Antique Philadelphia Cream Cheese Wood Shipping Box, c. 1900–1930

The Piece

A shallow wooden shipping box printed on all four sides with one of the most recognisable names in American groceries.

The form is a low open tray. Four thin sawn softwood sides stand around a set in bottom panel, the long sides running past the ends and pinned through at each corner. There is no lid with it. The whole thing is barely two inches deep, which is the depth of a single layer of packed cheese and the reason the box is shaped the way it is.

Across each side, printed directly into the wood in a deep ink that has gone almost navy, is PHILADELPHIA in a heavy slab serif with CREAM CHEESE stacked beside it in a lighter condensed face. The same line runs round all four sides, so the box reads from any angle it is set down on.

The wood is a pale even softwood with a warm honey tone on the outside and a grey oxidised surface within. One end has taken most of the wear: the printing there is broken up, with letters missing strokes where the ink has been rubbed away, and the arrises are rounded and grubby from handling. The opposite faces are far crisper. Small round nail holes pass through the printed band at intervals, each ringed with a dark iron stain.

History & Provenance

The name on the box has a longer history than most people assume, and almost none of it is in Philadelphia.

Cream cheese of this kind was made in 1872 by William Lawrence, a dairyman at Chester in New York, who was working towards Neufchatel and added too much cream. In 1880 Lawrence went into partnership with the New York distributor A. L. Reynolds and the two of them chose the name Philadelphia for it, because Philadelphia and the country around it had a reputation at the time for the best dairy in America. The name was marketing from the first day and the cheese has never been made there.

In the early years of the last century the trademark passed to the Phenix Cheese Company of South Edmeston, New York, and in 1928 Phenix merged with Kraft to form the Kraft Phenix Cheese Company. The brand has been in that family ever since.

That chronology sets the one firm limit this box has. It cannot predate 1880, because the name did not exist before then.

The box carries no corporate name at all. There is no Phenix, no Kraft and no Kraft Phenix anywhere on it, and that absence is the most useful thing about it. Once Phenix merged with Kraft in 1928 the Kraft name went onto the packaging and stayed there, so a shipping box printed with the brand alone belongs to the period before that change rather than after it. An absence of that kind sets an outer limit and not a starting point, but here the limit is a real one.

The object agrees. The sides and the bottom are solid thin sawn softwood, not plywood, cut to a scant quarter inch and left from the saw. The nails were iron and have rusted in place, staining dark haloes into the wood around each hole, which is decades of damp and drying rather than a season of storage. The interior has gone grey with oxidation and carries dark product staining worked down into the grain, and the wear across the four printed faces is uneven in the way a box wears when it sits on a shelf with one side out, with letters on one end rubbed away to broken strokes while the opposite face stays crisp.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Brand recognition is the whole argument and it needs no explaining. Everyone who picks this up knows the name, most of them have a tub of it in the refrigerator right now, and almost nobody knows the cheese has never had anything to do with Philadelphia. That is a good thing to be able to tell somebody.

Shallow is what makes it useful. It is the right depth to corral the things that otherwise migrate: keys and sunglasses on a hall table, salt, pepper and a pepper mill on a counter, remotes on a coffee table, soaps beside a sink, pens and stamps on a desk. Print on all four sides means it works whichever way round it is turned.

Visually it does a great deal with very little. Deep navy type on pale honey softwood is a strong graphic and it sits as well in a modern kitchen as in a farmhouse one, on open shelving, on a marble counter or propped upright on a plate rail as a piece of type.

For a shop it is the sort of small, cheerful, immediately understood object that sells from a counter without anyone needing to be persuaded, and it merchandises other stock beautifully while it waits.