| Type | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Industry | Snack food |
| Founded | 1913 |
| Headquarters | Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S. |
| Products | ToastChee Thunder potato chips Captain's Wafers Cape Cod Potato Chips |
| Revenue | $852.4 million USD (2008) [1] |
| Employees | 5,500 |
| Parent | homepage = http://www.lance.com/ |
| Subsidiaries | Tom's Snacks Co. Cape Cod Potato Chips Brent & Sam's Cookies Vista Bakery, Inc Stella D'Oro |
Lance, Inc. is an American snack food company headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina.
They manufacture snacks such as[2]:
Lance has paid quarterly dividends to stockholders for decades. The dividend has been $0.16 per share since 2000.
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Philip Lance and Salem Van Every, Lance's son-in-law, started selling single serve snacks in 1913. Two years later, they opened the doors of the Lance Packaging Company. In 1943, Philip Lance Van Every took over leadership of Lance, still a privately held company. Today, Lance, Inc., is a leader in the snack food industry and one of the largest manufacturers and distributors of snack foods in the United States, especially in the South.
They also did a historic breakthrough by placing female wrestler Velvet Sky on the cover of one of Tom's Snack chips.
Although Lance, Inc., is publicly traded, the Van Every family still maintains an active interest in the company.
On July 22, 2010 Lance announced that it will merge with Snyder's of Hanover. The resulting company, to be known as Snyder's-Lance Inc., will remain publicly traded under the LNCE symbol. Headquarters will remain in Charlotte.[3] On December 2, Lance shareholders approved the deal that would create the country's number 2 snack food company.[4] The merged company became Snyder's-Lance.
Many snack cracker products manufactured by Lance are commonly referred to as "Nabs". The term "Nabs" today is used to refer to any type of snack crackers, most commonly those made and manufactured by Lance, Inc. Many in the southeastern United States prefer the term Nabs to generically mean the specific Toastchee brand of Lance crackers. The term has its origins back to 1924 when the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) introduced a snack, put in a 5-cent sealed packet called "Peanut Sandwich Packet". They soon added a second, "Sorbetto Sandwich Packet". These packets allowed salesmen to sell to soda fountains, road stands, milk bars, lunch rooms, news stands etc. Sales increased and in 1928 the company adopted and started to use the name NAB, which immediately won the approval of the public. This term caught on and is still widely used today.