Nabisco (originally known as National Biscuit Company) is a brand of cookies and snacks, including brands such as Chips Ahoy!, Fig Newtons, Mallomars, Oreos, Premium Crackers, Ritz Crackers, Teddy Grahams, Triscuits, Wheat Thins, Social Tea, Nutter Butter, Peek Freans, Lorna Doone, Famous Chocolate Wafers and Chicken in a Biskit, used for the United States, United Kingdom, Venezuela and Mexico as well as other parts of South America by Kraft Foods.

All Nabisco branded cookie or cracker products are branded Christie in Canada. However, prior to the Post Cereals merger the cereal division kept the Nabisco name in Canada.

US Nabisco-branded products are branded Kraft in some other countries.

Headquartered in East Hanover, New Jersey, the company is a subsidiary of Illinois-based Kraft Foods. Nabisco's plant in Chicago, a 1.6 million-square-foot production facility at 7300 S. Kedzie Ave., is one of the largest bakeries in the world, employing more than 2,000 workers and turning out some 320 million pounds of snack foods annually. Originally known as the National Biscuit Company, Nabisco opened corporate offices in the world's first skyscraper, the Home Insurance Building, in the Chicago Loop in 1898.

Logo

The Nabisco logo, a diagonal ellipse with a series of antenna-like lines protruding from the top, is known as the "Nabisco Orb", and can be seen imprinted on Oreo wafers in addition to Nabisco product boxes and literature. It has been claimed in company promotional material to be an early European symbol for quality. Oreo cookies in Canada do not have the Nabisco Orb as they are branded as Christie in that country. Elsewhere, the packaging is branded with the Kraft logo.

Merger history

Nabisco dates its founding back to 1898Laurie, Maxine N.; and Mappen, Marc; Encyclopedia of New Jersey: Rutgers University Press; 2004/2005. P. 555., a decade during which the bakery business underwent a major consolidation. Early in the decade, bakeries throughout the country were consolidated regionally, into companies such as Chicago's American Biscuit and Manufacturing Company (which was formed from 40 Midwestern bakeries in 1830), the New York Biscuit Company (consisting of seven eastern bakeries), and the United States Baking Company. In 1898, the National Biscuit Company was formed from the combination of those three; the merger resulted in a company with 114 bakeries across the United States and headquartered in New York City. The "biscuit" in the name of the company is a British English and early American English term for cracker products.