McCormick & Company is rolling out two limited-edition collectible tins of its OLD BAY seasoning ahead of Maryland's peak blue crab season, pairing a Preakness Stakes tie-in with a student-artist collaboration from the Maryland Institute College of Art. The Hunt Valley, Md.-based flavor house announced the tins on May 14, 2026, positioning both SKUs as seasonal shelf pieces aimed squarely at the crab-boil consumer segment that drives OLD BAY's heaviest velocity windows each summer.
Neither McCormick nor its retail partners disclosed production volumes, suggested retail pricing, or distribution footprint for the two tins in the release. The packaging marks a return to OLD BAY's original tin format—a move the company is framing as heritage-forward rather than purely nostalgic, though no unit sales projections or ex-factory values were provided.
The timing is deliberate. Maryland's commercial blue crab (Callinectes sapidus) fishery typically builds through May and peaks between June and September, when dockside activity on the Chesapeake drives retail and foodservice demand for Chesapeake-style seasoning blends. The 2025 blue crab stock assessment flagged continued recruitment variability in the Bay, a pressure point that processors and supply-chain buyers have been monitoring closely heading into the 2026 harvest season. Whether dockside volumes this year support the kind of consumer crab-picking occasions that move seasoning at full velocity remains an open question as water temperatures climb.
The Preakness Stakes edition connects OLD BAY to the 151st running of the race, held at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore—an event that draws significant in-market food and beverage activation from regional and national brands alike. The MICA collaboration, meanwhile, taps Baltimore's creative economy, lending the second tin an art-forward design sensibility that McCormick has used successfully in prior limited runs to attract collector-segment buyers and drive social amplification without discounting.
For seafood operators, the campaign is largely a brand-health story rather than a supply or pricing signal, but it underscores sustained consumer appetite for Chesapeake-origin flavor identifiers—a tailwind that supports value-added blue crab products, steamed crab retail kits, and IQF crab cake lines that carry OLD BAY as a front-of-pack call-out. Foodservice distributors supplying crab houses and casual-dining operators along the Mid-Atlantic corridor may see incremental lift from the seasonal marketing push, though quantified sell-through data were not available at press time. McCormick has not indicated whether the tins will carry on-pack QR traceability or regional sourcing claims tied to Chesapeake harvest.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.