Is Your Bread White Enough?: King Arthur Baking Company’s Racist Marketing History
by Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh
On November 14, 1896, days before Thanksgiving, Boston Print reported an odd sight in the streets of Boston — “[a] horseman…clad in glittering armor,” is “prancing…through the streets…The Crusader’s cross gleams on the coat of mail and adorns the silken standard that he bears aloft. It is, in truth, King Arthur come to earth again.” King Arthur, poised in action, his horse galloping across the page, had come to Boston to tell the citizens and countrymen about nothing other than domestic bliss: flour, King Arthur’s Flour.
King Arthur Flour, known today as King Arthur Baking Company, is one of America’s oldest flour companies. While originally named for its founders, fate took a turn when one of the company men attended a musical adaptation of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. George Wood was so overwhelmed to “witnes[s] the same values in Arthurian legend he saw in his new exceptional flour: purity, loyalty, honesty, superior strength, and a dedication to a higher purpose” that he changed the company’s name from Sands, Wood, & Taylor to King Arthur Flour. Together, the owners chose “this figure of medieval romance” to serve as the “champion of modern civilization”: King Arthur in a white robe, waving a tattered white flag bearing a bold red cross, sitting atop a black horse that is caught in motion (below). In the backdrop, the outline of Jerusalem’s cityscape rests with a pronounced silhouette of a domed building similar to the Holy Sepulchre.
King Arthur Flour launched an aggressive marketing campaign that showcased this knight on each and every one of their products from the year of its inception in 1896 to earlier this year, when they rebranded in June 2020. For well over a century, the image of King Arthur seated resplendent on his war steed made its way into the intimate spaces of peoples’ homes on wooden barrels of flour, tin cans, towels and oven mitts, and on every bag of flour purchased (including almond and paleo flour).
The company, however, was not satisfied to just let King Arthur sit passively on its products. Instead, he became an active agent in marketing the flour that bore his name. In 1927, for example, Walter E. Sands brought the logo to life by designing a calliope that served as a base for a large three-dimensional structure of King Arthur (below). Sands drove the calliope around the streets of Boston and New York in his own pickup truck.
Just as he sailed through the streets, King Arthur also showed up uninvited at the open windows of women’s kitchens. In one advertisement (below), he informs a woman about the flour she’s used to make a delicious batch of donuts: “King Arthur Flour is made from only the finest wheat — and just the choicest part of that! It’s so fine it’s naturally white — never has to be bleached.” When she asks, “What difference does bleaching make? All flour is white,” King Arthur is quick to recalibrate her judgment and taste: “Only the finest flour is naturally white. All-white King Arthur is the finest you can buy — and the finest you can use for all baking purposes.”
The ad campaign relied on lighthearted play, but it was effective because it promised much more to consumers than just high quality baked goods. Under the guise of flour, King Arthur was selling American exceptionalism and white power. The company’s promotional strategies capitalized on the racist and xenophobic rhetoric already circulating around bread, specifically white bread, at the time. In one famous record from McClure’s Magazine, Dr. Woods Hutchinson, a nineteenth-century health writer, proclaimed that “White flour, red meat, and blue blood make the tricolor flag of conquest.”
And it was in the aspirations of conquest that King Arthur sold flour. The flag that King Arthur bears in the logo is similar to the flag of the Knights Templar, a twelfth-century Catholic military order. The Knights Templar were created to protect Christians from Muslims in the Holy Land during the long history of a series of battles designed to make English and French settlement on the Holy Land possible, battles we often refer to as the “Crusades.” The Knights Templar were devout and violent. In Bernard of Clairvaux’s treatise on the Knights Templar, titled In Praise of Knighthood, he writes that “If [a knight] kills an evildoer, he is not a mankiller, but, if I may so put it, a killer of evil.”
No matter how many bags of flour one purchased from King Arthur Flour, King Arthur was always just returning from Jerusalem to a consumer’s home, evoking this violent and disturbing history. The medieval stories that kept the legend of King Arthur alive long enough for George Wood to learn about him were stories that perpetuated settler colonialist fantasies, often by way of Islamophobia. Sir Perceval from the romance Sir Perceval of Galles, for example, is so eager to join King Arthur’s roundtable that he proves himself worthy of becoming a chivalric knight by decapitating countless Muslim men and watching their heads roll away on earth damp with Muslim blood. Sir Bevis, another knight from the fourteenth-century romance Sir Bevis of Hampton, is lauded and honored because he turns on a Muslim community that has taken him in, overthrows the Sultan, and lays claim to the land. King Arthur and his men commit such actions to prove their “purity, loyalty, honesty, superior strength, and a dedication to a higher purpose.”
