PAAS has sold Easter egg dye under one name for almost a century and a half. The company's own sworn federal trademark filing says that name entered commerce in February 1880. Most of what gets written about PAAS online says it started thirteen years later than that.
The short version
- The federal trademark PAAS, Registration No. 0716938, lists a first use in commerce of February 1880 for "food coloring" — filed by the company in 1960, sworn to under penalty of perjury, and the strongest single date this guide could locate.
- That contradicts the 1893 origin date repeated on several collector and lifestyle sites. A contemporary 1881 trade journal, an 1881 advertisement, and a 2000 investigative piece in Slate all independently back the earlier 1880 date instead.
- A widely repeated claim that founder William Townley "received patent 8,355" on April 12, 1881 does not fit the numbering of any U.S. utility patent issued that year — Edison's incandescent lamp patent, granted the year before, was already numbered 223,898. The source of the "8,355" figure could not be confirmed and is more likely a trademark registration number, not a patent.
- Counting Townley himself, the brand has had five owners: Townley, then his son Philip B. Townley, then Plough, Inc. by 1960, then Schering-Plough after a 1971 merger, then Signature Brands LLC, which bought the Easter egg business in December 1999 and still runs it today.
- The collectible here is the packaging, not the dye — empty tins and boxes with character tie-ins or a Newark, New Jersey return address are what collectors chase, not the dye tablets themselves, which lose potency and are not meant to outlast a single spring.
- No realized auction price could be found for a vintage PAAS kit. Every figure in this guide's final section is a seller's asking price, labeled as such.
On this page
What PAAS dye actually is
PAAS is a five-cent-tablet idea that never stopped working. The original product was a small, hard tablet of concentrated dye, dropped into a cup of water and vinegar to color a hard-boiled egg in a few minutes. By 2000, the company making it controlled roughly forty percent of the entire U.S. Easter egg dye market and was producing about fifteen million kits a year, according to the trade reporting from that spring's ownership change. The tablet format barely changed in a century; what changed was everything around it — the tin, the box art, the included extras, and the company's own ownership.
None of that makes the dye itself collectible. A tablet dissolves in water and the finished egg gets eaten or thrown out within a week. What collectors actually chase is the packaging: an unopened or lightly used tin or box, old enough to carry a manufacturer's name, a character tie-in, or artwork that places it in a specific decade. That is the category this guide treats as the object — not the chemistry inside the box, but the box.
The trademark that contradicts the popular start date
Several frequently cited sources — Wikipedia's own PAAS entry among them — date the company to 1893, the year founder William Townley is said to have worked out how to compress loose dye powder into a stable tablet. That date traces back to retellings of company lore rather than to a document from the period.
The federal trademark record tells a different story. PAAS, Registration No. 0716938, was filed with the U.S. Patent Office on June 22, 1960 and registered June 13, 1961, covering "food coloring" under International Class 002. Its stated first use in commerce — the date a company swears to under penalty of perjury when it registers a mark — is February 1880, thirteen years earlier than the popular account.
That earlier date is not an outlier. Townley opened his own Newark pharmacy in 1877 and first packaged dye under the PAAS name in 1880, per contemporary trade-press research into the period's drug and dye trade. An 1881 advertisement in the trade journal New Remedies reported brisk repeat demand — "every one who had a stock of the dyes last year appears to have sold it out completely" — which only makes sense if the product was already on the market by 1880. A 2000 Slate investigation into the company's history, written at the time Schering-Plough sold the business, described PAAS as "a company famous for making Easter egg dye for 120 years," arriving at the same 1880 start date by simple subtraction. A trademark filing, a period trade advertisement, and an independent piece of investigative journalism published decades apart all land on the same year. The company's own vintage packaging agrees too: tins sold on the secondary market today are printed with the line "Established 1880."
Three independent records converge on 1880, not 1893. A sworn federal trademark filing, an 1881 trade-journal advertisement, and a 2000 investigative report in Slate all point to 1880 as the year PAAS entered the market. The 1893 date in wider circulation does not appear to trace to any primary document this guide could locate. Where the two conflict, this guide treats the earlier, better-corroborated date as the more reliable one — though neither this guide nor any source it checked could identify where the 1893 figure originated.
A patent citation that does not add up
One secondary source researching the dye trade of the period states that Townley "received patent 8,355" on April 12, 1881. That claim is worth checking against how U.S. patent numbers actually ran that year, because the number does not fit.
