What did Aunt Jemima say about the new PepsiCo rebrand?
"Child, please."
That’s a hand mask in the photo. Those little yellow spots are where your eyes and nose go. It was a promotional item used around 1915, when the R.T. Davis Milling Company in St. Joseph, MO owned the company and changed its name to Aunt Jemima Milling Company. Davis purchased the company from (drumroll, please) Pearl Milling Company, which was owned by Christian Ludwig Rutt and Charles Underwood. Rutt and Underwood trademarked the Aunt Jemima image and name before selling. And trust me, that image was every bit as grotesque and distorted.
When the announcement was made about Aunt Jemima’s name change/rebrand, I immediately thought, ‘Oh, they are just returning to their heritage.’ The nod to the original company is not a good thing but it does make sense. If you don’t know the history of Pearl, Davis or all of the Black women to publicly portray or lend their likeness to the brand, then this makes perfectly good sense. But if you’re given to thinking and maybe even studying a bit of history, then the new rebrand appears careless.
Lore has it that Rutt attended a white minstrel show, where white men in blackface performed the song "Old Aunt Jemima." The concept of a smiling Black “mammy” wearing a red bandana as a head covering took with Rutt and business partner Underwood, and they packaged Rutt’s pancake mix recipe bearing the first of a series stereotyped images of a smiling Black woman on its packaging. It was a great marketing ploy given most of their market either had a Black woman preparing their meals or they had the memory of “mammy” cooking for them as a child. That image in various forms remained for over a century.
To be fair, Black women purchased the pancake mix too. We kept the complete mix as a staple in our cupboards. It was convenient and good.
To be even fairer, the Black women who portrayed Aunt Jemima made a decent wage for their time and likeness. No one, at least not me, wants to punish them or analyze their impetus. I understand what it’s like to need to pay the bills, and if truth be told, I could have done the same thing back then.
Still, Quaker Oats and its parent company PepsiCo need to go back to the drawing board with this rebrand. Why?
The very heritage they are paying homage to is the very heritage that perpetuated the stereotype. What’s to celebrate?