🎼”Bring Out The Best Foooooooods, Bring Out the Best!” 🎼

This may be the least interesting thing I ever post, but a lot of you were eager for me to blog about food and since I don’t cook and generally have little to no interest in food, this is the best I can do.

So I went into the grocery store to buy mayonnaise the other day. I know; hold on to your seats. This sounds like the beginning of an epic story.

But seriously, I went to the store to buy mayo the other day and I couldn’t find it. I looked next to the mustard and ketchup, because that’s where mayonnaise is, because all of those things go together. But not in New Zealand, apparently.

I literally looked everywhere in the store for mayonnaise before asking an employee for help. He directed me to the……

…salad dressings. (I apparently had not “literally looked everywhere in the store,” but why would mayonnaise be next to salad dressings).

And then there’s the slogan: “Bring Out the Best.” I grew up with the tv ad jingle for Hellman’s mayonnaise, which went “Bring Out the Hellmaaaaaaan’s, Bring Out the Best!“. Was Best Foods ripping off Hellman’s with not only identical labels, but identical slogans? The nerve of them. The absolute nerve.

That’s how I ended up down the internet rabbit hole of mayonnaise (that’s also how I just ended up writing the worst sentence I’ve ever come up with). I googled Hellman’s vs. Best Foods and found out that they were two separate brands: Hellman’s was started in 1913 in NYC by Kingdom of Prussia-born Richard Hellman; Best Foods was started sometime in the 1920s by California-based Postum Foods who seemed to be capitalizing off the wild success of Hellman’s.

In August of 1927, Postum Foods–later renamed Best Foods–bought Hellman’s. The products are nearly identical, though some claim that Best Foods is “tangier.” Because everyone west of the Rockies knew the mayo as “Best Foods” and everyone east of the Rockies knew it as “Hellman’s,” they decided to keep both brand names. In 2000, both brands were sold to the British company Unilever. To quote Wikipedia: “The Hellmann’s brand is sold in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains; Latin America; Europe; Australia; the Middle East; Canada; India, and Pakistan. The Best Foods brand is sold in the United States west of the Rocky Mountains; East Asia; Southeast Asia; Australia, and New Zealand.” (Yes, according to Wikipedia, Australia carries both brands. Aussie friends, please confirm or debunk this).

So there you go: the United States is culinarily-divided by two identical yet differently-named brands of mayonnaise and New Zealand grocery stores stock mayonnaise next to the salad dressings.

UPDATE. My wonderful friend Leah, a Kiwi living in Australia, immediately went to the nearest grocery store just to resolve the Best Foods-and/or-Hellman’s situation in Oz. She sent me this photo confirming that both brands indeed exist, side by side, on Aussie shelves. She added: “Did I go to the supermarket just for this photo? Yes. Did I then have to find something to buy just so I didn’t feel naughty or like I shoplifted? Also yes. ”

You’re a champion, Leah!