The Grand Mayonnaise Conspiracy

Join me down the mayo rabbithole

My wife does collage using vintage magazines (you can see her work here) and has a ton of them lying around the house.

She recently saw this ad:

There’s so much to love in this. The pipe-smoking, well-fed husband, the modern housewife assuring her mother this newfangled mayo was better than the homemade slop she used to make.

Mostly, though, there’s the note on the bottom reminding people it’s “Best Foods” in the West and “Hellmann’s” in the East.

You may recall my writing about this:

Since then, I’ve been down a mayo rabbit hole. Did you know they used to make mayonnaise bowls?

Throughout what follows, try and imagine being the first person to care deeply about mayonnaise. Here’s what I’ve found.

Mayonnaise evolved more than it was invented, likely in French-occupied Spain in the late 18th or early 19th century as a descendent of aioli.

With all due respect to my West Coast friends, the only name that matters in the history of mayonnaise is Richard Hellmann, German immigrant and old-world food disruptor.

I got the following facts from all over the internet, but the last site I visited was probably the site most of the other information was stolen from. Here it is and it has lots more amazing Hellmann’s mayo stories.

Here are a couple quick facts:

Hellmann married into the deli business and likely started with his wife Margaret’s family recipe. By the time he was selling it regionally, though, he had tweaked it beyond recognition to make it more stable and to standardize the taste.

He went to Europe to see about some of their processes. There, purveyors were shipping their mayo in wooden butter boxes like this:

Hellmann thought jars would be better, especially since customers could reuse them for canning. I don’t know whether he was the first one to realize that, but people came to expect mayonnaise in glass. It was a selling point when Kraft debuted its “Miracle Whip” in the 1930s (more on that soon).

Hellmann planned on taking the Titanic back to the U.S., but (thank god!!) found something cheaper that got to New York sooner.

Eventually, he got out of the deli business and into the condiment business, but mayo was the only place Hellmann’s dominated.

Not long before he retired, Hellmann set up a mayonnaise factory in San Francisco that Postum Foods (which became Best Foods) would subsume in the merger. Also worth noting is that Hellmann’s was selling $15 million a year in mayonnaise east of the Rockies in 1927.

Postum Foods is the Post Cereal Company, FYI.

Hellmann died in 1971!

Conspiracy Part 1

My intuition is that Best Foods copied the Hellmann’s recipe. An alternative explanation is that they independently discovered the best recipe for stable, shippable mayonnaise. The problem with that view is there’s no way Best Foods, the newer company, also randomly had almost an identical label as well.

Although I can’t find any more information along those lines, it is conspicuous that not long after Hellmann’s tried breaking into the West Coast market, Best Foods bought the company.

It’s hard to express how seriously Americans took mayonnaise in the early 20th century. I mean, they used it as party dip. My guess is quality mattered. Because of that, I’m here to argue that Best Foods might have saved mayonnaise as the preeminent egg-based spread.

I also will live and die and never come to terms with a world where hostesses served a bowl of mayonnaise with sliced fruit for dipping. Not that I’m against it, but the calories and naïve decadence are tough. I absolutely would dip a grape in mayonnaise and be horrified at myself for doing it.

There’s not a lot of solid information about why they kept two separate names, except that both had major name brand recognition and dominant market status. However, if Best Foods closed down Hellmann’s, it would open up a hole rising companies could exploit (Try Manhelm’s Mayonnaise!).

Plus, there was a culture change afoot.

Kraft introduced Miracle Whip in the 1930s, after the mayo merger, as an ostensibly lo-cal salad dressing alternative to mayonnaise. “Try something different!” was an early tagline.

Allegedly invented in Chicago, it had a vague margarine-like success, but the fact that it used less oil than mayonnaise may have held it back. It’s worth noting that in the 1920s, ads didn’t mention the fact that it was “Real” mayonnaise. the rise of imitators may have been the inspiration for the addition.

Hellmann’s Mayonnaise might have benefitted from the invention of electric light and the smear campaign against lard that was hearing up.

The Grand Conspiracy II

At the turn of the century, candlemaker Proctor and Gamble was in trouble as electricity took hold in the cities. The candle company had all this cottonseed oil it wouldn’t be turning into candles anymore, so it invested in a process that made it edible. Eventually, cottonseed oil would become “vegetable” oil and, from there, Crisco.

Except.

People loved lard. It was crazy cheap and tasted good. Crisco came from a lab and, well, wasn’t bacon-flavored. Getting Americans to switch from a meat-based item to a veggie one was a tall order (imagine trying it today).

Capitalizing on Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” which literally told readers how the sausage was made, Proctor and Gamble pitched Crisco as the clean alternative to the filthy, slaughterhouse leftovers being foisted on the American people.

As late as the 1930s most American households still were without electricity, but the writing was on the wall. “The Jungle” was revived as Union protests exploded with the Depression and Upton Sinclair was running for governor of California.

The anti-lard, pro-vegetable-oil onslaught continued and, right around that time, look what made it to the top of the Hellmann’s/Best Foods ad:

I do not know if that’s a picture of a 1930s celebrity chef. I do know Hellmann’s hired Mario Batali to write a mayo-forward cookbook for its 100th anniversary.

Miracle Whip not only had less “healthy” salad oil than Hellmann’s but was also made with cornstarch (a filler and unfortunate reminder about the things people did to stretch food).

Juggling ads

Warning: You could spend hours watching identical Hellmann’s and Best Foods TV ads. These are only two of several over the decades.

Note the emphasis on salad oil.

Since Best Foods and Hellmann’s have the same number of syllables, the people writing the jingles merely had to focus on the message and record two separate spots. I picked out 10 identical mayonnaise commercials, but you could really spend a whole afternoon watching two versions of the same commercial.

Some of these are wonderful. Some are horrifying. The best are a combination of the two.

So that’s everything I think you need to know about mayo and a couple of links in case I’m wrong and you wanna know more. I’m happy to hear from any Duke’s fans out there miffed by its exclusion.

Keep the Faith,

Tony

PostScript

Here’s another gentle reminder to follow along on my Chats and Notes. I’ve gotta be honest. It’s really hard for me to send out more than a couple emails a week because I don’t want to be a pest.

Here’s a recent post from my Notes: