Aunt Jemima (Pearl Milling Company)
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Aunt Jemima (Pearl Milling Company), historical brand of pancake mix and breakfast foods. The Pearl Milling Company was founded in 1888, and the following year it began producing its signature pancake mix, which would later be branded Aunt Jemima. Accused of engaging in racial stereotyping, it was rebranded from Aunt Jemima to Pearl Milling Company by its current owner, PepsiCo, in 2021. It was a prime example of the risks companies can face in brand marketing.
Newspaper editorial writer Chris Rutt and his partner, mill worker Charles G. Underwood, founded the Pearl Milling Company in St. Joseph, Missouri, and began selling a fast self-rising pancake mix that incorporated flour, lime, and salt—and, later, corn sugar and condensed sweet milk. Although innovative, the product, which bore the company’s name and the likeness of a smiling Black woman, was not a success, and Rutt and Underwood sold the firm in 1890.
The name and image of Aunt Jemima were drawn from the histories of both American slavery and minstrelsy. The name came from a minstrel song dating to 1875 called “Old Aunt Jemima,” which had sequels in songs throughout the 1880s such as “Jemina’s Wedding Day”; in 1889 Rutt had attended a minstrel show in St. Joseph during which the first song was performed. The image was that of what has been called the “mammy,” a popular trope of an enslaved older Black woman who cooked and cleaned for her white owners, apparently quite content with her lot in life. The image did not materially change following Black emancipation: it was represented by a dark-skinned heavyset woman of indeterminate middle age who wore an apron and a bandana as a headscarf. With a broad smile and exaggerated teeth and lips, the mammy figure was a staple of blackface vaudeville, a simpleminded character whose domain was the kitchen.
Pearl Milling Company’s buyer, the R.T. Davis Mill and Manufacturing Company, continued to use Rutt and Underwood’s imagery on its packaging. Alerted to her by a Chicago food wholesaler, Davis went a step further by hiring a real-life Aunt Jemima named Nancy Green, who had been born into slavery in Kentucky and then worked as a maid for a Chicago attorney, to represent the brand at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, where she made pancakes and told scripted nostalgic stories about the Old South. An advertising firm added the necessary backstory, including Green’s supposed “loyal service” to a Louisiana slaveholder whom she protected from raiding Union soldiers. So successful was the character and the product line, along with its Lost Cause romanticism, that Davis renamed his firm Aunt Jemima Mills in 1914.
Later Davis promotions included a “jolly Aunt Jemima” rag doll collection, cookie jars, and cutout paper dolls inserted inside boxes of pancake mix. But the “living Aunt Jemimas” were central to Davis’s marketing. Following Green’s death at the age of 89 in 1923 and continuing until 1967, a series of Black women took on the Aunt Jemima role, appearing at fairs and other venues to promote the product line, which later expanded to include frozen waffles and syrup. Among the foremost living representatives after Green were Anna Robinson, who played the role from 1933 to 1951 and weighed about 350 pounds, and Aylene Lewis, who played the role at the Aunt Jemima Pancake House at Disneyland, where Jemima’s slaveholder, Colonel Higbee, was also a fixture.
Responding to criticism of the racialized branding of its product, the Quaker Oats Company, which had purchased Aunt Jemima Mills in 1925, redrew the mammy image of Aunt Jemima in 1968 with her bandana replaced by a plaid headband, her face somewhat slimmed, and her skin lighter in tone. In a second revision in 1989 the character lost her headband entirely and wore pearl earrings and a lace collar, her hair slightly gray. The company retained the brand name, however, even though by the 1960s “Jemima” had become a vernacular term associated with subservience, akin to “Uncle Tom” and a related pejorative from the 1960s, “handkerchief-head.”
Public attention to the problematic image of Aunt Jemima, as well as a steadily declining market share among Black consumers, led to another rebranding campaign by the Quaker Oats Company. In 1994 legendary soul artist Gladys Knight was hired to appear in advertisements promoting the Aunt Jemima line in the role of a modern working grandmother, but this did nothing to reverse declining sales, with one Black marketing researcher commenting, “Aunt Jemima is a reminder of how whites saw African Americans 100 years ago—as servants.”
In 2001 PepsiCo purchased Quaker. Racialized product branding had long since begun to disappear: for example, the California-based restaurant chain Sambo’s rebranded itself beginning in the 1970s, with some locations renamed as Jolly Tiger and others as No Place Like Sam’s, before going bankrupt in 1984. Similarly, protests by Hispanic activists against the use of a Spanish-speaking Chihuahua, beginning in 1997, to market Taco Bell restaurants led to the quiet termination of the dog-based campaign in 2000.
Even so, PepsiCo left the Aunt Jemima brand largely intact until the murder in the summer of 2020 of a 46-year-old Black man named George Floyd, which led to worldwide protests. PepsiCo then retired the Aunt Jemima brand, announcing, in the words of the chief marketing officer of Quaker Foods North America,
We recognize Aunt Jemima’s origins are based on a racial stereotype. While work has been done over the years to update the brand in a manner intended to be appropriate and respectful, we realize those changes are not enough.
PepsiCo replaced the brand name with Pearl Milling Company in February 2021, thus bringing the brand’s history full circle. After the renaming, other companies with racialized brands quickly followed suit, including Mars Foodservices, which renamed its Uncle Ben’s brand of converted rice (its name derived from another trope of slavery) to Ben’s Original, and B&G Foods, which removed the “Black chef” figurehead from the packaging of its Cream of Wheat line of farina porridge.