Vintage 1950s Vitamin Crate Label 🍠 Lafayette, LA, Remember Doing This?

Who Packed Vitamin Brand Yams? 🍠 Vitamin Brand Yams, Packed for Friedman & Broussard, Lafayette, Louisiana

Size: 9" x 9" ~ Little to no edge wear. Unused old stock, clean cream backs with no paste on them.

🥄 If you are of a certain age, do you remember doing this? 🤢 I remember spoons full of Cod Liver Oil! This is a vintage 1950s Vitamin Brand crate label for Louisiana yams and sweet potatoes, packed for Friedman & Broussard of Lafayette, Louisiana, and never pasted on a crate.

🔍 What's on it

VITAMIN BRAND runs across the top, YAMS over SWEET POTATOES sits in an oval, and below it is the kitchen: a mother leaning over the table with a spoon while a little boy tips his head back, mouth wide open, holding a small bottle lettered VITAMIN, with a plate of cooked sweet potatoes on the table. Remember doing this? Around the edges: 50 LBS. NET, PRODUCE OF U.S.A., U.S. No 1, and PACKED FOR FRIEDMAN & BROUSSARD, LAFAYETTE, LA. There's a tiny New Orleans printer's line along the bottom edge, ending "& Co. Inc. N.O. LA.", with the name hidden under the shadow of that big sweet potato. The back is plain.

Look at the joke! The bottle in the boy's hand says VITAMIN, the same as the brand, and there's a plate of sweet potatoes right there on the table. The pitch is skip the bottle, the vitamins are in the crate. And they really are: Louisiana's orange sweet potatoes are loaded with beta carotene, which is vitamin A, and the LSU horticulture people under Dr. Julian C. Miller spent years breeding them sweeter, softer and more golden.

⚖️ Why it says YAMS and SWEET POTATOES

This is my favorite bit, and it's right there in the middle of the label. Louisiana growers started calling their moist, orange sweet potatoes "yams" to set them apart from the drier, paler sweet potatoes back East, and in 1937 they were allowed to sell them that way, on the USDA's condition that the words "sweet potato" had to be on the label too. So that red oval is the rule in action: YAMS on top for the selling, SWEET POTATOES underneath to keep it honest. And the funny part is, there isn't a true yam grown for food in this country at all. The real yam is a completely different plant.

⚜️ Lafayette and Acadiana

Lafayette sits in the heart of Acadiana, with Louisiana's sweet potato country all around it. It wasn't always Lafayette, though. In 1821 an Acadian named Jean Mouton gave the land for a Catholic church, the town grew up around it as Vermilionville, and the parish was created in 1823 and named for the Marquis de Lafayette. The town wanted the parish's name too, but there was already a Lafayette, a suburb of New Orleans, so it had to wait until New Orleans absorbed that one. Vermilionville finally became Lafayette in 1884.

They even threw a party for the crop. The first Louisiana Yambilee was held at Opelousas, just up the road, on October 9 and 10, 1946, started by Bill Low and a yam shipper named Felix Dezauche to get nationwide publicity for Louisiana yams.

📸 My pictures seriously don't do it justice. Sorry for the glare, I tried!

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this vintage advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! That kitchen scene looks great framed in a kitchen or a dining room, and it's a perfect gift for a mom, a nurse, anybody who grew up on cod liver oil, or anybody from Lafayette and Acadiana.

Crate labels 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. Every label sold is one fewer left for sale anywhere. Nobody is printing more, and once these are on display with collectors or in galleries, they will be very difficult to acquire.