Search Results

This chapter charts the history of the Skippy brand of peanut butter. Skippy was launched in 1933, five years after Peter Pan, amid the Great Depression. Skippy peanut butter was the brainchild of Joseph Rosefield (birth name Rosenfield), a native of Louisville, Kentucky. The Rosefield Packing Company would be the most successful business to come out of Alameda, California. Before the company turned its attention exclusively to the manufacture of peanut butter, it was one of the largest pickle makers in the state of California. By the 1920s the Rosefield Packing Company was making its first brand of peanut butter called Luncheon. Rosefield then developed a more successful concept and patented it: stabilizing peanut butter via the process of hydrogenation. Skippy peanut butter expanded rapidly. When Skippy turned profitable in 1940, it began to advertise. Skippy would eventually become America's best-selling peanut butter for more than thirty years.

This chapter charts the history of the Peter Pan brand of peanut butter and the hydrogenation process. The 1920s saw progress in the peanut butter industry with the introduction of hydrogenation. Hydrogenation raises the melting point of peanut oil so that it is solid at room temperature, preventing it from separating from the peanut solids. This is why peanut butter with hydrogenated oil doesn't need to be refrigerated. Joseph Rosefield of Alameda, California is widely acknowledged for the first patent to hydrogenate peanut butter. But it was Pittsburgh inventor Frank Stockton who filed a patent for hydrogenating peanut butter on March 17, 1921—almost three weeks before Rosefield. Peter Pan is ordinarily credited as the first hydrogenated peanut butter, but that's not accurate; credit goes to Heinz, whose hydrogenation pedigree dates to 1923.

This chapter focuses on how the Skippy brand of peanut butter became the market leaders in the peanut butter industry in the United States. After World War II, Skippy cemented its dominance in the peanut butter industry, registering $6 to $7.5 million in sales a year between 1947 and 1949. Its sales reputedly exceeded the total of the next three nationally advertised brands combined, which may have been Peter Pan, Heinz, and Beech-Nut. In the spring of 1963 Norman Rockwell, the most iconic of American artists, made four drawings for the Whispering Sweepstakes, a full-color Skippy advertising campaign that ran in the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies' Home Journal, and American Home. In 1955 the Rosefield Packing Company was purchased by Best Foods, ending forty years of ownership by the family of Joseph Rosefield, the man who created Skippy. Frank Delfino represented the third generation of leadership at the company.