B&G Sold B&M Beans to a Family Canner. Your Brand's Story Is the Only Part That Travels.

On October 13, B&G Foods told the SEC it had sold two bean brands to McCall Farms. B&M, the baked beans and brown bread. Joan of Arc, the kidney beans, chili beans and the rest of that shelf. Terms weren't disclosed. B&G says the money goes to repaying long-term debt, and CEO Robert Mills told Food Dive the sale was "another step in our efforts to simplify our portfolio."

On paper that's a line item. On the can it's 159 years. B&M started as the Burnham and Morrill Company in Portland, Maine, in March 1867, and started selling brick oven baked beans in 1927. B&G's own 10-K calls it "the original brand of brick-oven baked beans," with a leading share in New England.

Count what actually changed hands

B&G bought B&M and Joan of Arc from Pillsbury in March 1999, in the same deal that brought it Underwood and Las Palmas. In 2021 it announced it would close the Portland bean factory, the brick plant in East Deering that went up in 1913, and production moved to the Midwest. The big red B&M sign came off that building in September 2023.

McCall Farms bought a name this week. Founders are long gone. Factory's closed. Pillsbury sold it. B&G sold it too. A canner in Effingham, South Carolina still wanted the thing. What they got is a name New England already knows, plus a recipe that still matches the label.

McCall knows the trade. The company has been in the Swink family since it was a 2,000-acre cotton farm, and it already runs Margaret Holmes, which Retail Merchandiser calls the No. 2 Southern vegetable brand. In 2025 it bought Le Sueur, the peas, green beans and carrots, from B&G as well. B&G's second-quarter sales were $383.3 million, down nearly 10 percent from a year earlier, per Food Dive. Holding companies are good at a lot of things. Loving a can of brown bread isn't one of them.

You don't get 159 years

B&M had a century and a half under one name before the name was worth more than the building. A five-year-old salsa company doesn't get that. Neither did I.

What an independent gets instead is the record. Whatever you've written down, in public, under your own name: where it started, who made the first batch, what you refused to put in it, why the recipe hasn't changed. A retail buyer reads that before the meeting. An AI assistant pulls it when a shopper asks about you. If your name ever comes up in somebody's acquisition deck, that record is a big part of what gets priced. The kettle and the co-packer contract don't carry the story. It has to be written down somewhere a stranger can find it.

I've owned gallucci.net since 1996. There are 435 posts on it now. Plenty of the platforms I posted on over those thirty years have changed hands, changed the rules or turned the lights off. The domain is still mine, and it's the one place where the whole record reads in order. When somebody wants to know whether I know what I'm talking about, that's where the answer is. A food brand's archive does the same job for the brand, if it has one.

Big Food can buy a heritage brand. It can't invent one. That's the opening for an independent, and it only stays open if somebody wrote the story down.

What I'd do this quarter

Write the founding down in plain words on a page you own. The year, the town, the kitchen, the first store that took a case. Put a date on it. If the founding story lives only in the founder's head and one podcast interview, it's gone the day the founder stops telling it.

B&M's carried "brick oven" on the label for close to a century. It's a fact a shopper can repeat to somebody else. If you've got real history, put the year and the place on the front of the package.

Use organic social media to put the record in front of people every week. The cook at the kettle, the farmer who grows the peppers, the batch that went wrong and what you changed after it. Every one of those posts is a dated public fact about your brand. Three years of them is the history a buyer, a retailer or a chatbot reads back to you.

Keep the recipe story and the ownership story honest. If you change a co-packer or an ingredient, say so before somebody else does. A heritage claim that turns out to be false costs more than having no heritage claim at all.

I've argued before that the story worth telling is the thing you said no to, and that when you haven't written your own page, Google answers your brand name with somebody else's. Same problem here, with a longer clock on it. Walmart already put its own name where the food used to be, so the package alone won't carry you.

Ask your food and beverage marketing agency to show you the one page where your brand's story lives. If nobody can find it, start there this month.

Building that record is the first thing I do with a food brand. If yours needs one, message me on LinkedIn.