

 

Here is the current logo.

The late Cora Jane Spiller, a great niece of Duncan Hines, offered this perspective: 

“Uncle Duncan was always in a coat and tie and always wore a felt hat. He drove a Cadillac, and he saw a world of possibility through his windshield,” Spiller said. 

Historian David Hoekstra said one of Hines’ closest friends was Janet Riebman, who once portrayed Betty Crocker at restaurant conventions. 

Lots of food writers like to rank cake mixes for their readers to react. A quick analysis of the reviews indicates a split-decision. 

In general, Duncan Hines tends to score higher than Betty Crocker in the chocolate cake varieties. However, it’s just the reverse in the yellow cake categories, where Betty Crocker gets the nod. 

Take the Duncan Hines versus Betty Crocker challenge again and again. As one cake lover is fond of saying: “It’s always cake-o-clock.”

Betty Crocker ascended to ‘rock star’ status in the 1940s

In 1945, Fortune magazine named Betty Crocker as the second “best known woman” in the entire United States, runner-up to Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the United States from 1933-45), wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

That’s quite an honor for the nonexistent Ms. Crocker, who had been dubbed “America’s First Lady of Food.” Betty Crocker was and still is the fictional grande dame of General Mills, based in Minneapolis, Minn. 

Marjorie Child Husted, was the primary voice of Betty Crocker on the radio, was concerned about the welfare of women as homemakers and their feelings of self-respect. “Women needed a champion,” she said. “They needed someone to remind them that they had value.” 

“I guarantee a perfect cake every time you bake cake…after cake…after cake,” Betty said. 

On television, actress Adelaide Hawley appeared as Betty in the George Burns and Gracie Allen comedy series. George would say: “I don’t know how to bake a cake, Gracie, but here is Betty Crocker to show us how.”

 

In 1954, General Mills gave Betty Crocker “a brand.” It was the classic Betty Crocker signature in white lettering imposed on a red spoon. Instantly, the spoon assumed the role as Betty’s “kitchen helper.”

 

In 1954, General Mills decided that Betty’s official portrait, painted in 1936, needed a touch-up. Six well-known artists, including Norman Rockwell, were invited to paint fresh interpretations of Betty Crocker. The one chosen, by illustrator Hilda Taylor, was a softer, smiling version of the original image. (Rockwell’s painting came in second.)

 

Hilda Taylor's Betty Crocker

 The faces of Betty Crocker have continued to change with passing generations. The seventh version in 1986 “portrayed Betty Crocker as a professional woman, approachable, friendly, competent and as comfortable in the boardroom as she is in the dining room.”

The bouncy white bow on her blouse generated a reaction from Betty’s fans. They were “worried the bow might catch fire if she bent over a hot stove.”

 

In 1996, painter John Stuart Ingle gave the eighth (and current) Betty “an olive skin tone that could belong to a wide range of ethnicities,” said the General Mills archivist.

 

To celebrate the 100-year birthday of the creation of the Betty Crocker aura in 2021, General Mills published a collector’s edition cookbook with Betty Crocker’s all-time favorite 100 recipes. 

Cathy Swanson Wheaton, executive editor, was responsible for selecting those recipes, and she told reporter Rick Nelson of the Minneapolis Star Tribune that it was a daunting task. 

“Bettycrocker.com has 12 million visits each month – it’s one of the largest food websites out there – and our customer service department gets a million questions a year,” Wheaton said. 

A lot of recipes came from those two sources, plus the nearly 400 cookbooks that General Mills has published since “Betty was born.”

“We’ve given clever new twists” to some of the old recipes, Wheaton said. “Ingredients and methods have changed and improved over time. It didn’t make sense to share the old recipes…when people cooked vegetables to death.” 

Also, “our taste buds have moved on. We expect more flavor combinations these days,” she said. 

“The new cookbook helps consumers see that Betty’s still relevant. She’s not your grandmother’s Betty Crocker. She has that history, but she’s still going forward and still has great ideas. She trends with the times.” 

“My blood runs ‘Betty red,’ and so I’m super-honored that I can keep up the traditions,” Wheaton said. “She lives in the hearts of all of us who represent her.”

Betty Crocker has been part of Americana for 100 years

You might say Betty Crocker is older than dirt…in its dessert form, that is.

“Dirt treat” recipes began showing up in the 1980s. 

By then, Betty Crocker had already become a “senior citizen.” Lordy, she dates all the way back to 1921, making her a centenarian…plus one.