By January 1880, over a year before the cited date, routine utility patent numbers had already passed 223,000 — Thomas Edison's patent for the incandescent lamp, filed in late 1879, was granted that January as U.S. Patent 223,898. A patent granted in April 1881 would have carried a number well past 240,000, not 8,355. Design patents, which run on their own separate numbering series starting at 1 in 1842, were also well past that figure by 1881. Federal trademark registrations under the 1870 Trademark Act, however, ran on yet another independent numbering series that started at 1 in late 1870 — and a count in the low thousands by the early-to-mid 1870s is consistent with that series' pace, which makes an old-series trademark registration a more plausible match for a number as low as 8,355 than any patent would be.
This guide could not confirm what "patent 8,355" actually refers to. The number does not fit any U.S. utility or design patent issued around April 1881, and it is not clear from the secondary source whether an actual patent or an old-series federal trademark registration was being described. No independently verifiable patent record for Townley's dye-tableting method could be located for this guide under his name. The underlying claim — that something was formally registered to Townley in early 1881 — may well be accurate; the specific instrument and number are what remain unconfirmed here.
The synthetic dye chemistry behind the tablet
PAAS tablets worked because of a chemistry breakthrough that was barely a generation old when Townley started selling them. In 1856, eighteen-year-old British chemist William Henry Perkin was trying to synthesize quinine from coal-tar derivatives when he instead produced a vivid purple compound later named mauveine — the first synthetic aniline dye, and the beginning of an entire synthetic color industry that natural plant and mineral dyes could not compete with on cost or consistency.
By the 1880s that industry had matured enough to put stable, concentrated, water-soluble color into a pocket-sized tablet. An 1892 trade reference, the Druggists' Circular and Chemical Gazette, specifically described the PAAS-type dyes of the era as "various anilin compounds, which are either directly soluble in water or may be made so by the use of a little alcohol" — placing Townley's product squarely inside the same synthetic-dye wave as commercial clothing dyes, inks, and the first synthetic food colorings of the same decades. Early PAAS packaging reflected the product's drugstore origins and the public's wariness of the new synthetic chemistry: boxes included small swatches of dyed worsted, silk, and feathers to demonstrate the colors, alongside an explicit safety claim that eggs "thus dyed can be eaten without fear of poisoning."
Five owners later, the name still sells
Townley ran the company until his death in 1894, after which his son, Philip B. Townley, took it over. By 1960, ownership had passed to Plough, Inc., the Memphis-based consumer products company built by Abe Plough — the same company that filed the 1960 food-coloring trademark this guide relies on for the 1880 date, and that separately registered a PAAS mark in 1965 for an unrelated line of toys, which suggests the brand was already being stretched across more than one product category by the mid-1960s.
Plough, Inc. merged with Schering Corporation in 1971 to form Schering-Plough, a pharmaceutical and consumer-products conglomerate that ran the Easter egg dye business out of a plant in Cleveland, Tennessee for roughly three more decades. In December 1999, Schering-Plough sold the PAAS Easter egg business to Signature Brands LLC, a company spun off from General Mills in the late 1980s and best known for Betty Crocker-branded kitchen tools; production moved to Signature Brands' headquarters in Ocala, Florida for the 2000 season. Signature Brands LLC still owns and runs the brand today — though the specific 1960 PAAS word-mark registration this guide cites for the 1880 date was itself allowed to lapse in 2016, a routine renewal gap rather than evidence the name stopped being used. Two related, newer registrations the company has kept current — a 1986 mark covering the kits' crayons, stickers, and wraps, and a 1998 mark covering its egg-dipping tongs — confirm the brand name was still actively protected well after the original mark's first-use date had done its job of establishing the 1880 priority date.
How to date a vintage PAAS tin or box
Because the dye itself is not the collectible, dating a PAAS kit is really a packaging and provenance exercise, not a chemistry one.
- Material and format. The earliest widely available vintage kits on the resale market are printed tin canisters, generally mid-twentieth century; these gave way to printed cardboard boxes, and eventually to the shrink-wrapped plastic blister kits sold today. A metal tin is close to a guarantee of pre-1970s manufacture.
- Manufacturer credit on the package. A box or tin crediting "Paas Dye Company" or simply "Paas Mfg. Co., Newark, N.J." predates the 1999 ownership change; one crediting Schering-Plough places it between roughly 1971 and 1999; a Signature Brands credit, or an Ocala, Florida address, places it in 2000 or later.
- Licensed characters. Kits built around a licensed cartoon or movie character — a known example features Popeye and other King Features characters, consistent with 1940s mass-market licensing practice — can be dated more precisely by cross-referencing the character license's own active years than by the dye packaging alone.
- Commemorative and anniversary tins. A 1991 tin illustrated with Norman Rockwell artwork is a known, dateable special edition rather than standard-year packaging, and should be identified as such rather than assumed to be an ordinary year's box.
- Contents, not just the box. A complete kit with its original dye tablets, dipper, wax crayon, and instruction sheet still present and uncut is worth more to collectors than an empty box alone, even though the dye tablets themselves have no remaining color-fastness worth using.
