When you’re loading up your grocery cart in anticipation of holiday meals this season, there’s a good chance at least one Maine brand will be in there, whether it’s the butter you bake with, the ice cream on your apple pie or the beer you cheers to family and friends with.
Here are the stories behind six of those most iconic Maine brands that may end up gracing your holiday dining table.
Bakewell Cream, Hermon
Here’s a real Yankee ingenuity story. During World War II, shortages of both cream of tartar and baking powder left home bakers without a useful leavening agent to use in their bakes. Byron Smith, a chemist in Bangor, figured out a way to get the same rise using a chemical called sodium pyrophosphate, which he mixed with cornstarch.
Though WWII-era rationing ended, the mixture — dubbed Bakewell Cream — stuck around. In Maine and New England, it became the semi-legendary secret ingredient for perfect, fluffy biscuits, as well as for scones and muffins. Hermon-based company New England Cupboard bought the Bakewell Cream brand in the 1990s, and today distributes it all over the Northeast, alongside its packaged baking mixes and other dry goods.
Bangor Rye rolls
How many folks who grew up in the Bangor area call Bangor Rye’s brick oven rolls Cohen rolls? Quite a few, we’d imagine. That’s because, up until 2011, Bangor Rye was operated by Reuben and Clara Cohen and their family — including William Cohen, former U.S. secretary of defense and U.S. senator from Maine. The Cohens opened the brick oven bakery in the late 1920s, and cranked out fragrant bulkie rolls, sub rolls and other goodies for more than 80 years before current owners, Paul and Peter Huston, bought it in 2011.
In previous decades, you’d get rolls in big paper bags straight from the bakery. Today, they’re available six to a plastic bag at grocery stores throughout the Bangor region. The packaging has changed, but the recipe has, thankfully, stayed the same.
Kate’s Homemade Butter, Arundel
There are lots of fancy butters in grocery stores these days, from imported European brands to organic high-end U.S. producers. But before almost all of them hit U.S. shelves, there was Kate’s Homemade Butter, the Maine butter maker founded in 1981. Daniel and Karen Patry started making butter in the basement of their Old Orchard Beach home and stayed there for decades until moving to a new facility in Arundel in 2012.
They still make just two products: butter (both salted and unsalted) and buttermilk, all from Maine milk producers. In an era when many Maine dairy farms and producers struggle to stay afloat, Kate’s is a bright spot.
Pineland Farms Cheese, Bangor
Another Maine dairy success story is Pineland Farms, which makes cheese at a processing plant on Outer Hammond Street in Bangor. The plant was once the home of Grant’s Dairy, a company that originally started on Pushaw Road in Bangor in 1923. If you ate school lunch in eastern Maine before the 2000s, you probably remember little Grant’s milk cartons on your tray.
Grant’s moved into the new plant in 1995 and processed milk there until 2013, when Garelick Farms, the company that bought Grant’s in 1994, went bankrupt. In 2017, Pineland Farms, with help from the Libra Foundation, renovated the empty plant, and since 2018, it has made a wide variety of cheeses, including multiple flavors of cheddar, jack, Swiss and feta. It’s now the largest cheesemaker in Maine.
Gifford’s Ice Cream, Skowhegan
We’d be willing to bet there are quite a few holiday pies that will be topped with a scoop of Gifford’s vanilla ice cream this season. Sure, Vermont’s Ben & Jerry’s might be the best-known New England ice cream company. But Mainers love Gifford’s, founded in the 1970s by Randall and Audrey Gifford, themselves descendents of multi-generation New England dairy producers.
People love them so much that when a February fire devastated its plant in Skowhegan, other ice cream producers around the country came to the rescue to help Gifford’s stay afloat. It’s the official ice cream of both the Boston Bruins and Boston Celtics, plus the Portland Sea Dogs. There are lines into the street when its ice cream stands reopen each spring. Ben & Jerry’s better watch out.
Allagash Brewing Company, Portland
As of 2022, there are 165 registered breweries in Maine, the most per capita of any state in the country. But for sheer volume and national profile, none are as big as Allagash Brewing Company, the craft brewery founded in 1994 in Portland by Rob Tod. Allagash White, the brewery’s flagship beer, is available in 19 states, including the entire eastern seaboard minus Florida. Maine is a state renowned for its beer scene, and for nearly 30 years, Allagash has led the way.
