Before National Chocolate Covered Raisin Day was a thing (is it a thing, though?) . . . we had the Sun-Maid Raisin Maidens. A marketing strategy of the California Associated Raisin Company (a predecessor company to the Sun-Maid Growers of California), the Raisin Maidens represented the company at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, California. 

One of the women shown here, looking oh-so au currant in her dress and bonnet, is Lorraine Collet Peterson (1892-1983), the original model for the Sun-Maid logo. Plucked from obscurity by a big-shot raisin executive while working the packing and seeding line for the Griffin & Skelley Fruit Packing Company, Peterson’s likeness graced the nation’s raisin boxes from 1916 to 1960.

American model hired to promote a corporate trademark as the "Sun-Maid Girl".

Lorraine Collett (09.12.1892 - 30.03.1983)

Lorraine Collett was born to George Dexter Collett and Martha Elizabeth Falkenstein in Kansas City, Missouri. In 1915, Collett was attending high school and working part-time as a seeder and packer for the Griffin & Skelley Fruit Packing Company in Fresno, California for $15 a week. That May she was spotted by Leroy Payne, one of the executives of the raisin cooperative, while drying her curly brown hair and wearing her mother's red bonnet in the backyard of her family's home. She was hired to promote the California Associated Raisin Co. by handing out free samples at the Panama-Pacific Exposition and participating in an unusual promotion that had her dropping raisins from an airplane flying over San Francisco.

he company later commissioned a watercolor portrait of Collett from San Francisco artist Fanny Scafford to use as the basis for the "Sun Maid" corporate mascot devised by advertising executive E.A. Berg. Her likeness was trademarked and began appearing on raisin packaging in 1916. Use of Collett's image was so successful in promoting its products that by 1920 the company adopted "Sun-Maid Raisin Growers' Association" as its new name. Backed by an aggressive marketing push throughout the 20s, Sun-Maid managed to triple American consumption of raisins by the end of the decade. A revised version of her likeness continued to be featured on all Sun-Maid packaging through 1960. In 1974, Collett was presented with a commemorative plaque by Sun-Maid's president at a ceremony where she presented Scafford's original portrait and the red bonnet to the company in exchange for $1700. Sun-Maid executives donated Collett's bonnet to the Smithsonian Institution in 1987 on the occasion of the company's 75th anniversary.