Who are our oldest food makers?

Sam Edwards' ham house in Virginia peanut country.

I've been working on a spread for next spring's catalog about the oldest companies we work with. Some have been around for decades, some for centuries. We even have one that's a millennium old this year. It's been an interesting experience to think about them more deeply, bringing up lots of questions. Like, why are they still around? More importantly, how are they still around and making great food? How much did they have to change along the way? Who decided what to change and what not to change? How did they transition when their founder left the business? I ran across this article about why there are so many old companies in Japan that explains how traditional firms like Nintendo manage succession (these days it's often done by the owner adopting an adult into the family to run the business—a surprise to me).

Some of our venerable food makers and the year they got in business:

1014 Castello di Cacchiano olive oil in Tuscany

1731 Amarelli licorice in Cosenza

1880 Usinger liverwurst in Milwaukee Wisconsin 

1898 Rizzoli anchovies in Parma Italy

1900 Cope's corn in Rheems Pennsylvania

1900 Roi olive oil and sauces in Badalucco Italy

1903 Raye's mustard in Eastport Maine

1909 Broadbent cured meats in Kuttawa Kentucky

1925 Koeze peanut butter in Grand Rapids Michigan

1926 Martelli pasta in Lari Italy

1926 Edwards cured meats in Surry Virginia

1947 Benton's cured meats in Madisonville, Tennessee

 

Catalog design: Keep text and images close to each other

From time to time I'll describe some of the principles I use to design our catalogs.

Leonardo da Vinci had it right by me. Mix text and images wherever you can, embedding each within the other, so the text and images are close to each other. That way you don't have to search for the text that explains your image. You also don't have to move your eyes back and forth as far between the two—losing your place and tiring your eyes—in order to understand what you're seeing and reading.

This is how the principle looks applied to one of our bread pages, which have remained essentially unchanged for many years.

Compare this to a typical catalog that uses a block of text with numbers or letters to connect the images and copy. Reading while looking away to refer to the picture is a pain, which is probably one reason why most people rarely read catalogs these days.