Vintage 1950s Dixie Home Peanut Butter Label 🥜 Greenville SC

Remember Dixie Home Peanut Butter? 🥜 Dixie Home Peanut Butter Jar Label, Dixie Home Stores, Greenville, South Carolina

Size: 2 1/2" x 2 1/4" ~ Little to no wear.

A big yellow columned Southern home under a bright blue sky, a DIXIE HOME banner with streamline speed stripes, and PEANUT BUTTER in bold letters on green. This is a Dixie Home peanut butter jar label, distributed by Dixie Home Stores of Greenville, South Carolina, and never put on a jar. It's a sweet little thing, just 2 1/2 inches across, and a piece of the grocery chain that went on to become half of Winn-Dixie!

🔍 What's on it

CONTENTS 12 OZS. across the yellow top, over a painted two-story house with tall columns, a red roof, two chimneys and green trees in an arched window of blue sky. Then DIXIE HOME in white on a navy band with white speed lines and red fins, and below on green, PEANUT BUTTER, MADE OF SELECTED NO. 1 PEANUTS, HYDROGENATED PEANUT OIL, SALT AND SUGAR., DISTRIBUTED BY DIXIE HOME STORES in yellow, and GREENVILLE, SO. CAROLINA. The label is square with rounded corners. The back is plain.

That word DISTRIBUTED matters. The chain didn't sign itself as the maker. The peanut butter was packed for the chain and sold under its own name, the way store brands still are today.

🛒 The Chain Behind the Label

Dixie Home Stores was born in 1937, when two South Carolina grocery chains, Dixie Stores of Greenville and Home Stores of Columbia, formally merged. The two men at the top were family, too. R. E. Ebert of Columbia, the president, had married the sister of J. P. Williamson of Greenville, the executive vice president. When the merger was reported that summer, the new chain counted 164 stores, 113 of them in South Carolina, two in Georgia and the rest in North Carolina, with a bakery in Columbia that could turn out 15,000 loaves a day and large warehouses in Columbia and Greenville. That's the name on this label, so it comes from the years after 1937.

🥜 On the Shelf

The chain put its own name on groceries from canned milk to margarine, and peanut butter was one of them. The ads in The Clinton Chronicle of Clinton, South Carolina, show it plainly. In September 1949 a pound jar of the store's peanut butter was 35 cents. In December 1953 it was "Creamy Dixie-Home Peanut Butter," the 12-ounce jar, for 29 cents. That's the same 12-ounce size printed across the top of these labels.

The ingredient line tells a story too. Old-time peanut butter separated, with the oil floating on top. In the early 1920s Joseph Rosefield of Alameda, California, worked out how to partially hydrogenate the oil so it stayed mixed in. His process went into Peter Pan, and in 1932 he launched Skippy. "Hydrogenated peanut oil" on these labels means the chain was selling that smooth, no-stir kind.

🏬 Then Came the Big One

On November 14, 1955, the company, by then headquartered in Greenville, merged with Winn & Lovett of Jacksonville, Florida. It brought 117 stores, mostly in North and South Carolina, and about $90 million a year in sales, and the combined company took the name Winn-Dixie Stores, Inc. The Dixie in Winn-Dixie is Dixie Home. Most of the Carolina stores kept their old signs for a while before they all switched over, and Greenville became the home of a Winn-Dixie division. With that merger the new company broke into the top ten supermarket chains in the country, and from the mid-1950s into the mid-1960s it was the most profitable company in the grocery business. The old name lived on as a Winn-Dixie store brand for years, and Dixie Home Tea was the last product to carry it.

🏡 Display

This little label looks great framed in a kitchen or a pantry, and it's a perfect gift for a peanut butter lover, anybody who grew up shopping at Winn-Dixie, or anybody from Greenville, Columbia and the Carolinas.

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 and art institutes have galleries dedicated to them, and more and more collectors are seeking them out to preserve their history. Once the limited supply for sale is gone and on display with collectors or in galleries, they will be very difficult to acquire.