The Vlasic pickle empire was born on Blacks Corners Road

The stork in the bow tie, the deadpan voice, the pickle held up like a fine cigar — that whole act traces back to a small plant in Imlay City. In 1957 Joseph Vlasic bought the Patzer Food Products Company on Blacks Corners Road, and two years later he folded it into a new company called Vlasic Foods. The family had been in food in Detroit for decades, going back to a creamery his Croatian-immigrant father started. Pickles were the gamble that paid.

It paid enormously. That first Imlay City plant didn’t stay small. It grew to roughly ten times its original footprint — hundreds of thousands of square feet spread across nearly two hundred acres — and in the busy summer packing season it puts close to 850 people to work. The brand became a national name, with the cartoon stork narrating commercials and the jars lining grocery shelves from coast to coast. The cucumbers still come largely from Michigan fields.

There’s a nice symmetry in a Thumb pickle town. This is farm country, blueberries and produce, and Imlay City throws a Blueberry Festival every summer. A pickle plant fits the place: it takes what the surrounding fields grow and turns it into something with a long shelf life and a long reach. Bob Vlasic, Joseph’s son, ran the company as it scaled up, and the family name ended up on more jars than almost anyone’s.

Drive past the plant on Blacks Corners Road on a July afternoon and you can sometimes catch the brine in the air — the smell of a small-town bet from 1957 that turned a roadside packing shed into a household word.