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Keebler Company

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Keebler Company

The Keebler Company is an American cookie and former cracker manufacturer. Founded in 1853, it has produced numerous baked snacks, advertised with the Keebler Elves. Keebler had marketed its brands such as Cheez-It (which bear the Sunshine Biscuits brand), Chips Deluxe, Club Crackers, E.L. Fudge Cookies, Famous Amos, Fudge Shoppe Cookies, Murray cookies, Austin, Plantation, Vienna Fingers, Town House Crackers, Wheatables, Sandie's Shortbread, Pizzarias Pizza Chips, Chachos and Zesta Crackers, among others. Keebler slogans have included "Uncommonly Good" and "a little elfin magic goes a long way". Tom Shutter and Leo Burnett wrote the familiar jingle.

The cookie and cracker lines were separated when Kellogg's sold the cookie line and the rights of the Keebler name to Ferrero SpA in 2019. The cracker lines are now marketed under the Kellogg's or Sunshine names.

Godfrey Keebler, of German descent, opened a bakery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1853. His bakery networked with several other local bakeries and others around the country over the years, and in 1927 they merged into the United Biscuit Company of America.

United Biscuit operated regional bakeries which included not only Keebler, but also Hekman Biscuit Company of Grand Rapids, Michigan, the Strietmann Biscuit Company of Mariemont, Ohio, Merchants Biscuit Company of Denver, and the Bowman Biscuit Company of Denver which used the Supreme brand name. By 1963, United Biscuit introduced the Kitchen Rich brand nationally while still utilizing the regional brand names. In 1966, United Biscuit decided to adopt a uniform brand name and chose Keebler as the national brand and the name of the company.

Keebler did adopt Streitmann's Zesta saltine brand as Keebler's national brand of saltine crackers. The Zesta brand name dates back to 1926, when it was chosen as the winning entry in a naming contest held by Strietmann. Joseph B. Rosenthal of Cincinnati received the grand prize of $100 (equivalent to $1,819 in 2025) for suggesting the name "Zesta", as a replacement for Strietmann's previous brand of soda crackers, "Prize".

Keebler-Weyl Bakery became the official baker of Girl Scout Cookies in 1936, the first commercial company to bake the cookies (the scouts and their mothers had done it previously). By 1978, four companies were producing the cookies. Little Brownie Bakers is the Keebler division still licensed to produce the cookies.

In 1974, Keebler was acquired by United Biscuits, a British multinational food manufacturer, headquartered in West Drayton, Middlesex, England. By the 1980s, Keebler had expanded into the bagged salty snack market, launching a string of successful and innovative snack chips such as Tato Skins, O'Boisies, and Pizzarias. In 1995, United Biscuits announced plans to spin off the snack chip business, but ended up selling the entire company to a partnership between Flowers Industries and Artal Luxembourg, a private equity firm. Artal Luxembourg sold its holdings in Keebler in an IPO in 1998.

The Keebler Company purchased Sunshine Biscuits in 1996.

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