Home grown, family owned: Indiana food brands span decades.

• Author: Kapp, Jennifer
• Position: Agribusiness

The time-honored tradition of producing high quality brand-name food products is alive and well among the family-owned businesses scattered around Indiana. These companies buy crops from the same trusted growers year after year. They hold true to the ingredients and ingenuity that made their parents' and grandparents' products popular decades ago.

Some Indiana brands have become so well known their names are almost synonymous with the product-for years, Clabber Girl meant baking powder; GoCo Wheat, a hot flavored cereal, though no one would ever think to ask for it that way. Other Indiana brands have gained regional and national recognition through the years simply because they were constantly in the pantry.

CLABBER GIRL

Glabber Girl baking powder--the best-selling baking powder in the United States--sold 7.8 million cans last year throughout all 50 states and 28 other countries. The Glabber brand began leavening bread in 1899 at a time when the word dabber referred to a leavening process requiring milk. In 1923, the company changed the brand name to get away from the reference to milk and redirected the word clabber to apply to the widely recognized girl on the label--the Glabber Girl. The Clabber Girl Corp. owned by Hulman & Go. continues to sell baking powder to retail, foodservice and industrial markets under the Glabber Girl brand.

For the first time ever in October 2000, the company launched a second product under the Clabber Girl brand name--corn starch, packaged in cans. "The company had been buying large amounts of corn starch, and we knew we had a better way of packaging it for the retail market," says spokesman Tom Payne. While researching the market for the new product, the company discovered its corn starch product stood apart from the competition because it was not genetically modified and it had been processed to form a finer, smoother powder. "It won't lump up on you," Payne says. Clabber Girl corn starch is now available in 30 states.

Clabber Girl brand memorabilia will be showcased in the company's new museum under construction on the first floor of the Hulman Building in Terre Haute. The company is restoring the building that was constructed in 1892, and the museum is slated to open in May.

POP WEAVER POPCORN

Pop Weaver sells microwave, caramel corn and plastic bags of popcorn in all 50 states and to some international markets. Weaver Popcorn Co. started in 1928 to market popcorn to snack food manufacturers and...