The Company Behind Duncan Hines' Famous Cake Mix

Duncan Hines was a real person, but making cakes was never his passion. In fact, he was reportedly not a very good cook. What he was good at, though, was recommending restaurants. The traveling salesman spent the years from 1936 to 1954 visiting, reviewing, and recommending restaurants in "Adventures in Good Eating" — his American answer to Europe's Michelin guide — and his name had so much clout that putting it on a box of cake mix was a real seal of approval. Hines partnered with Roy H. Park in 1952 to form Hines-Park Foods, which licensed his name to Nebraska Consolidated Mills, the company that produced the cake mixes. Though they weren't the first of their kind in a long history of cake mix, Duncan Hines was the first to call for fresh eggs rather than powdered in the recipe.

Hines-Park Foods merged with Procter & Gamble in 1956, and that partnership continued for over 40 years until the line of baking mixes was sold to Aurora Foods in 1998. Over those four decades, Duncan Hines became the widely recognized baking brand it is today. Aurora Foods merged with Pinnacle Foods in 2004, and Conagra Brands acquired Pinnacle (and thereby became owners of Duncan Hines) in 2018. 

Conagra Brands began in 1919, when Nebraska Consolidated Mills was incorporated  — the company changed its name to ConAgra, Inc. in 1971 and Conagra Brands in 2016. Conagra Brands owns a number of iconic and recognizable companies in addition to Duncan Hines — including Orville Redenbacher's, PAM, Hebrew National, and Vlasic. The company's portfolio focuses on frozen and snack food items.  

Since purchasing Duncan Hines, Conagra Brands has made changes to the decades-old brand; notably, decreasing the amount of cake mix inside the box. Home bakers definitely noticed this shrinkflation, which results in less batter, thinner layers, and shorter cupcakes. "A single box makes one 9-inch layer [when] it used to make 2 sizable ones," wrote one frustrated Redditor, who complained that the required wet ingredients no longer seem accurate for the amount of mix in the box. "The pan sizes and directions are exactly the same, but now you get less cake mix," adds another Reddit user, who wound up with rubbery cakes and thought they'd misread the directions until they realized it was the decreased amount of mix that was to blame.

While a reduced product size may be disappointing, Conagra Brands' website emphasizes its focus on selling safe and nutritious foods. In mid-2025, Conagra Brands announced that it would be removing artificial colors from all products by the end of 2027. While some cake mixes still include dyes like red 40 (which is still listed as an ingredient in the red velvet cake mix as of October 2026), not all Duncan Hines products include synthetic colors. When our writer reviewed a dozen yellow cake mixes, Duncan Hines took the top two spots with the Classic Yellow Cake mix and Dolly Parton's Favorite Yellow Cake mix. Both include added color, but do not include any artificial dyes to get their recognizable yellow hue.