The Real Story Behind The Betty Crocker Logo

There are some brand logo parts that you could separate from their accompanying text and many Americans could still identify them, like the Arby's hat and McDonald's Golden Arches. The iconic red wooden spoon of the Betty Crocker logo could rank among those items, too. The logo's creation is a simple story of putting what ends up sounding like an obvious twist on an existing concept, as tends to be the case with most successful logos.

While the logo might be a real piece of Americana, there has never been a real Betty Crocker behind the baking goods brand, as PBS detailed. The name is for the product line, not any actual woman. Smithsonian Magazine explained that the marketing strategy was to create a fictional Betty Crocker to push the idea of the products as necessary to having the quintessential happy home. PBS noted the fictional Betty made her first appearance in 1921 in a Gold Medal Flour ad in the Saturday Evening Post.

While the story of the brand is interesting on its own, it's incomplete without the development of the logo that has graced the products for decades. Once again, it's all about pushing the product.

According to General Mills, their company is behind the famous red spoon logo. It established its relationship with Betty Crocker in 1946 by opening the Betty Crocker Test Kitchens in Minneapolis. In 1953, General Mills says, the logo was a simple red oval with white lettering within. General Mills explained that from there, artists at marketing agency Lippincott & Margulies added the spoon handle and stem, also changing up the font of the brand name inside what became a spoon.

General Mills continued by explaining the new logo made its first appearance on bags of Gold Medal Flour in 1954 and then spread to the rest of the product line. The new logo could be described as simply the icing on the cake for the brand, however. By that time, the baking goods had already become a household name due to radio shows and television ads, as Smithsonian Magazine laid out. In addition, Betty Crocker's website mentioned there were real women who answered inquiries by homemakers in letters.

General Mills noted there are more than 200 products bearing that iconic red spoon logo now, including the famous boxed cake mix that forms a base for these dangerously easy three-ingredient cakes you'll want to make all the time. Even if the spoon you are working with while making those cakes isn't red, now you know where the red spoon on the box came from.