NATIONAL BISCUITS

At this point, I've written about two Nabisco products - Oreos and Triscuits - but I haven't yet dived into the name of the company itself. It all traces to an 1898 merger between the New York Biscuit Company and the American Biscuit and Manufacturing Company, which rebranded as the National Biscuit Company. In 1901, the company introduced a new type of sugar wafer that they called Nabisco, after the first few letters of each word in the company name. About a decade later, the company rebranded to just NBC, and in the 1940s they finally began using Nabisco across all their packaging, formalizing it in April 1971. These are minor legal changes, but following some mergers the company was renamed to Nabisco Brands in 1981, then RJR Nabisco in 1985, then back to Nabisco in 1993.