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Bon Ami (French language for "Good Friend") is an American scouring powder brand sold by the Bon Ami Company of Kansas City, Missouri. Since its inception in the late 19th century, the brand's advertising campaigns have gained particular notice.
Bon Ami was originally manufactured in a factory in Glastonbury, Connecticut, which later moved to Manchester in the 1880s.
As of 1896, Bon Ami was a common product in northeastern United States households. The slogan "hasn't scratched yet!" is an early American trademark.
In 1963, Lestoil purchased an approximately 60% stake in Bon Ami. Bon Ami merged into Lestoil in 1964, after protracted negotiations.
In 1971, Bon Ami was purchased by the Faultless Starch Company, which later changed the corporation name to Faultless Starch/Bon Ami Company to help reintroduce Bon Ami to the market.
In 1980, the company again revived its brand with a magazine campaign featuring the headline "never underestimate the cleaning power of a 94-year-old chick with a French name". During the first 6 months of the campaign, Bon Ami sales rose 12%. Nevertheless, its business was still flagging by 1983, when it remained in third place behind products from Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive.
In the 1966 film The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, whenever discussing a murder at an old mansion, one character mentions that the police were unable to clean the blood off the organ keys, and another character adds, "And they used Bon Ami!" Lead actor Don Knotts personally got permission from the president of Bon Ami to include this reference to the company's product.
In the first volume of his autobiography, Isaac Asimov recalls a box his family kept in the bathroom when he was a child, and how in his childish naïveté he was impressed that the company was so conscientious that if they ever found that the powder had scratched, they would change the slogan to "Only Scratched Once!"
Jane Vandenburgh's novel Failure to Zigzag makes reference to Bon Ami's slogan "hasn't scratched yet".
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