Maryland Firsts: An article series exploring our state’s contributions to American industry
The next installment in our Maryland Firsts article series reveals the sweet ’n spicy beginnings, growth, and impact of major Maryland food manufacturers Domino Sugar and McCormick & Company.
For several generations, everything has been quite nice for the tastiest trades in town
The sugar and spice trades were once the world’s most expansive and lucrative industry. For 5000 years it dominated all ventures. Along the Silk Road to India and the Middle East, black pepper, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cardamom found a home. But it was by sea that the trade prospered, ultimately bringing profound social, emotional, and economic impact to Europe. Over the course of its history, the industries, with the power of pepper, cane, and cinnamon, would establish new empires and find new continents. It defined what it meant to be wealthy and powerful. It changed the bland, monotonous diets of the well-off, and eventually the world populous.
McCormick & Company’s global headquarters in Hunt Valley, Maryland. The company moved from its downtown Baltimore location in 1970, and in 2018 unveiled a new, state-of-the-art facility. Photos courtesy McCormick & Company.
McCormick’s Roots
The industry would come to Baltimore much later. In 1889, a 25-year-old Baltimorean named Willoughby McCormick began a startup business in his one-room basement. He had some flavoring extracts, but most of his extracts were fruit syrups and root beer—not spices at all. With three assistants he sold his products door-to-door and within a year of making profits, was able to move to larger quarters. In 1896, the commitment to spices was made when he bought the F.G. Emmett Spice Company of Philadelphia.
Today, McCormick & Company is a Fortune 500 company with $5.6 billion dollars in revenue and stock that sells at about $87 per share. It has the largest spice producing facility on the planet, a 320,000-square foot campus in Baltimore County’s Hunt Valley.
Before it’s move from the City of Baltimore, the nine-story national headquarters and manufacturing center built in 1921 enthused and relaxed the public with spicy odors wafting across the Inner Harbor. The roaring ’20s was an age of optimism and prosperity. And then McCormick the leader died in 1932 and in the Depression, the company lost its way.
His nephew Charles McCormick, who was Johns Hopkins educated, would rescue the company. A man who understood human nature and respected people, the younger McCormick believed a company was nothing without an engaged workforce. He raised salaries by 10 percent, reduced work hours from 56 to 45 per week, instituted profit sharing, and began a series of junior boards that became a multiple management style—a Baltimore first that was eventually adopted by other corporations nationally and abroad. Within the first five years of this leadership style, McCormick instituted 2,000 ideas for improvement recommended by the junior boards. The model continues today.
Along the way McCormick of the Inner Harbor introduced several industry firsts. They were the first to introduce gauze covered tea bags, for example. Generations later, the company became the first to build an AI system to analyze decades of data to build new flavor combinations—the resulting platform “ONE” launched in 2019.
Driven by a strategy for growth of acquisition, joint ventures, and as a supplier to food corporations such as McDonalds, McCormick & Company would own brands in 170 countries including popular names like French’s, Lawry’s, Zatarain’s, Cattlemen’s BBQ Sauce, and dozens more, including Maryland’s distinctive yellow and blue can of spice, Old Bay, purchased in 1990.
Old Bay seasoning has developed into a full line of products produced by McCormick. Photo courtesy McCormick & Company.
Iconic Old Bay
Created in Baltimore, Old Bay was founded in 1939 by Gustav Brunn, a Jewish refugee who owned a spice company in Germany. Arrested during the Nazis Kristallnacht, Brunn was shipped to Buchenwald Concentration Camp. Within several weeks and a hefty sum of money, he was released and immediately shipped to America, specifically Baltimore, with his wife, two children, and a spice grinder.
