10,000 items, 5,000 square feet, 160 years of history: Inside General Mills’s brand archive

Brands are part of history. And some of that history might be interesting to the average person.

Did you know that Wheaties was behind what was likely the first commercial jingle, which hit the airwaves on Christmas Eve back in 1926? Or that Betty Crocker was reportedly the second most-recognized woman in America among homemakers (behind Eleanor Roosevelt, of course) in the 1940s?

Other history, though, is probably most valuable to the people who work at that brand. Say marketers are reviving a bizarre ad from the ’90s that’s developed a cult fandom over the years, as General Mills’s snack brand Gushers did last fall with “FruitHeads.” It would certainly help to be able to dig into old files and use everything you could from when that ad was created.

Enter the brand archive, which can be helpful for everyone from history aficionados to brand marketers looking to accurately reference a company’s own history. Brand archives have been getting a workout in recent years, with new creative work regularly referencing older efforts and major anniversaries.

General Mills is celebrating 160 years amid the 250th anniversary of America, and it has also maintained a company archive for more than four decades. To understand what goes into corporate archival work, we asked Natasha Bruns, senior corporate archivist at General Mills, to give us the lowdown on what an archive for a consumer packaged goods company includes, and how the company’s brand marketers tap into it.

Inside the archive

General Mills started its archive in 1981 and has more than 10,000 individual records, according to Bruns, within roughly 5,000 square feet of physical archive space. The archive has three employees managing the space, which is divided into different sections, which are arranged based on the primary material, ranging from packaging to inventory. In its advertising section, print ads date all the way back to the 1800s.

“Our collection is very broad,” Bruns said. “It spans so much great innovation from General Mills over our last 160 years, and that’s everything from letters written to Betty Crocker to original packaging for Bisquick when it first came out, cookbooks from Betty, and original packaging for things like Wheaties and Nature Valley.”

As for the day-to-day work of an archivist, who may, like Bruns, have a history degree and a master’s in library and information science, can vary.

“There’s a lot of different things that I’m helping support,” Bruns said. “Different brands will reach out with historical questions, wanting to know the history of their brands, the context for when something like Bisquick was created, or how Betty Crocker got her start, and they’ll want to understand the history of how Betty evolved over time, for example, and learn how Betty Crocker has connected with consumers over the years.”

Questions can range from the historical to the sometimes logistical, like checking if a brand released a specific flavor previously and, if so, when that was released. Some days, the work will involve pulling together material for company tours, and other days may include researching presentations and talks about the history of a brand.

“Every day is a little bit of a learning experience,” she said.

Archive this

Beyond the work of digging through the archives for the various General Mills brands, which also include Cheerios, Lucky Charms, and Pillsbury, much of the job involves thinking about the archive of the future.

“While the archivist does collect all the things from our history, it’s also very forward-looking,” she said. “I’m always looking to see what people are working on today and what will be useful for the future generations of marketers and brand teams, because we want to, as much as possible, capture the things that Betty Crocker is working on today or that Wheaties is doing right now in order to help inform future generations of marketers.”

The vastness of the advertising landscape today, with marketers making many different kinds of ads for different media environments, has expanded the scope of archival work.

“That is definitely one of the biggest challenges of a corporate archivist,” Bruns said. “There’s so much being generated all the time. ‘What do you decide to keep?’ And we try to keep a collection of a little bit of everything, which can be pretty complicated. But we’re trying to get to, ‘What was the overall themes for a brand at a particular time? And how are we capturing that overall as authentically to what’s happening now?’”

It helps to have the archives to refer back to, understand what was kept already and make sense of the archival processes of the past, and be familiar with the questions that often arise from teams; all of this information, Bruns added, can help inform the best future additions to the archive.

Brands interested in creating archives may be inspired to do so around a big anniversary or milestone that may help the people behind the brand understand the value of an archive. When establishing an archive, Bruns said it’s important to talk to different experts who know the brand history, and get the facts down on paper.

“If you were wanting to share this with somebody 10 or 20 years from now,” Bruns said, “what would be the most helpful thing to you?”