 

(Psst. Betty Crocker’s key ingredient in her “Dirt Ice Cream Cake” recipe is her Super Moist Devil’s Food cake mix.) 

Carrie Hatler of St. Paul, Minn., creator of the Forgotten Minnesota blog, said Betty Crocker is known as “America’s First Lady of Food,” but she’s not a real person.

 

“Betty Crocker was born in a boardroom of The Washburn-Crosby Company in Minneapolis in 1921,” Hatler said. (The flour-milling company merged in 1928 with a number of other mills to form General Mills.) 

Betty Crocker was “invented” to solve a problem that was generated by an advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post in 1921. 

The ad for Gold Bond Flour, a product of Washburn-Crosby, featured a jumbled picture puzzle. Contestants were encouraged to solve the puzzle and send it in for the prize of a pincushion in the shape of a sack of Gold Medal Flour, said Tori Avey, a food writer in Beverly Hills, Calif.

 

Not only did Washburn-Crosby receive more than 30,000 pieced-together puzzles, it got almost as many letters with questions about the basics of baking, almost exclusively from women. 

Samuel Gale, who was the head of the company’s advertising department back then, “never felt comfortable signing his name to letters in reply to consumers, as he suspected that women would rather hear from other women who knew their way around a kitchen,” Avey wrote. 

According to Hatler’s online post, Gale and his team had the bright idea of “creating a female personality” to answer inquiries individually. They combined the last name of a recently retired company director, “William G. Crocker,” with the first name “Betty” – a name they thought sounded warm and friendly. 

Florence Lindeberg, a secretary at Washburn-Crosby, penned Betty Crocker’s “original signature,” and Lindeberg was tasked with signing each letter “Cordially Yours, Betty Crocker.” 

In 1924, Betty Crocker “acquired a voice” with the radio debut of the nation’s first cooking show on WCCO radio in Minneapolis. Washburn-Crosby’s home economist Blanche Ingersoll portrayed Betty on the air and “promoted good cooking as the secret to a happy home.” 

As the program was picked up in other markets, different women voiced Betty in each city, reading scripts written by Ingersoll. 

Marjorie Child Husted was next in line to take over the radio microphone in 1926. She managed the Betty Crocker Homemaking Service. Her 40 home economists created and “triple-tested” recipes to meet “the Betty Crocker standard.”

 Marjorie Child Husted

As her role expanded, Husted even traveled to Hollywood to interview movie stars such as Joan Crawford, Claudette Colbert, Jean Harlow, Helen Hayes and Clark Gable…“who also enjoyed Betty’s recipes and home-cooked food.” 

In 1936, artist Neysa McMein created a portrait “to put a face to Betty Crocker.” McMein painted Betty with dark hair. She wore a red jacket over a white blouse with a frilled collar.

 

In 1941, General Mills hired Adelaide Hawley to act as Betty Crocker on television. Hawley was a popular vaudeville entertainer with a large following…but truth be told…she “had little experience of any kind with cooking.”

 Adelaide Hawley

General Mills never let that bit of information leak out to dissuade Betty’s ever-growing fan base.

The beverage aisle is missing Tab these days

Gone but not forgotten. The diet soda Tab lived 57 years before the last drop was bottled in 2020. Tab’s memories as the drink “of and for beautiful people,” will linger long. 

Tab’s television commercials featured supermodels Elle Macpherson and Jayne Kennedy as well as the “video vixen” – Donna Rupert. Even the Tab-labeled drinking glass was magically transformed and given an “hour-glass figure.”

 

Dieting teenage girls, like Celia, who said her dress size was a “double-digit chubbette,” drank one-calorie Tab in order to “keep tabs” on their weight. 

“I wasn’t terribly overweight, but when you are under 5 feet tall, it doesn’t take a lot of extra pounds to look, well, extra round,” wrote Celia Viggo Wexler, a nonfiction author and journalist. 

“Tab was very, very sweet, with the aftertaste of furniture polish. It went very well with the maraschino cherries I consumed to distract me from not eating desserts,” Wexler added. 

Introduced by The Coca-Cola Company in 1963, Tab contained no sugar. Contrary to popular belief, the name was not an acronym for “totally artificial beverage” or “tastes awfully bad.” 

Even though Tab was engineered to mimic Coke’s flavor, management avoided giving the new product a Coca-Cola identity, according to Dr. Jeffrey Miller, an associate professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. 

