Aunt Jemima is a discontinued American breakfast brand for pancake mix, table syrup, and other breakfast food products. The brand was retired in 2021 and is now sold under the name Pearl Milling Company. The original version of the pancake mix was developed in 1888–1889 by the Pearl Milling Company and was advertised as the first "ready-mix" cooking product.
Aunt Jemima was modeled after, and has been a famous example of, the "Mammy" archetype in the Southern United States. Due to the "Mammy" stereotype's historical ties to the Jim Crow era, Quaker Oats announced in June 2020 that the Aunt Jemima brand would be discontinued "to make progress toward racial equality", leading to the Aunt Jemima image being removed by the fourth quarter of 2020.
In June 2021, amidst heightened racial unrest in the United States, the Aunt Jemima brand name was discontinued by its current owner, PepsiCo, with all products rebranded to Pearl Milling Company, the name of the company that produced the original pancake mix product. The Aunt Jemima name remains in use in the brand's tagline: "Same great taste as Aunt Jemima."
Nancy Green portrayed the Aunt Jemima character at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and was one of the first black corporate models in the United States. Subsequent advertising agencies hired dozens of actresses to perform the role as the first organized sales promotion campaign.
History
In 1888, St. Joseph Gazette editor Chris L. Rutt and his friend Charles G. Underwood bought a small flour mill at 214 North 2nd St. in St. Joseph, Missouri. Rutt and Underwood's "Pearl Milling Company" produced a range of milled products (such as wheat flour and cornmeal) using a pearl-milling process. Facing a glutted flour market, after a year of experimentation, they began selling their excess flour in paper bags with the generic label "Self-Rising Pancake Flour" (later dubbed "the first ready-mix").
Branding and trademark To distinguish their pancake mix, in late 1889, Rutt appropriated the Aunt Jemima name and image from lithographed posters seen at a vaudeville house in St. Joseph, Missouri. At the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the company set up a pancake-cooking display next to the "world's largest flour barrel" (twenty-four feet high). Nancy Green, a former slave from Montgomery County, Kentucky, portrayed the character and cooked pancakes, sang songs, and promoted the product.
In 1915, the well known Aunt Jemima brand was the basis for a trademark law ruling that set a new precedent. Previously, United States trademark law had protected against infringement by other sellers of the same product, but, under the "Aunt Jemima Doctrine", the seller of pancake mix was also protected against infringement by an unrelated seller of a different but related product: pancake syrup. Aunt Jemima became one of the longest continually running logos and trademarks in the history of American advertising.
Logo The earliest advertising was based upon a vaudeville parody, and it remained a caricature for many years.
Quaker Oats commissioned Haddon Sundblom, a nationally known commercial artist, to paint a portrait of an obese actress named Anna Robinson, and the Aunt Jemima package was redesigned around the new likeness.
James J. Jaffee, a freelance artist from the Bronx, New York, also designed one of the images of Aunt Jemima used by Quaker Oats to market the product into the mid-20th century.
Just as the formula for the mix changed several times over the years, so did the Aunt Jemima image. In 1968, the face of Aunt Jemima became a composited creation. She was slimmed down from her previous appearance, depicting a more "svelte" look, wearing a white collar and a geometric print "headband" still resembling her previous kerchief.
In 1989, marking the 100th anniversary of the brand, her image was again updated, with all head-covering removed, revealing wavy, gray-streaked hair, gold-trimmed pearl earrings, and replacing her plain white collar with lace. At the time, the revised image was described as a move towards a more "sophisticated" depiction, with Quaker marketing the change as giving her "a more contemporary look", which remained on the products until early 2021.
Rebranding of 2020–2021 On June 17, 2020, Quaker Oats announced that the Aunt Jemima brand would be discontinued and replaced with a new name and image "to make progress toward racial equality". The image was removed from packaging in fall 2020, while the name change was said to be planned for a later date.
Within one day of the June 2020 announcement, other similarly motivated rebrandings and reviews of brand marketing were also announced, including for Uncle Ben's rice (which was renamed Ben's Original), the Mrs. Butterworth's pancake syrup brand and bottle shape, and the "Rastus" black-chef logo used by Cream of Wheat.
Descendants of Aunt Jemima models Lillian Richard and Anna Short Harrington objected to the change. Vera Harris, a family historian for Richard's family, said "I wish we would take a breath and not just get rid of everything. Because good or bad, it is our history." Harris further stated that "Erasing my Aunt Lillian Richard would erase a part of history." Harrington's great-grandson Larnell Evans said "This is an injustice for me and my family. This is part of my history." Evans had previously lost a lawsuit against Quaker Oats (and others) for billions of dollars in 2015.
On February 9, 2021, PepsiCo announced that the replacement brand name would be Pearl Milling Company. PepsiCo purchased that brand name for that purpose on February 1, 2021. The new branding was launched that June, one year after the company announced that they would drop Aunt Jemima branding. PepsiCo referenced the Aunt Jemima brand by logotype on the front of the packaging for at least six months after the rebrand. Following that period, PepsiCo said that it wouldn't be able to completely and permanently abandon the Aunt Jemima brand due to trademark law; if it did, a third party could obtain and use the brand.
