Underwood Devil: History of the Oldest US Food Trademark

When we think about the deep corporate roots of American grocery staples, certain comforting icons immediately flash across our minds. The friendly, stately Quaker Oats man has been staring down from breakfast boxes since 1877. The dapper Mr. Peanut, with his signature top hat and monocle, was born out of a schoolchild’s contest drawing in 1916. Even the universally recognized Gerber Baby has been the pristine face of commercial infancy since 1932. These characters feel ancient because they have successfully anchored themselves into our collective cultural memory for generations, serving as living proof of a brand’s survival across centuries of changing consumer tastes. Yet, none of these legendary mascots hold the crown. The absolute oldest registered food trademark still in active use in the United States belongs to a product that today’s mainstream consumers rarely think about, let alone find on their weekly grocery lists: Underwood Deviled Ham.

Long before the modern snack food empire existed, a small Boston canning company locked down a piece of intellectual property that would outlast empires, outrun its competitors, and establish a continuous commercial lineage stretching all the way back to the nineteenth century.

The Underwood Chronology: From Pickles to the Red Devil

To fully understand the longevity of the Underwood legacy, you have to look past the iconic red devil label and map out a fascinating 46-year timeline of industrial experimentation. It is often noted that the William Underwood Company “invented” modern canned meats, confusing a single product launch with a half-century of technical evolution. When you look at the raw data, the massive chronological gap between the company’s founding and its most famous flagship product reveals a story of trial, error, and industrial adaptation.

Investigation File: The 1906 Word Hijack: William Underwood pioneered the process of potting meat to preserve whole cuts, but they never invented the emulsified scrap paste sitting on modern bottom shelves. To see how corporate meatpackers systematically hijacked this luxury tradition following the Pure Food and Drug Act, read our full forensic deep-dive: The Potted Meat Myth: The Linguistic Theft of a Luxury Tradition.

1822: The Glass and Pickle Era

When William Underwood originally opened his doors in Boston in 1822, he wasn’t processing livestock or sealing tin cans. In fact, affordable commercial tinplate didn’t even exist in the American market yet. Underwood began his career as a high-end food packer utilizing fragile glass jars sealed tightly with cork and wax. His early business was entirely driven by preservation economics: he packed local condiments, pickles, mustard, berries, and native fruits specifically to sell to sea captains and merchants sailing out of Boston Harbor. His core mission was simple: Prove that American-packed agricultural goods could survive a brutal transatlantic maritime voyage without spoiling.

1830s–1850s: The Transition to Tin and Coastal Seafood Dominance

By the late 1830s, the fragility and weight of glass forced Underwood to transition his entire operation to hand-soldered tin-plated canisters, the heavy English containers that gave birth to the modern abbreviation “can.” This structural shift required the company to work the bugs out of early industrial canning, navigating issues like erratic heat distribution and exploding cans on warehouse shelves.

During this mid-century expansion, Underwood’s primary financial engine wasn’t beef or pork; it was the sea. Recognizing the immense value of coastal infrastructure, the company aggressively expanded into Maine, culminating in the 1847 acquisition of Treat, Noble & Co. (then operating as Mitchell & Noble) in Eastport. By absorbing Treat and Noble’s pioneering infrastructure, Underwood secured a regional monopoly on northern canning. They took the hard-fought thermodynamic processing lessons their newly acquired company had learned from packing Atlantic lobsters, salmon, mackerel, and oysters, and used that infrastructure to scale up their stabilization methods back at the Boston headquarters.

1868: The Post-Civil War Spiced Meat Explosion

It wasn’t until after the disruptions of the American Civil War, specifically in 1868, that William Underwood’s sons (who had assumed management of the firm) pivoted heavily toward meat spreads. The rapidly growing post-war industrial workforce created an unprecedented demand for convenient, shelf-stable, and highly portable factory lunches.

The brothers began experimenting with heavily mashing whole-muscle ham and blending it with a pungent, hot mix of mustard, cayenne pepper, and secret spices. This process of “deviling” served a brilliant dual purpose: it yielded a highly savory, craveable sandwich spread while the intense spice matrix naturally masked any metallic tang imparted by the primitive tin canisters. The product was an overnight commercial sensation, leading the company to officially register their famous, iconic red devil trademark in 1870 (with full federal registration following in 1886).