“Because most early diet sodas didn’t taste that great, strategists warned against associating their brands with drinks that might taint their tremendous value,” Dr. Miller said. 

Royal Crown Cola set the example when it launched Diet-Rite Cola in 1958. By 1960, Diet-Rite was the fourth best-selling soft drink in the country, trailing only Coca-Cola, Pepsi and 7 Up. 

“Coca-Cola and Pepsi, finding themselves behind the eight ball, scrambled to come up with their own diet soda offerings,” Dr. Miller said. 

“Coca-Cola wanted to come up with a soda that had a proper ‘mouthfeel’…and was attractive to women, the presumptive market. It also needed a catchy name,” Dr. Miller remarked. 

Coke’s marketing research department used its giant IBM computer to generate a list of short words with one vowel that were “G-Rated.” There were more than 185,000 options, including “Burp.” The word “Tabb” won the judges’ hearts and minds. It was later slimmed down to “Tab.” 

Tab probably should have been “retired” when Coca-Cola rolled out diet Coke in 1982. Yet, The Coca-Cola Company continued to produce Tab for nearly four more decades, even though its market share dwindled to a trickle. 

Perhaps the company learned a lesson about “customer loyalty” from the “New Coke” debacle in 1985 – when Coke was reformulated to taste like Pepsi…a 79-day blunder. 

“But there are also consequences to keeping old favorites alive,” wrote Danielle Wiener-Bronner of CNN Business. She interviewed Coca-Cola’s CEO James Quincey in December 2021, about a year after Tab was discontinued. He explained: 

“In the end, it’s a Darwinian struggle for space in the supermarket or in the convenience store. The retailer wants to make as many dollars as he or she can for each spot on the shelf.” An underperforming brand, like Tab, takes away precious shelf space and “eventually it will get pulled out.” 

Natalie Kueneman of Ketchum, Idaho, who created ILoveTab.com in 1994, said she was saddened but not shocked by “Coca-Cola’s decision to pull the plug on Tab, especially since the company hadn’t substantially marketed the drink in more than two decades.” 

Kueneman said: “Coke missed a huge opportunity to market Tab in a really fun way over the years. I don’t know why they never did.”

Necco saved from the brink of ‘candy extinction’

One of America’s most treasured brands of candy is Necco wafers. Necco even has a niche in the annals of American literature.

In a 2014 book of her memoires, author Sue William Silverman wrote: “Through breaks in the trees, the moon rounds the sky – a thin Necco wafer, an old-fashioned candy belonging to the past.” 

Indeed, the product is very old. The treat was created in 1847 in Boston, Mass., produced by the New England Confectionery Company (NECCO). 

The image of a Necco wafer floating in the night sky is being preserved, however, for future generations to enjoy as well.

 

The famous brand was rescued from bankruptcy in 2018. 

Necco was resuscitated by Spangler Candy Company, a family-owned business in Bryan, Ohio. Spangler also took in Necco’s Sweethearts brand of “conversation candies” and Necco’s Canada Mints products.

 

These “new additions” complement Spangler’s flagship brands of lollipops – Dum Dums and Saf-T-Pops. (Spangler also recently acquired Bit-O-Honey from Pearson’s Candy of St. Paul, Minn.)

 

Spangler’s President Kirk Vashaw told loyal Necco customers: “We were delighted to bring Necco wafers back into production and to share in their sweet return with fans old and new.” 

Randee Dawn, a freelance journalist, said Spangler will not alter Necco’s traditional waxed-paper wrapping or the eight-flavor lineup of lemon, lime, orange, clove, cinnamon, wintergreen, licorice and chocolate. 

Vashaw said: “Chocolate connoisseurs may notice a slightly richer taste to the cocoa. To our palate, it brings out the flavor a bit differently.” 

He said there’s no need to “improve on what already, for ‘Necco nation,’ is perfection. Candy is a simple joy in life and it’s a simple reward. People want the same thing they remember as a kid. That’s the beauty of candy – nostalgia.”

 

“Neccos have proved both durable (they won’t melt and travel well) and versatile,” Vashaw said. “Kids have used them as shingles on gingerbread houses, adults have used them as poker chips and even young Catholic worshippers have used them to practice taking communion.” 

Before Spangler stepped in, however, there was an absolute panic among Necco lovers. 

Clair Robins of CandyStore.com, an online bulk candy store in Los Angeles, reported that when the news media reported on March 12, 2018, that Necco was at risk of “going completely out of business,” it sent off shock waves and a ignited a buying frenzy. 

