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Recipes Resurrected : North Carolina Culinary Treasures from the Archive

Three Assorted Asheville Food Ads, 1913

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Through Time and Taste: Advertising NC Foods
Food advertising in North Carolina has taken many forms over the years. It hasn’t always been the brightly colored billboard seen while driving along the highways or the commercials that air during primetime television. The earliest form of advertisement was simply word of mouth. From farm to farm and friend to friend, word would spread of available produce to be bought and traded throughout communities across the state. The foodstuffs farmers produced in surplus of their subsistence farming, would then be offered to others in exchange for other products or services (Agan, 2020). In colonial North Carolina, crops such as tobacco and rice were used in lieu of money and given a fixed value by the Assembly (Franklin, 1926, p. 573). During the same period, North Carolinians when trading amongst themselves and not with the English, would trade more corn and pork than tobacco, hemp, rice, or indigo (Franklin, 1926, p. 568).
Food advertising has advanced alongside technology, improving in quality, creativity, and performance. Early printings of advertisements in North Carolina newspapers and other publications were no-nonsense–from the state’s first printer, James Davis, who established the North-Carolina Gazette in New Bern in 1751 through the mid 1800s. They listed the business’ name, usually the location (not always the exact address), its purpose such as meat market or wet goods grocer, saloon, or confectionery. Beyond those core descriptors, little else was included unless the business was financially well off.
With the improvement of printing presses, businesses began including images with their advertisements. These were not reproduced photographic images but rather engravings that could be coated in ink and pressed into paper to replicate the same image across all printings of that day’s newspaper edition. The engravings were meticulously placed into the page layout alongside typeface. Image engravings of non-business specific items were often reused over and over again as it saved time and money if individual engravings did not have to be produced for every advertisement run in a paper. For example, both of these fish merchant ads appeared in the 1893 Business Directory of the City of New Berne, N.C. They were placed 23 pages apart in the directory, contain different typeface, and information, but the fish located at the center of each ad remains the same.
Around the same time that images were starting to be included in advertisements, American consumer culture began to flourish. The onset of this consumer culture at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries was spearheaded by the industrialization of the nation (Higgs, 2021). American consumers were no longer limited to the offerings of their local shops as they could now mail-order products or travel to big cities to visit department and grocery stores ten times the size of their neighborhood stores. Local newspaper advertisements help tell this story, as some reveal offerings of produce out-of-season to a region, or things that represent another cultural landscape. The increased availability of diverse foods led to consumer trends that can be traced through advertisements, as exhibited in this timeline of North Carolina food advertising here.
Because of the way advertisements tell the story of people and their food tastes, advertising has become synonymous with American and North Carolina history. The history of the state coincides with the advertisements in its media. Such evidence is gleaned from not only products advertised, but also the language used, printing methods, and images included. For example in these advertisements, we can gather a larger context from simply looking at these advertisements, including the era they are from, their intended audience, etc.
In an attempt to stand apart from each other, brands in the early 1900s began relying heavily on advertising their products to consumers in order to construct a narrative about what they offered, or provide direction on how the product could be useful to a consumer. These advertisements were not limited to the printings in newspapers. Other formats of advertising include, but are not limited to: mural advertisements painted onto the sides of buildings, and ads printed in promotional materials for sporting events (such as this Wilson Score Card ), ads placed in city or state directories which could include full or partial page printings, ads on the covers, ads in the margins of directory pages, or even printing on the edges of the book. Advertising space was and still is a hot commodity. Other forms of advertising include food packaging, signage, billboards, and even sports teams’ uniforms.
An example of the wide variety of advertising in North Carolina can be seen here in these Melville Dairy items. Melville Dairy was a dairy farm in Burlington, Alamance County, North Carolina. It was founded in 1927 and served as the chief supplier of dairy products to the county until it was bought out by Guilford Dairy in 1967. Melville Dairy’s products and influence reached beyond the confines of Alamance County as it purchased Raleigh’s Smith Dairy in 1948, operating Smith-Melville Dairy until 1953. Melville Dairy branding and advertising appeared in numerous newspapers, city directories, yearbooks, on butter molds, and a Melville Dairy little league baseball team.
The advertising of North Carolina food products helped put NC based foods on the national market–for some, eventually the worldwide market too. These international NC food brands include Krispy Kreme which went abroad in 2001 when they opened their first store outside of the U.S. in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. Although most NC food brands can’t be found on the shelves of grocery stores worldwide, the growing popularity of American themed snack shops has increased the accessibility to NC and American products. These products, often directly tied to a person’s consumption of American television or films, have created a new way for NC to reach other parts of the world. Although Pepsi is sold internationally, it is much harder to come by than Coca-Cola, but they can both be found in these international American grocers. These shops often stock the brightest and most recognizable American brands, including North Carolina’s own Texas Pete hot sauces and Mt. Olive Pickles. Another international NC reach is the sourcing of pickles from other countries to ensure that Mt. Olive Pickle Co. can provide the same quality product year round–often sourcing cucumbers from Canada, Mexico, and India. No matter where the cucumbers are grown, they’re all still processed and packaged in the town of Mount. Olive, North Carolina.
References and Further Reading:
Agan, K. (2020). Farming and Agriculture: Working the Fields. NCpedia.
https://www.ncpedia.org/history-farming-north-carolina-k-8
Agribusiness. The Scott Family Collection. (2014, March 20).
https://www.scottcollection.org/explore/agribusiness/#:~:text=Scott%20and%20his%20br
other%2C%20Ralph,was%20sold%20to%20Guilford%20Dairy
Bishop, R. (2010). Agriculture in North Carolina during the Great Depression. NCpedia.
https://www.ncpedia.org/agriculture/great-depression
Franklin, W. N. (1926). AGRICULTURE IN COLONIAL NORTH CAROLINA. The North
Carolina Historical Review, 3(4), 539–574. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23514713
Higgs, K. (2021, January 11). A Brief History of Consumer Culture. The MIT Press Reader.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-brief-history-of-consumer-culture/
Williams, W. J. (2006). Advertising. NCpedia. https://www.ncpedia.org/advertising