Pesto Pants information will fill this page. Perhaps one day, even a blog post, revealing the secret story behind the name and logo of 'Pesto Pants'. :-).

Here is some other food name and logo history to entertain you in the meantime.

Did you ever wonder why Heinz Ketchup bottle has a label that says "57 Varieties"?

Well, it turns out that while riding a train in New York City in 1896, Henry John Heinz noticed an ad for "21 styles of shoes." He thought that it was a clever way to advertise the great number of choices of canned and bottled foods that his company sold. Back then, the company already sold more than 60 items but Heinz put together "5" (his lucky number) and "7" (his wife's lucky number) to get "57 varieties".

That number must be really lucky, because H.J. Heinz Company grew to be a behemoth in the food industry. It currently sells more than 5,700 varieties in 200 countries and territories.

Oh, and by the way, Heinz' first product wasn't ketchup. It was bottled horseradish made from his mother's own recipe.

Betty Crocker

The story of how Betty Crocker came to be is quite interesting. In the early 1920s, the Washburn Crosby Company of Minneapolis (a big milling company that later merged with other companies to form General Mills) got a lot of mails from its customers asking baking questions.

In 1921, the company thought that it would be better to sign the responses personally, so they combined the last name of its director, William Crocker, with the first name "Betty" (chosen because "it sounded cheery, wholesome, and folksy.") (Source) The famous Betty Crocker signature was penned by a company secretary who won a contest.

The whole Betty Crocker persona was carefully engineered to appeal to women:

A group of college educated women were hired to develop Betty’s persona. Her picture and signature appeared in print ads. Cooking demonstrations were organized showing off Betty’s “solutions to domestic woes.” [...]

On the radio, Betty could speak to her loyal followers. Cooking and Gold Medal Flour were central to the script. But so were housekeeping, time management, friends, family, and husbands. “If you load a man’s stomach with boiled cabbage and greasy fried potatoes,” Betty once told listeners, “can you wonder that he wants to start a fight, or go out and commit a crime?” But she also reminded women that their role as homemakers was important, and that their aspirations could be “as great as woman could have in any occupation.”

In 1924, Betty Crocker debuted on the radio (on the nation's first cooking show). In 1936, Betty Crocker got a face: artist Neysa McMein brought together all women in the General Mills' Home Service Department and created a composite face. Over the next eight decades, Betty had several makeovers to update her look to fit the times!

(If you're interested in finding out more about Betty Crocker, Susan Marks wrote the definitive book, Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America's First Lady of Food)