Who owns aunt jemima

While the brand will be new to store shelves, the boxes and bottles of syrup will still have the familiar red packaging of Aunt Jemima. Quaker said it sought input from customers, employees and external cultural experts as it developed the new brand name. Skip Navigation. Key Points. Quaker Oats, a division of PepsiCo, had announced last June that it would retire the Aunt Jemima brand, saying the character's origins are "based on a racial stereotype.

In a move to do away with a problematic past, Quaker Oats parent company PepsiCo announced on June 17 it would retire its Aunt Jemima character. The beaming face of America's beloved pancake mix and maple syrup has long been rooted in a painful and racist history.

However on social media, many expressed outrage over the perceived erasure of the legacy of the women who have served as the brand's models. A popular claim circulating on Facebook is that Nancy Green, the original Aunt Jemima model, was an inspirational figure.

She was a magnificent cook. The initial recipe for the pancake mix was the brainchild of Chris Rutt, a former editorial writer for the now-defunct St. Joseph Gazette. Rutt and business partner Charles Underwood had acquired a flour mill and, by trial-and-error, perfected a recipe for self-rising, premixed pancake flour. According to M. Manring, author of " Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima ," despite the novelty of their new product, Rutt and Underwood encountered difficulty branding it.

While wandering the streets of St. The song features a mammy, a racial stereotype of the Black female caretaker figure devoted to her white family.

This image of supposed Southern hospitality inspired the hopeful entrepreneur. More: Aunt Jemima brand is changing its name and removing the namesake Black character. Unfortunately, Manring wrote, Rutt and Underwood were unable to sell their new Aunt Jemima breakfast product. The partners eventually sold their company and the recipe to R. Aunt Jemima is that kind of stereotype that is premised on this idea of Black inferiority and otherness.

In a piece for The New York Times , Richardson wrote that the inspiration for the brand's name came from a minstrel song, "Old Aunt Jemima," in which white actors in blackface mocked and derided Black people.

The logo, Richardson wrote, was grounded in the stereotype of the "mammy Download the NBC News app for breaking news and alerts. The company's own timeline says Aunt Jemima was first "brought to life" by Nancy Green, a Black woman who was formerly enslaved and became the face of the product in In , a judge dismissed a lawsuit against the company by two men who claimed to be descendants of Anna Harrington, a Black woman who began portraying Jemima in the s, saying the company hadn't properly compensated her estate with royalties.

Quaker said that the new packaging will begin to appear in the fall and that a new name will be announced later. Daina Ramey Berry, a professor of history at the University of Texas, said the decision to drop the name and the image of Aunt Jemima is significant because the brand normalized a racist depiction of Black women.

Aunt Jemima, she said, "kept Black woman in the space of domestic service," associating them with serving food under a "plantation mentality.