According to Dr. Kyla Wazana Tompkins, consuming bread in the nineteenth-century was one of the ways that American propagandists and nationalists encouraged citizens to promote American global superiority on an individual and domestic level: “[T]o advocate for bread as a republican food [in the nineteenth century],” she writes “was to advocate for an economic model that supported U.S. expansion and economic autonomy.” As an example, she discusses Sylvester Graham, a nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister and nutritionist who believed that vegetarianism and a bread-diet would curb masturbation urges, among other things: “[I]ngesting more bread, he promised, would produce healthy bodies and homes and ensure America’s place in the pantheon of civilized nations.”
King Arthur Flour asked consumers to trust the King Arthur in the logo because he had operated on the world’s stage. It is with the same kind of honor and determination with which he stood up for white, devout, Christian pilgrims in the twelfth-century that he promised to ensure that white consumers were given only the highest quality bread ingredients. White women in the kitchen should have trusted King Arthur’s judgement because he had seen more than they had. He had seen past the known and familiar borders of the Western world. As a figure from the past, he had even seen past the known and familiar boundaries of the present. He came from beyond, from medieval romance, out of an act of conquest, to guide them, to lead them to choose, to attain something valuable.
But most importantly, King Arthur’s promotional strategies promised to consumers that to purchase King Arthur’s flour in its pure, unadulterated whiteness was to be able to bring into one’s private domestic space the ingredients for perpetuating and reproducing white superiority over and over and over again.
At some point in the twentieth century, King Arthur Flour removed the backdrop of Jerusalem’s cityscape. What remained is the logo most consumers are familiar with today. However, in July 2020, amid both the Covid-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the company rebranded itself. It changed its name from King Arthur Flour to King Arthur Baking Company, and it changed its logo from the knight to a crown of wheat (below).
A short animation shows King Arthur on his horse, riding past the circular boundaries of the logo (below). Two wheat stalks that were on the outskirts of the logo come together and sprout into a crown. On their new logo, the Vice President for marketing at the company has stated, “our brand is not about King Arthur riding a horse, and so we like the idea of how any baker can wear a crown and how that feels more inclusive.” They’ve even made a crown filter available on social media platforms so that people can take photos of themselves as the new King Arthur of the King Arthur Baking Company.
Today, King Arthur Baking Company is cooperatively-owned with progressive employee policies and practices. The short video advertisement on its homepage shows a racially diverse range of people baking in tandem with the company’s products. The people featured include a hijabi woman and her two kids, a queer black couple, a latina woman, an Asian mother and her son, and a white man and woman. It is a comforting advertisement, and one can almost smell the aromas emanating from their ovens in the end as their breads and pies and cakes bake.
And yet, after all the company witnessed with us in 2020, its explanation for its new logo is at best disappointing and at worst troubling: “We’re not the type to rush into anything, but after 230 years, we’re ready for an updated name and a new logo that better represents who we are today. And it’s a pretty simple story.” When you follow the link to their site to learn more, King Arthur Baking Company confirms their commitment to joy and offers a brief description of their new logo. Even though they have proudly tracked the history of the company on their website, they in no way reflect on their racist past, nor do they reject it.
This should leave us wondering then: how are we to read this new logo in light of the company’s racist and orientalizing past? What is inclusive about it? Has the project of white supremacy become so successful that it no longer requires a military agent to promote it? Are we all invited to wear the crown because we have collectively created the world we now live in? How can we make a more inclusive world if we do not acknowledge or take into account the exclusionary practices of the past?
King Arthur Baking Company’s marketing history is anything but a “simple story.” For centuries, it translated the raw ingredient for bread, one of the world’s most ancient staples, as an ingredient that can reinforce and fortify whiteness. In fact, there is nothing simple about what and who we welcome into our homes. There is nothing simple about what we choose to make and feed our families, or what we choose to perpetuate in our intimate spaces.
Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh is a researcher and writer. Her research focuses on the racialization of Muslims and the history of Islamophobia in premodern England. Her writing has appeared in In the Middle, postmedieval, in the anthology My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora, and elsewhere. Born in Iran and raised in California, she currently resides in New York.