Hunting seasonal advertising ephemera, not just the big-ticket pieces?
The look-alikes
| Brand or method | How it differs |
|---|---|
| Dudley's / Shake-an-Egg | PAAS's longest-running direct competitor, built around a shake-the-colored-crystals-in-a-bag method rather than a dip tablet, and marketed through mascot characters including Dudley Rabbit and a chicken named Klara Klucker. Still sold today, so an unopened vintage box needs the same manufacturer-and-address dating approach as a PAAS tin. |
| White Rabbit Paper Dye | An 1888 competitor to PAAS's original tablet dye — among the earliest rival brands on record, predating most of the licensed-character era by half a century. |
| Generic store-brand dye tablets | Unbranded or store-label dye tablets copy PAAS's basic format closely enough that a box with no maker's name and no address is usually a private-label product, not a PAAS mispackaging, and carries little collector value regardless of its actual age. |
| Onion-skin and natural dyeing | A pre-industrial method with no company behind it at all: eggs boiled while wrapped in onion skins pick up a mottled color from the skins' natural pigment, with the eggshell's own calcium acting as a mordant. No packaging exists to collect, which is itself a useful contrast with every branded method above. |
What a vintage kit sells for now
A 1940s PAAS "Pure Food Coloring" kit featuring Popeye and other licensed cartoon characters is currently asking $59 on eBay, described as used with its original dipper, transfer paper, and multicolor dyes intact. A newer-old-stock tin printed with an "Established 1880" line and two brushes and three dye colors is asking $8 plus shipping. A 1991 commemorative tin illustrated with Norman Rockwell artwork, complete with its original tablets, crayon, stickers, and dipper, is listed on Worthpoint without a visible sold price — the site gates its sold-price data behind a paid membership, which this guide did not purchase.
No confirmed realized auction price for any vintage PAAS kit could be located for this guide, from any of the specialist auction-result sites this project has used successfully for other categories. Every figure above is a seller's asking price, not a verified sale, and should be read that way.
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For another guide built around a company's own federal paperwork undercutting its popular origin story, see Bakelite: the trademark that predates the patent. For a different seasonal collectible dated by manufacturing technology rather than a company record, see Shiny Brite ornaments: a wartime material story. See more Field Guides
Sources
- PAAS, Registration No. 0716938, Serial No. 72099536, Justia Trademarks, for the filing date, registration date, and the February 1880 first-use-in-commerce date for food coloring.
- Signature Brands LLC, Trademark Owner Records, Justia Trademarks, for the company's current PAAS-related trademark portfolio, including the 1986 and 1998 marks and the 2016 cancellation of the original 1960 filing.
- PAAS, Registration No. 0806326, Serial No. 72213600, Justia Trademarks, for the separate 1965 Plough, Inc. toy-category trademark filing, cited as evidence of the brand's multi-category use by the mid-1960s.
- Researching Food History: Easter Eggs — Paas Dyes, White Rabbit Dye, onion skins, anilin, for Townley's 1877 pharmacy founding, the 1880 first packaging, the 1881 "New Remedies" advertisement, the 1892 Druggists' Circular aniline-compound description, early packaging contents, and the 1888 White Rabbit Paper Dye competitor.
- Easter Egg Dye: A Chatterbox Investigation, Slate, April 2000, for the "120 years" framing corroborating an 1880 start date, the Schering-Plough-to-Signature Brands sale in December 1999, the Cleveland, Tennessee to Ocala, Florida production move, and the 15-million-kit, 40-percent-market-share figures.
- Abe Plough, Wikipedia, for the 1971 Plough, Inc. and Schering Corporation merger forming Schering-Plough.
- Paas (dye), Wikipedia, for the widely repeated 1893 origin date this guide checks against the primary trademark record, and the Pennsylvania Dutch derivation of the name.
- Mauveine, Wikipedia, for William Henry Perkin's 1856 discovery of the first synthetic aniline dye.
- United States Patent and Trademark Office issue-year patent numbering, cross-referenced against Edison's U.S. Patent 223,898 (granted January 1880), for this guide's analysis of why "patent 8,355" does not fit a utility patent dated April 1881.
- Shake-an-Egg, Remind Magazine, for the Dudley Rabbit and Klara Klucker mascot detail on the Dudley's/Shake-an-Egg competing brand.
- eBay and Worthpoint listings for individual vintage PAAS kits, for this guide's asking-price figures, each labeled as an asking price rather than a confirmed sale.
- Wikimedia Commons, for the circa-1910 Easter postcard used as this guide's figure, placed as a period-appropriate image rather than a photograph of the product itself.
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