Antique 1930s Kreme De Koke Ice Skater Vegetable Label ⛸️ from Salinas

What Was Kreme de Koke? ⛸️ Kreme de Koke Selected Vegetables

Size: 9 1/2" x 7"

A blonde figure skater spinning across a box of lettuce! This is an antique 1930s Kreme de Koke Brand vegetable crate label from the Salinas Growers Exchange of Salinas, California, printed in San Francisco by Schwabacher-Frey and never pasted on a crate. It's one of my favorite pieces of crate art, and I think you'll see why.

🔍 What's on it

A smiling skater with curly blonde hair, arms flung wide, in a short white skating dress and white skates, with a long white scarf swirling around her. Behind her, KREME de KOKE in huge white-and-red block letters, with a little BRAND under it, all on a black ground, and an olive-green band across the bottom. In red on the green: SELECTED VEGETABLES and PRODUCE OF U.S.A., and in the corner, SALINAS GROWERS EXCHANGE, GROWERS SHIPPERS, SALINAS · CALIFORNIA. Down in the bottom corner in tiny type is the printer, SCHWABACHER-FREY. The back is plain.

❄️ The skater and the name

The brand was registered for the Salinas Growers Exchange in 1940, and the story collectors tell is that the skater is Sonja Henie. It fits. The Norwegian star won three Olympic golds, in 1928, 1932 and 1936, and ten straight world titles, and she was the skater who made the short skirt and white boots the look of the sport. Right after the 1936 Games she signed with Twentieth Century-Fox, and "One in a Million" made her one of the biggest box-office names in Hollywood. Then she toured the country with her ice shows. If you were drawing a pretty skater for a label around then, she's who everybody pictured.

The lore goes further: "Kreme de Koke" is said to come from Norwegian, meaning "cooking cream," which would be a sly nod to Sonja. And collectors like to say she was a little racy for a box of vegetables back then, with that skirt flying up in the spin!

And a skater on a Salinas box makes sense for another reason. Everything in that box traveled on ice.

🥬 Salinas, the Salad Bowl

The railroad made the Salinas Valley. Once refrigerated rail cars came along, lettuce grown there could cross the whole country, and the valley earned the name "America's Salad Bowl." John Steinbeck, a Salinas boy, put it right into East of Eden. The first cars were cooled with ice: big wood crates were loaded into box cars and packed in ice, and that's how crisp head lettuce came to be called "Iceberg Lettuce." Labels like this one were pasted on the ends of those wooden crates.

It changed in the 1950s, when Bud Antle brought in vacuum cooling and corrugated cartons. Lettuce could be packed right in the field, the cartons went into mechanically refrigerated cars, and the ice and the wooden crates went away. So did the labels.

🖨️ Schwabacher-Frey of San Francisco

Schwabacher-Frey was a major West Coast printer and stationer, and the Schwabacher name belonged to one of San Francisco's best-known families. The firm printed everything from billheads and stock certificates to postcards and crate labels, and Kreme de Koke is one of the labels that carries its name.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this antique advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! That black ground makes the skater pop, and it's a perfect gift for a skater, a Steinbeck fan, or anybody from the Salinas Valley.

Old labels like this are a reminder of a bygone era, and the lithography on them is unparalleled even to this day, in my opinion. Museums have galleries of them, and more and more collectors are seeking them out to preserve their history. The presses that printed these went quiet a long time ago, so what is out there now is all there will ever be. Once the last of the supply is on display with collectors and in galleries, finding one gets very difficult.