History
In 1903, Richard Hellmann (1876–1971)[4] emigrated from Vetschau, Germany, to New York City, where in August 1904 he married Margaret Vossberg, whose parents owned a delicatessen. In mid-1905, he opened his own delicatessen at 490 Columbus Avenue, where he developed his first ready-made mayonnaise, dished out in small amounts to customers. It became so popular that he began selling it in bulk to other stores, constantly improving the recipe to make it avoid spoilage longer.
In 1913, after continued success, he built a factory to produce his mayonnaise in even greater quantities, and began selling it on September 1 under the name Hellmann's Blue Ribbon Mayonnaise, seeing sales greatly increase after switching from hotel-size large stone jars to customer-size clear glass jars that could be reused for home canning after selling them a rubber ring for 1 penny.
In May 1914, he simplified the label from three ribbons to a single blue ribbon, and trademarked it along with the name "Blue Ribbon Mayonnaise". In 1915, he sold his store and opened a small mayonnaise factory at 120 Lawrence Street (now West 126th) in Manhattan; by the end of the year, he had a larger factory at 495/497 Steinway Street in Long Island City. In February 1916, the company was incorporated as Richard Hellmann, Inc., after which he briefly tried other products, such as horseradish and pumpernickel bread, before deciding to concentrate on mayonnaise and expand distribution outside the New York area. In November 1919, he licensed John Behrmann to make the mayonnaise in Chicago.[4]
In 1920, the New York Tribune asked three chefs to rate commercial salad dressing brands, and they voted Hellmann's mayonnaise the best, noting that it had more oil (85%) than any other salad dressing they tested. This helped to boost sales.
On July 29, 1920, Hellmann became a U.S. citizen; later that year, Margaret Hellmann died, and on May 11, 1922, he married second wife Nina Maxwell, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William J. Maxwell.
In 1922, after sales of the mayonnaise were launched in Toronto, Ontario, Hellmann began building a larger (5-story) factory at 34-08 Northern Boulevard in Long Island City. While honeymooning in San Francisco, California, Hellmann decided to open a plant there too, setting up an office and soliciting salesmen. In 1922 the Hellmann's mayonnaise cookbook was published by Behrman in Chicago.[4]
Hellmann's Mayonnaise thrived on the U.S. East Coast, selling $15 million a year by 1927 with $1 million in profits. In August 1927 Postum Foods bought the Hellmann's brand, allowing Hellmann to retire. In 1931, Postum (now General Foods) merged Hellmann Inc. into "The Best Foods, Inc." along with the pre-existing Best Foods Inc. line of mayonnaise, then owned by the Gold Dust Corporation. [5] By then, both brands of mayonnaise had such commanding market shares in their respective halves of the country that the company decided that both brands and recipes be preserved in their respective territories.
To this day, Best Foods Mayonnaise is sold west of the Rocky Mountains, specifically, in and west of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, as well as Colby and Goodland, Kansas. Hellmann's is sold east of the Rockies, specifically, in and east of the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, parts of Colorado and Texas.[6][7]
In 1955, Best Foods acquired Rosefield Packing Co., makers of Skippy peanut butter. In 1958 Best Foods was bought by Corn Products Refining Company to form Corn Products Company, which in 1969 became CPC International Inc. Hellmann's mayonnaise arrived in the United Kingdom in 1961 and by the late 1980s had over 50% market share.[8]
Since 1960, Hellmann's and Best Foods have been advertised together, with its copy originally read out or displayed as Hellmann's in the East, Best Foods in the West. Around 1968 the Best Foods brand added the Blue Ribbon from the Hellmann's brand, making them more like sister products. Since 2007, both brands have exactly the same design. In 1997, CPC International renamed itself Bestfoods, focusing on packaged food products (including the Hellmann's brand), and spun-off the corn-refining business into a new company called Corn Product International, currently known as Ingredion.[9] Bestfoods was acquired by Unilever in 2000.[10]
On February 1, 2023, Hellmann's was discontinued in South Africa.[11]
