Old Bay Seasoning
The Old Bay Line, after which Old Bay is named
Old Bay Seasoning is named after the Old Bay Line, a passenger ship line that plied the waters of the Chesapeake Bay from Baltimore to Norfolk, Virginia, in the early 1900s. In 1939, a Jewish-German immigrant named Gustav Brunn started the Baltimore Spice Company. Gustav had previously been fired from McCormick after just two days on the job when his employer found out that he was Jewish.
The origins of the company began in Wertheim, Germany, where Brunn started a wholesale spice and seasoning business selling to food industries, seeing an opportunity as spices were in especially short supply amidst hyperinflation in the aftermath of World War I. Due to rising anti-Semitism as the …
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