Vintage 1943 Land O’ Sunshine Evaporated Milk Can Label 🥛 Suwannee Food & Baking, Jacksonville FL

🥛 In 1943 you could not just buy this can of milk. You had to spend stamps on it. The label carries its own copyright year on its face, and on 2 June 1943 canned evaporated and condensed milk went onto the American ration book. A tin of Land O’ Sunshine Evaporated Milk was, that summer, a thing you budgeted points for.

🧷 Details

Approx. 9 1/2" x 3 1/2" ~
Original unused can label, lithographed on cream stock, blank reverse
Printed on the face: LAND O’SUNSHINE over a Jersey cow’s head set in a blazing sunburst · EVAPORATED MILK · CONTENTS 14½ OZ. AVOIR. OR 13 FL. OZ.
On the right panel: PACKED FOR SUWANNEE FOOD & BAKING CO., JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA, and the copyright line © 1943 S. F. & B. CO.
Up the right edge, between two union-label ovals: INTERNATIONAL PLAYING CARD & LABEL CO., ROGERSVILLE, TENN.
Some very minor edge wear — you would not notice it on display, but see the photographs and judge for yourself

🍼 What the directions panel says

Between the two cow panels the sheet carries the whole feeding instruction, and the first line stops a modern reader dead:

“Can be used for infant feeding. Use according to your doctor’s directions. Use undiluted on cereals and fruits, or in coffee. Add one part of water to one part of the contents of this can to obtain a milk product which will not be below the legal standard for whole milk. Land O’ Sunshine Evaporated Milk is produced in clean sanitary plants.”

That is not a stray claim — it is the ordinary practice of the period. Before commercial formula, evaporated milk cut one-to-one with water was how a great many American babies were fed, on a doctor’s direction, and a tin that kept without refrigeration was the point of the product. Put that next to the ration stamp and you have the whole squeeze of the home front on one strip of paper.

🏪 The house brand of the company that became Winn-Dixie

Suwannee Food & Baking Co. was the manufacturing arm behind a Jacksonville grocery empire. William “Bill” Lovett founded Lovett’s Groceteria in 1928; baking began at the Suwannee Food & Baking plant in 1931; and Lovett’s grew to 78 stores across Florida and Georgia. In 1939 Lovett persuaded Table Supply to take a controlling 51 per cent of his company, and the two became Winn & Lovett — the firm that would end up as Winn-Dixie. The plant stood in Jacksonville’s New Town neighbourhood, inside what became the chain’s original corporate headquarters and distribution centre.

So Land O’ Sunshine is not a national brand and never was. It is a grocery chain’s own label, packed for its own shelves — and the chain it belonged to is still on the map of the American South.

🎟️ What 1943 meant for a tin of milk

Rationing of processed foods began on 1 March 1943 with War Ration Book Two and its blue stamps: 48 blue points per person per month, which for a family of four meant 192 points to cover everything tinned, bottled and packaged. Over 300 processed foods were rationed from March 1943 until August 1945. Canned evaporated and condensed milk joined the list on 2 June 1943.

The reason was the can, not the milk. Japan controlled roughly 70 per cent of the world’s tin supply, and tin — shock-proof, moisture-proof, indifferent to temperature — was what the military needed for ration tins, ammunition boxes, plasma containers and morphine syrettes. Civilian tin had to be squeezed. That is why a housewife in Jacksonville counted points at the grocery counter, and why this cheerful sunburst of a label was printed in a year when the thing it wrapped was being counted out by the stamp.

🖨️ The printer, and the union man who built the plant

The imprint up the right edge belongs to one of the best stories in American label printing. George L. Berry was president of the printing pressmen’s union for forty years, and he came from the Tennessee hill country where the union built its own town. In July 1927 he engineered the purchase of the F. Y. Kitzmiller and Sons knitting mill in Rogersville, Tennessee, which had gone into receivership, and had it rebuilt as a printing plant — for the plain reason that trained pressmen needed work.

A team under A. H. Pfiffner, R. J. Tieke Sr. and C. H. “Fritz” Geiger got the shop running, and it began printing playing cards in 1929 with about twenty people. As card demand fell, food and tobacco labels were added; in 1930 the firm was renamed the International Playing Card and Label Company and moved to labels exclusively. It became one of the largest independently owned label printers in the country, working for Campbell’s Soup, Gerber, Chef Boyardee, Life Savers, V-8, Pepsi and Clabber Girl — and for hundreds of small regional packers like this one. It merged with Dennison Manufacturing of Framingham, Massachusetts in 1977, and the Rogersville plant was finally sold in 2011.

The two small ovals stamped either side of that imprint are union labels — the printing trades’ mark that the sheet was set and run by union hands. On a plant founded by a union president to employ his own members, they are not decoration.

🐄 The picture itself

A Jersey cow’s head, three-quarter view, in front of a hand-drawn sun whose rays are laid down in two tones of yellow and burnt orange over the whole upper half of the sheet. The lettering is heavy sans-serif with a cast shadow, the kind of confident commercial type that was about to vanish under post-war modernism. Land O’ Sunshine is Florida selling Florida, on a can of milk.

❓ Questions People Ask

How is it dated? The label dates itself — the packer’s 1943 copyright line is printed on the right panel.

Is it a crate label? No — it is a can label, printed to wrap a tin of evaporated milk.

Who made the milk? The label says packed for Suwannee Food & Baking Co. of Jacksonville, which means the brand was theirs and the packing was done to their order.

Is it a reproduction? No. Original unused label stock on period paper, with the printer’s imprint and union labels intact on the edge.

🏡 Good for framing in a kitchen or pantry, Jacksonville and Florida history collections, Winn-Dixie and grocery-chain history, dairy and evaporated-milk collections, World War II home-front collections, and printing and union-label history.