Character of Aunt Jemima
Aunt Jemima is based on the common enslaved "Mammy" archetype, a plump black woman wearing a headscarf who is a devoted and submissive servant. Her skin is dark and dewy, with a pearly-white smile. Although depictions vary over time, they are similar to the common attire and physical features of "mammy" characters throughout American history.
The terms "aunt" and "uncle" in this context were a Southern form of address used with older enslaved persons. They were denied use of English honorifics, such as "mistress" and "mister", respectively.
A British image in the Library of Congress, which may have been created as early as 1847, shows a smiling black woman named "Miss Jim-Ima Crow", with a framed image of "James Crow" on the wall behind her. A character named "Aunt Jemima" appeared on the stage in Washington, D.C., as early as 1864. Rutt's inspiration for Aunt Jemima was Billy Kersands's American-style minstrelsy/vaudeville song "Old Aunt Jemima", written in 1875. Rutt reportedly saw a minstrel show featuring the "Old Aunt Jemima" song in the fall of 1889, presented by blackface performers identified by Arthur F. Marquette as "Baker & Farrell". Marquette recounts that the actor playing Aunt Jemima wore an apron and kerchief.
However, Doris Witt at University of Iowa was unable to confirm Marquette's account. Witt suggests that Rutt might have witnessed a performance by the vaudeville performer Pete F. Baker, who played characters described in newspapers of that era as "Ludwig" and "Aunt Jemima". His portrayal of the Aunt Jemima character may have been a white male in blackface, pretending to be a German immigrant imitating a black minstrel parodying an imaginary black female enslaved cook.
Advertising
Marketing materials for the line of products centered around the "Mammy" archetype, including the slogan first used at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois: "I's in Town, Honey".
At that World's Fair, and for decades afterward, marketers created and circulated fictional stories about Aunt Jemima. She was presented as a "loyal cook" for a fictional Colonel Higbee's Louisiana plantation on the Mississippi River. Jemima was said to use a secret recipe "from the South before the Civil War", with their "matchless plantation flavor", to make the best pancakes in Dixie. Another story described her as diverting Union soldiers during the Civil War with her pancakes long enough for Colonel Higbee to escape. She was said to have revived a group of shipwrecked survivors with her flapjacks.
Beginning in 1894, the company added an Aunt Jemima paper doll family that could be cut out from the pancake box. Aunt Jemima is joined by her husband, Uncle Rastus (later renamed Uncle Mose to avoid confusion with the Cream of Wheat character, while Uncle Mose was first introduced as the plantation butler). Their children, described as "comical pickaninnies", were named Abraham Lincoln, Dilsie, Zeb, and Dinah. The paper-doll family was posed dancing barefoot and dressed in tattered clothing, and the box was labeled "Before the Receipt was sold". (Receipt is an archaic rural form of recipe.) Buying another box with elegant clothing cut-outs to fit over the dolls, the customer could transform them "After the Receipt was sold". This placed them in the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches American cultural mythos.
Rag-doll versions were offered as a premium in 1909: "Aunt Jemima Pancake Flour / Pica ninny Doll / The Davis Milling Company". Early versions were portrayed as poor people with patches on their trousers, large mouths, and missing teeth. The children's names were changed to Diana and Wade. Over time, there were improvements in appearance. Oil-cloth versions were available circa the 1950s, with cartoonish features, round eyes, and watermelon mouths.
A typical magazine ad from the turn of the century created by advertising executive James Webb Young and the illustrator N.C. Wyeth shows a heavyset black cook talking happily while a white man takes notes. The ad copy says, "After the Civil War, after her master's death, Aunt Jemima was finally persuaded to sell her famous pancake recipe to the representative of a northern milling company."
However, the Davis Milling Company was not located in a Northern state: Missouri in the American Civil War was a hotly contested border state. In reality, Aunt Jemima never existed, created by marketers to better sell products.
Controversy
Although the Aunt Jemima character was not created until nearly 25 years after the American Civil War, the clothing, dancing, enslaved dialect, and singing old plantation songs as she worked, all harkened back to a glorified view of antebellum Southern plantation life as a "happy slave" narrative. The marketing legend surrounding Aunt Jemima's successful commercialization of her "secret recipe" contributed to the post-Civil War nostalgia and romanticism of Southern life in service of America's developing consumer culture—especially in the context of selling kitchen items.
African-American women formed the Women's Columbian Association and the Women's Columbian Auxiliary Association to address the exclusion of African Americans from the 1893 World's Fair exhibitions, asking that the fair reflect the success of post-Emancipation African Americans. Instead, the Fair included a miniature West African village whose natives were portrayed as primitive savages. Ida B. Wells was incensed by the exclusion of African Americans from mainstream fair activities; the so-called "Negro Day" was a picnic held off-site from the fairgrounds.