The story
Founded by Margaret Rudkin in 1937.1
Margaret Rudkin began baking bread in 1937 for her youngest son, Mark, who had asthma and was allergic to most commercially processed foods. Her son's doctor recommended the bread to his other patients and encouraged her to sell it to the public. Her first commercial sale was to her local grocer in Fairfield, Conn., Mercurio's Market. Rudkin's husband Henry, a Wall Street broker, began taking loaves of bread with him to New York to be sold in specialty stores. Rudkin moved the growing business out of her kitchen and into her garage, and then into a factory in 1940. Rationing during World War II forced her to cut back production due to the restricted availability of quality ingredients. In 1947, Rudkin opened a modern commercial bakery in Norwalk, Connecticut, and soon after added plants in Illinois and Pennsylvania.
On a trip to Europe in the 1950s, Rudkin discovered fancy chocolate cookies that she believed would be popular in the United States. She bought the rights to produce and sell them, and the Distinctive Cookies line was born. Under her management, Pepperidge Farm continued to expand into other products, including frozen pastry items and, later, the Goldfish snack cracker from Switzerland. In 1961, she sold the business to the Campbell's for $28 million and became the first woman to serve on its board of directors. She drew on her knowledge and experience to write The Margaret Rudkin Pepperidge Farm Cookbook in 1963, which was the first cookbook ever to make the New York Times Best Seller list.
The Pepperidge Farm logo is based on the Grist Mill in Sudbury, Massachusetts, which supplied the company with 48 tons of whole wheat flour monthly from 1952 to 1967.
During the 1970s and 80s, the company used the slogan "Pepperidge Farm remembers" for a long-running television commercial campaign that leaned heavily upon nostalgia, particularly of life in the early decades of the 20th century.
From Wikipedia’s article on Pepperidge Farm, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5