Old Bay Seasoning

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 antisemitism as the Nazi Party rose to power, the company moved to Frankfurt, Germany; however, on the night of November 10, 1938, a massive pogrom against Jews, known as Kristallnacht, led to Brunn being arrested by Nazi soldiers and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp.

According to Brunn's son, Gustav's wife paid a large sum of money to a lawyer for him to be released, and as they had already applied for and received American visas, were able to escape with their two children to New York City, and later Baltimore, Maryland, where Brunn had family. There, having brought with him only a small spice grinder, Brunn first produced the "Delicious Brand Shrimp and Crab Seasoning", which was later renamed Old Bay.

The rights to the seasoning brand were purchased by McCormick & Co in 1990. McCormick continued to offer Old Bay in the classic yellow can.

McCormick has a number of other products under the Old Bay banner, including seasoning packets for crab cakes, salmon patties and tuna, tartar sauce, cocktail sauce, and seafood batter mix. They also make other seasoning blends that mix Old Bay seasoning with garlic, lemon, brown sugar, herbs and blackened seasonings. McCormick has offered a lower-sodium version of Old Bay Seasoning.

In 2017, McCormick changed the packaging from metal cans to plastic containers in an effort to reduce the packaging costs.

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