Wesson cooking oil

Wesson Oil advertisement, 1918.

Wesson was originally a trademark of the Southern Oil Company, named after David Wesson (1861–1934), a food chemist at the firm who, in 1899 developed a novel process for deodorizing cottonseed oil, producing the first commercial all-vegetable shortenings from cottonseeds. This new product was marketed as Snowdrift. The Savannah, Georgia, factory was erected in 1911 and torn down in 2004. In the 1920s, the vegetable oil division was spun off as the Wesson Oil & Snowdrift Company. In 1960, this firm merged with Hunt's Foods, Inc. to become Hunt-Wesson Foods, later merged with Norton Simon and later merged with Beatrice Foods. The brand was sold to ConAgra Foods along with many other former Beatrice brands in 1990.

In July 2011, two lawsuits were brought against ConAgra, arguing that it misrepresented Wesson as being "pure and natural" when it used genetically modified corn and soy in its oils. They argued that ConAgra "engaged in this misleading and deceptive campaign to charge a premium and take away market share from other similar products".[1][2] On April 4, 2019, a settlement document was given to the court to have a final hearing on approval of the document for October 7, 2019.[3] Which will include $27 million for damages and reliefs.[4]

After an antitrust lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in early March 2018, Conagra Brands Inc. and J. M. Smucker Co. cancelled a deal for Smucker to purchase the Wesson brand. The FTC claimed that Smucker would have controlled at least 70 percent of the market for branded canola and vegetable oils.

On December 18, 2018, Conagra announced that it had reached an agreement to sell Wesson to Richardson International, Limited, Canada’s largest agribusiness operating elevators, crop input facilities, canola processing and oat milling facilities in Canada, the US and Britain. [5]