Hines, Duncan

Now best known as a cake-mix brand name, Duncan Hines was once the most widely recognized name in American food. Hines’s importance for the latter half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is twofold: as the author of immensely popular guides to American restaurants, which were the forerunner of all the dining guides that would appear in succeeding decades, and, more significantly, as the name on cake mixes and related products. Hines was a prototype for one of the most effective and widely used marketing ploys in the period—branded food celebrity.