Pickles were brought to the New World by Christopher Columbus, who is known to have grown cucumbers for the purpose of pickling on the island of Haiti.

Before Amerigo Vespucci set out to explore the New World, he was a pickle peddler in Seville, Spain. Since food spoilage and the lack of healthy meals were such concerns on long voyages, he loaded up barrels of pickled vegetables onto explorer ships. Hundreds of sailors were spared the ravages of scurvy because of his Vespucci's understanding of the nutritional benefits of pickles.

Since the Middle Ages, pickles were a common condiment and snack in England. Queen Elizabeth's chefs noted her liking of them, and Shakespeare peppers his plays with references not only to pickles, but new uses of the word as metaphor: Oh, Hamlet, how camest thou in such a pickle? (Act 5, Scene 1.) 'Tis a gentle man here a plague o' these pickle-herring! How now, sot! (Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 5.) What say you? Hence, Horrible villain! or I'll spurn thine eyes like balls before me; I'll unhair thy head: Thou shalt be whipp'd with wire and stew'd in brine, Smarting in lingering pickle. (Anthony and Cleopatra, Act 2, Scene 5.)

In the sixteenth century, Dutch fine food fanciers cultivated pickles as one of their prized delicacies. The area that is now New York City was home to the largest concentration of commercial picklers at the time.

1820: A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons, exhibiting the fraudulent sophistications of bread, beer, wine, spirituous liquors, tea, coffee, cream, confectionary, vinegar, mustard, pepper, cheese, olive oil, pickles and other articles employed in domestic economy and methods for detecting them was published by chemist Frederic Accum. It opened consumers eyes to the possibilities that common household ingredients were tampered with during production in order to improve their appearance or lengthen their shelf-life. This text revealed that pickles were commonly treated with copper to brighten their coloration. 1851: The Scottish chemist James Young patents a way of creating paraffin, which will be used to seal home preserves, through a dry coal distillation. 1860 : Louis Pasteur sterilizes milk by heating it. 1881: Alfred Bernardin invented the first metal tops to be used in commercial canning. 1893: Heinz, a new company to touted its 57 varieties of pickles, preserves, and other jarred foods, introduces the pickle pin at the Chicago World's Fair. The pickle pin resurfaces at world fairs and expositions to this day, marking it one of the most successful marketing efforts in American History.

19th Century