Duke's Mayo Renamed the Whole Company After the Jar. Name Your Food Brand's Accounts After Yours.

On October 26, Sauer Brands, a Richmond condiment company with roots going back 139 years, started calling itself Duke's Mayo Company. The owners put the jar's name on the front door because that's the name people already ask for. A small food brand should do the same thing on every account it runs, before it spends another dollar chasing reach.

Data current as of October 28, 2026

What did Sauer Brands actually do?

Duke's Mayo Company is the Richmond, Virginia condiment maker behind Duke's Mayonnaise and Mateo's Gourmet Salsa in grocery stores, plus the Sauer's and Gold Medal condiment lines it sells to restaurants. On October 26 it announced that it is now known as Duke's Mayo Company. Read the fine print at the bottom of that release and you'll see Duke's Mayo Company is a trade name of Sauer Brands, Inc. Nobody shredded the incorporation papers. They changed the name on the sign.

The rename landed about seven weeks after the company agreed to sell its spice business to Watkins. Watkins took Kernel Season's, Spice Hunter, the Sauer's spice line and the old Sauer plant at 2000 W. Broad St. in Richmond. What's left is condiments, and the condiment everybody knows is Duke's.

CEO E. Yuri Hermida put it this way to Food Business News: "Duke's Mayo Company is a name that says plainly what this company is about, which is a dedication to flavor and scaling high-growth condiments."

Why would anybody retire a name that goes back to 1887?

Because the word shoppers use for the product was always Duke's. C.F. Sauer was a 21-year-old pharmacist selling flavoring extracts in Richmond in 1887. Eugenia Duke was selling sandwiches spread with her homemade mayonnaise to soldiers at Camp Sevier in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1917, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and she sold the mayo business to the C.F. Sauer Co. in 1929. The family kept the company until 2019, when Falfurrias Capital Group bought it and renamed it Sauer Brands. Advent International bought it in February 2025.

When Advent took over, the AJC reported that Advent had no plans to change anything about Duke's, "including the Sauer brand name." That promise lasted about 20 months. I'm not knocking them for it. Plans change when you sell off the half of the company the old name belonged to.

The release says why out loud. Duke's and Mateo's are pushing into new regions, and their national "brand awareness and household penetration" are, in the company's own words, "still low relative to the size of their categories." When you walk into stores where nobody knows you, you lead with the one name that already has fans. The same release says Duke's holds a leading Net Promoter Score in its category. Sauer has an accounting department.

Where did I learn this?

On a restaurant floor, before I ever touched marketing. I was an opening manager for Brinker International, the Dallas company that owns Chili's and Maggiano's. I'd go in before a restaurant opened, hire and train the front and back of house, stay six to eight weeks, then move to the next one. Brinker's name was on my paycheck. The name on the sign out front was the one guests drove in for.

Years later I'd moved into software, and an SEO agency in Dallas called me in for an interview because I was ranking ahead of them. That interview turned my career on a dime. Search engines reward the name people type, and people type what's on the package. I've owned gallucci.net since 1996, and I'm @gallucciNET on every platform I post to. Boring, and easy to find.

Where does a small food brand get this wrong?

The LLC name leaks onto the accounts. The Instagram handle is the holding company. The LinkedIn page says "Something Foods LLC" while the bag says something else. The Google Business Profile sits under the founder's name, and the Amazon storefront shows the legal entity. A shopper who loved your salsa at a farmers market goes home, types the name off the jar, and finds nothing. That's the cheapest fix in social media for food brands, and it's the first thing I check.

It costs you twice when the AI tools get involved. If the name on the jar and the name on your accounts don't match, Google and the chatbots can't connect them, and Google will answer your brand name with somebody else's page. Duke's is fixing the version of this problem that a regional brand hits the minute it crosses into stores where it's a stranger, the same spot Shiner was in with new Texans. And when a brand changes hands, the name and the story are the parts that travel, which is what happened when B&G Foods sold B&M to McCall Farms earlier this month.

What should you do this week?

1. Write down the name your customers actually say. Pull it from your last 20 reviews, comments and retailer emails. Done when three customers, in their own words, agree on it.

1. Rename every handle and page to that name. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest. Done when you can type the jar name into each app's search bar and land on your account first.

1. Keep the LLC and file the trade name. That's exactly what Duke's did. Ask your attorney about filing an assumed name (a DBA) in your state. Done when the trade name is on file and on your invoices.

1. Fix the profiles you don't think of as social. Your Google Business Profile, your Amazon storefront and every retailer listing. Done when a Google search for the jar name shows your profile with your own photos.

1. Change the from-name on your email. Done when a test email lands in your own inbox under the brand name, not the company name.

None of this needs a rebrand. If a food and beverage marketing agency hands you a new logo before it's checked what your handles are called, hand the deck back. Independent brands win on the name and the story their fans already carry around, and that's the part big food can't fake. Put that name everywhere a shopper might type it.

I rename the accounts in the first hour of every 90-day sprint. If your handles still say LLC, message me on LinkedIn.