Aladdin Industries

When Aladdin Industries located its corporate headquarters in Nashville in 1949, it also introduced a progressive industrial design to Nashville's emerging corporate landscape. The company built a modern International-style headquarters designed by the firm of Spencer Warwick Associates on South Nashville land between existing railroad tracks and the Dixie Highway.

Aladdin Industries Incorporated dates to 1919. The company made and sold insulated receptacles and kerosene lamps. In the late 1930s Aladdin began to develop its first vacuum bottles. By 1949, at the time of the move to Nashville, Aladdin had merged with the Mantle Lamp Company of America, which had previously sold mantle lamps under the brand name “Aladdin.” The new company kept the name, and in the following year, 1950, Aladdin expanded into the new market of school lunch box kits.

Production at the Nashville factory was initially devoted to the manufacture of vacuum bottles and lunch box kits. The first name character for the school lunch boxes was television and movie cowboy star Hopalong Cassidy. The new product was a huge success, and over the decades Aladdin has produced hundreds of new school lunch box designs. A second important expansion came in 1965, when Aladdin acquired the Universal Stanley Division of the J. B. Williams Company, which made the Stanley thermos bottle. Stanley bottles are still produced at the Nashville factory.

The corporation's third major product, Temp-Rite meal delivery systems, dates to 1968. These are insulated, compartmentalized trays that maintain food at a desired temperature and are in high demand from institutional clients such as hospitals. This product's success led to a creation of a separate division, Aladdin Synergetics, which by 1972 had established offices in England, France, and Germany.