The CandyStore phone lines lit up. Katie Samuels of Florida called to “offer to trade her used 2003 Honda Accord for our entire inventory of Necco wafers,” Robins said. 

“Katie estimated in her desperate pitch to us that the car could be worth up to $4,000. That would buy a lot of Necco wafers. ‘Pleeeease say yes!’ she pleaded.” 

“We had to graciously turn down her offer,” Robins said. “Katie ended up buying a couple of boxes on her credit card…48 rolls of Necco wafers.” 

Two other popular Necco brands were at risk of dying as “orphans” in 2018 – unless they could be adopted. Happily, both found new homes. 

Mary Jane, an old-fashioned peanut butter-and-molasses flavored, taffy-type candy, which was invented in 1914, is now being produced at Atkinson Candy Company of Lufkin, Texas. Atkinson’s well-known brands include Slo-Poke and Black Cow.

 

The Clark Bar, introduced in 1917, with a crispy peanut butter/spun taffy core and coated in milk chocolate, has landed at Boyer Candy Company of Altoona, Pa. Boyer also makes Mallo Cups and Smoothie Cups (peanut butter and butterscotch treats).

Pine Brothers throat drops rescued from extinction

Whenever Martha Stewart gets a little tickle in her throat, she pops a soothing Pine Brothers throat lozenge into her mouth. Elvis Presley used to do the same.

 

Connecting the two cultural icons was Rudy “Tutti” Grayzell, a Rockabilly Hall of Fame singer from Saspamco, Texas. 

Grayzell was a paid spokesperson to comedically promote the old-fashioned Pine Brothers Softish Throat Drops. Appearing in costume, Grayzell sported a wild pompadour wig, wore a bunch of jewelry and displayed a pasted-on thatch of chest hair.

 

Writing about Grayzell for the San Antonio Express-News in 2011, Jim Beal Jr. interviewed Rider McDowell, chair of Pine Brothers LLC. McDowell, who is a professional screenwriter, playwright and novelist, said: 

“I’ve used Rudy in a movie and in three stage plays.I wanted somebody (for Pine Brothers) who had a great sense of humor and enormous charisma. You need that to cut through the flotsam that’s out there. Rudy can do that. He’s one of a kind. He’s almost electric in his energy.” 

“As a 17-year-old, Grayzell and his band were playing at a supermarket opening in San Antonio,” Beal reported. “Elvis Presley stopped by the gig.” Presley was impressed with Grayzell and hired him to go on the road as his opening act. 

Grayzell said: “I knew from the first time I saw Elvis in that grocery store parking lot that he was going to be a big star.” 

“One time, after a show,” Grayzell said, “my voice was giving me a little bit of trouble. I asked Elvis what he used to keep his voice so smooth. He told me he used Pine Brothers throat drops.”

 

“It wasn’t rare back then, if you were a singer, to use Pine Brothers, McDowell said. “Having ‘The King’ behind you isn’t half bad,” he joked. (Unfortunately, Grayzell died in 2019 at age 86.)

Pine Brothers was founded in Philadelphia in 1870 by brothers John Herman and George William Pine at their confectionary. 

The brand survived for more than 140 years, but clearly, it was on a respirator when Pine Brothers was acquired in 2011 by Virginia Knight-McDowell, the creator and former owner of Airborne. Her husband (Rider McDowell) had grown up in Princeton, N.J., and remembered Pine Brothers drops from his youth. 

“They tasted and felt like candy – at least I ate them that way – but they really soothed your throat,” Rider McDowell said.

 

Victoria Knight-McDowell penned an essay on entrepreneurship in 2012. She wrote: “My life as an entrepreneur began one morning in the mid-1990s when my husband awoke from a dream, and said, ‘I want to market your herbal remedy and I want to call it Airborne.’” 

“Once Airborne became successful, we began to discuss starting or acquiring other companies,” Victoria said. “We’d always felt that the most exciting time with Airborne was during the initial stages, growing the brand, versus maintaining it.” 

“Then serendipity stepped in.” They received a tip that Pine Brothers “might be ripe for acquiring, since the current owners were shifting into patented health products. Within a month we’d struck a deal to buy Pine Brothers, its assets, trademarks, inventory, recipes – everything,” Victoria said. 

“Not a day goes by when we don’t receive fan letters thanking us for bringing the brand back.”