He was denied employment by McCormick, so he founded the Baltimore Spice Company and created the secret formula for Old Bay seasoning, specifically for seafood, and marketed it to the businesses that lined the Harbor. Originally named “Delicious Brand Shrimp and Crab Seasoning,” it was rebranded Old Bay after the Chesapeake’s Old Bay Steamer Line. Today, Old Bay is used on Utz crab chips, “Crabby Bo” covers the lips of a glass of National Bohemian beer, and Flying Dog brewery has a summer ale, Dead Rise, made with Old Bay. It is so popular that Old Bay hot sauce for the Super Bowl sold out in 40 minutes. So did Pepperidge Farms’ Old Bay Goldfish Crackers. True Temper Sports Company released a lacrosse stick with Old Bay decals. Currently they too are sold out.
Baltimore Steam Packet Company (Old Bay Line) photo distributed by Old Bay Line as a souvenir. The steamer line was the inspiration for the naming of Old Bay seasoning.
McCormick’s departure from Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in 1970 signaled a change coming to American industry within Baltimore. Attracted by the nation’s deepest harbor and modern railroad system, industrial manufacturing giants has long flocked to the harbor, especially in the 19th century. Proctor and Gamble, Pepsi, Western Electric, Allied Chemical, and steel mills in Sparrows Point called Baltimore home. Eventually, new inventions in building infrastructure and a need for more space were making old centers of commerce obsolete. Blue collar jobs and the workingman’s paradise were being replaced by white collar business. Today, only one major manufacturing business remains in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, Domino Sugar.
The iconic Domino Sugars sign overlooking Baltimore’s Inner Harbor has been a staple of the vista since 1951. Photo by David Robert Crews
Sweet As Domino Sugar
It is a virtual newcomer, opening in 1922, but its 120- by 70-foot neon sign erected in 1951 proclaims this manufacturing plant is here to stay. Domino is the second largest sugar refinery in the USA, producing 6.5 million pounds of raw sugar cane each day. It is the only refinery that produces sugar in retail size plastic tubs and distributes 350 billion single serving packets per year. On certain days, the smell of crème brûlée wafts around Locust Point.
Baltimore’s harbor was once home to six different sugar and molasses refineries during the boom years 1865 to 1873. Molasses is made from the “white gold” sugar cane industry and was introduced to America and Louisiana by Christopher Columbus in 1493 during his spice trade route of discovery. But a downturn in molasses demand doomed Baltimore’s numerous refineries.
Domino, allured by the harbor’s big ships capable of carrying huge amounts of cane and a rail transportation network that supported shipping sugar across the country, set down new roots. Domino, founded in 1901, is said to take its name from the sugar cubes that looked like the tiles of the popular turn of the century game.
In 1922, its new building in Baltimore was hailed as “a monument of state of the art modern industrial design.” The building remains unchanged and is on the National Register of Historic Places. In the 20th century, women—the primary cooks of the house—were early marketing targets. Radio adds proclaimed, “keep your man peppy with lots of sugar energy” and “mother is interested in quality. She selects 100 percent pure Domino sugar.” Promoting tours of the noisy conveyer belt plants, Domino opined “our doors are open…and you will be welcome, especially the housewives of Baltimore.”
But it is Domino’s willingness to innovate that continues to rank it among the largest sugar companies in the world. Sugar is an international, volatile business dependent on government support and price controls. Peter O’Malley of American Sugar Refining, Inc. represents the industry, and identifies the company’s sustainable and community innovations which include the use of solar panels, storm water controls, and support of oyster sanctuaries to clean our water. “Dominos is a good neighbor and good steward of its history and its environment,” he says. With 500 employees, Domino continues the blue collar, hardworking reputation and legacy Baltimore is known for.
Today, the grand neon sign remains a fixture over the Inner Harbor. Recently restored with LED lights and reinstalled on Domino’s 100th birthday celebration, the red sign is so big that a tractor trailer could drive through the letter O. It is visible across the harbor, the Patapsco River, and continues to capture our attention.
Author Laura Lippman attributes her lead character, Tess Monaghan, in her book The Sugar House, with this thought as she views the harbor…
“If she were God, that was where she would make her home. Atop a neon sign overlooking Baltimore, guarding a mountain of sugar.”
