Betty Crocker wasn’t a real person.
Back in 1921, Gold Medal flour ran a promotion offering shoppers a pincushion shaped like a sack of flour if they could solve a jigsaw puzzle. When Gold Medal’s parent company, Washburn Crosby Co., received thousands of responses, along with questions about baking, they decided to develop a warm (albeit fictitious) personality to represent the brand. They came up with Betty Crocker, and the rest is history.
Her last name was chosen to honor a former employee.
What’s in a name? If you ask Washburn Crosby, a lot. Betty’s surname was selected to pay tribute to William G. Crocker, a recently retired director of the company. As for Betty, the advertising folks liked this name for its cheerful, friendly quality.
Betty Crocker’s first portrait isn’t of one woman, but many.
So if Betty Crocker isn’t a real person, who’s the woman in the picture? When painter Neysa McMein created the first Betty Crocker portrait in 1936, she created a composite, blending the features of the women who worked in the company’s home service department. Over the years, the Betty Crocker image has been reimagined several times to keep her looking contemporary. It’s been over 90 years since Betty Crocker was “born”, but she’s still alive and kickin’. Even today, customer service representatives use the Betty Crocker moniker to answer your burning cooking questions.
The big red spoon wasn’t always Betty Crocker’s logo.
It’s difficult to imagine Betty Crocker without the company’s big red spoon logo, but it wasn’t always that way. In 1953, Betty Crocker’s iconic signature was enclosed in a red oval, but a few months later, the company decided they didn’t think the logo “popped,” and enlisted Lippincott & Margulies to create the now-famous spoon.