 

Cybele May, a marketing specialist in Los Angeles, is one of those fans. He said the natural honey-flavored “pieces are beautiful little amber drops. The melt is wonderful, and they truly are soothing for a throat that’s a bit raw.”

‘Ghost brands’ tickle the fancy of business historians

How many “ghost brands” come immediately to mind? These are popular consumer products that were once mainstays…but have since “fallen dormant or out of favor.” These products are also commonly referred to as “orphan brands.”

Seth Anderson, a Chicago-based marketing consultant, said: “Some ghost brands disappear from stores altogether, while many others remain but are banished to bottom shelves in supermarkets or drugstores and get little or no marketing support.”

 

Anderson has compiled an A-List of about three dozen ghost brands that once enjoyed considerable success in the marketplace, ranging from A to W – as in “Aim” toothpaste and “White Rain” shampoo. 

Aim was introduced in 1973 by Unilever, and White Rain was launched in 1952 by The Gillette Company. You can still find these products, but they’ve been passed along to assorted “parent companies.” 

Fate brought Aim and White Rain together in the 21st century to reside in a stable of products housed under the umbrella of International Wholesale Inc. of Allen Park, Mich. 

An interesting “ghost brand” story from the annals of American commerce is the saga of James Smith. He was born in Fife, Scotland, and arrived in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1847. He opened a restaurant there and specialized in making sweets, including candy and ice cream. 

Early on, sons William and Andrew Smith joined the business. In 1852, the Smiths bought a cough drop recipe from a peddler named Sly Hawkins and made their first batch of “Smith Brothers Cough Drops.”

 

Their new lozenges were tasty “cough candy” for customers “afflicted with hoarseness, cough or colds.”

William and Andrew inherited the business after their father died in 1866. They developed one of the first factory filled packages with trademark branding, using their own pictures on their product packaging. 

Writing for Family Business magazine in 1990, Robert N. Steck said: “The Smiths spelled out the word ‘trademark’ below the family portraits. William’s picture appeared right above the word ‘trade,’ and Andrew’s above the word ‘mark.’”

 

“From that point on, the two brothers were universally known as ‘Trade’ and ‘Mark.’ Under ‘Trade and Mark’s management,’ the family business prospered. But as with all family businesses, the problem of management succession arose,” Steck wrote. 

“To which member of the rising generation should the business be trusted? Would that person prove capable? The answer to the first question was easy. Mark had never married, and Trade had but one son, named Arthur. But the answer to the second question was more difficult, for Arthur let it be widely known that he considered the family business boring.” 

“Nor did Arthur’s instincts for business seem particularly sharp. He once brought in a consultant to help determine the best markets for the product. In doing his analysis, the consultant asked Arthur, ‘Where do your biggest orders come from?’ Arthur replied, ‘Why, the postman brings them.’” 

Steck said: “Smith Brothers Cough Drops survived and prospered despite Arthur” and remained a family business for more than a century, until the company merged with Warner-Lambert Pharmaceutical Co. in 1963. 

At the time, TIME Magazine reported: “Though the Smith Brothers cough-drop business prospered under the founder’s sons, William and Andrew, Smith Brothers in recent years has lagged far behind such aggressive drops as Vicks and Luden’s.” 

“Warner-Lambert President Alfred E. Driscoll…plans to move Smith Brothers into his American Chicle division, which turns out Chiclets, Dentyne and Rolaids. Chicle’s crack 500-man sales force is likely to give competitors a few sore throats.” 

The article continued: “Driscoll…has no intention of tampering with the secret formula for the cough drops. It is known only to the late William Smith’s stepson, who each six months mixes a new batch of the formula in solitude.” 

F&F Foods of Chicago purchased Smith Brothers from Warner-Lambert in the 1970s, and the brand slowly faded into oblivion, disappearing from store shelves. 

The latest effort to revive Smith Brothers Cough Drops was launched in 2016 by LanesHealth of Manchester, N.H., a subsidiary of G.R. Lane Health Products Ltd., of Gloucester, England. 

Shoppers can still find online posts that offer the four Smith Brothers flavors – black licorice, honey lemon, wild cherry and warm apple pie.

 

Whatever happened to Pine Brothers Softish Throat Drops? 

These squishy…almost gummy…“glycerine tablets” were invented in 1870 in Philadelphia by brothers John Herman and George William Pine, who operated a confectionary. 

That’s going to be a “ghost product” story with a happy ending…just you wait and see.