What Happened to the Spice? The Evolved Meaning of “Deviled”

Today, the name “Deviled” presents a bizarre culinary paradox because the modern reality of the product is entirely at odds with its fiery etymology. To a 21st-century palate, Underwood Deviled Ham, much like a standard American picnic favorite, the “Deviled Egg”, contains absolutely zero heat. However, when the terminology first emerged in British taverns in the late 18th century, “deviling” explicitly meant blasting food with an aggressive, mouth-burning paste of mustard and cayenne to mimic the fires of hell. When Underwood launched their recipe in 1868, that pungent spice profile felt radically intense to a Victorian American public unaccustomed to true chili peppers. Over the last century, industrial mass-marketing systematically dialed back the heat to appeal to the widest possible demographic. The result is a linguistic fossil: the fiery marketing name survived, but the recipe was completely tamed, leaving us with a “deviled” tradition that relies on savory salt and fat rather than hellfire.

Deviled ham was not only found in cans in the 1800s. Recipes for deviled ham also appeared in cookbooks, and these continue into the twentieth century. As stated, mustard, cayenne, hot sauce, or other chiles were typical ingredients. Both mustard and chile peppers such as cayenne are hot or “pungent” and so fit the conjecture that deviling refers to hot spices being added to foods, especially ground up foods. The typical way of eating deviled ham is in a sandwich, either alone or with added components, such as mayonnaise.

Today, the William Underwood Company identity operates as a unified portfolio owned by B&G Foods, with their entire five-can lineup officially classified under the master category of “Sandwich Spreads.” To streamline mass-market retail logistics, the historic term “Deviled” has been restricted strictly to their flagship product, now labeled as Underwood Deviled Ham Spread. The remaining four variations in their modern commercial rotation, White Meat Chicken Spread, Premium Roast Beef Spread, Corned Beef Spread, and Liverwurst Spread, have dropped the historical spice branding entirely. Instead, they rely on the iconic, smiling red devil logo to pass an aura of nineteenth-century legacy down to a modern line of standard, homogenized grocery shelf spreads.

The Trademark Deception: Deviled Ham vs. Modern Potted Meat

Because William Underwood pioneered the industrialized preservation of meats in America, a persistent piece of copy-pasted internet trivia claims that the company “invented” the modern canned product we know today as “Potted Meat.” This semantic confusion completely misaligns the historical reality with the modern grocery store experience. If you open a classic paper-wrapped can of Underwood Deviled Ham alongside a standard supermarket can of budget potted meat, you will find two completely different culinary worlds.

Underwood Deviled Ham remains true to its 19th-century roots: it is dense, coarse, distinctively fibrous, and clearly derived from ground whole-muscle pork. Modern generic potted meat, by contrast, is an ultra-homogenized, completely smooth pink paste that spreads like warm butter. While Underwood used the historical process of potting to preserve recognizable meat cuts, modern bottom-shelf brands actually hijacked that respected trade term as a vague noun following the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. They weaponized the name to legally market high-pressure scrap emulsions without exposing their proprietary mixtures on the front label. To understand how a prestigious aristocratic cooking method was systematically subverted by industrial meatpackers into a cheap supermarket slurry, check out our comprehensive forensic breakdown on the history and food science of the potted meat myth.

Pillar vs. Paste: The Whole-Muscle Difference

This structural divide becomes undeniable when you compare the modern ingredient statements of the two products. Despite sharing adjacent shelf space, a can of Underwood Deviled Ham Spread still contains zero mechanically separated meat; its label consists of ground whole-muscle pork and seasonings, maintaining its nineteenth-century processing lineage. The same is true of its other products. Mass-market brands like Armour and Libby, by contrast, rely entirely on high-pressure mechanical separation as their primary protein source. This industrial technique represents a parallel evolution to the highly controversial processing methods used to manufacture Lean Finely Textured Beef, the product colloquially known in media circles as “Pink Slime.” While both methods represent absolute marvels of modern slaughterhouse yield efficiency, the crucial difference lies in the raw texture: Underwood preserves the cellular, fibrous matrix of genuine meat, while the budget brands utilize a pulverized, emulsified slurry that legally requires a generic “Potted Meat” wrapper to conceal its industrial origins.