A natural salesman, at the young age of 10, the founder of Lay's started his first business selling soft drinks opposite the ballpark in his home town of Greenville, South Carolina. However, Herman Lay's first serious venture was in 1932, when he became a snack food distributor in Nashville. He believed in selling high quality products at affordable prices and making them available to everyone.
Soon Herman had enough money to buy up another company and turn Lay’s into a household name in the southern states. Meanwhile, there was a second crisp purveyor on the scene, Charles Elmer Doolin. He started the same year as Lay, 1932, when he bought a corn chip recipe from a café in San Antonio, Texas, and started selling Fritos.
Three decades later, the largest names in snack production joined forces to form Frito-Lay. Its products include Doritos, Fritos, Cheetos, Cracker Jack, Funyuns, Ruffles and, of course, Lay’s. It gets its potatoes from farms across 25 states and they’re trucked to one of 30 manufacturing plants, where, on average, five potatoes go into every bag.
You may be surprised to know, Del Monte’s first product wasn’t fruit cocktail or even tinned pineapple, but coffee which it supplied to the prestigious Hotel Del Monte in Monterey, California. It didn't start canning fruit until 1892 when it manufactured canned peaches.
In 1907, Del Monte built what was to be the largest fruit and vegetable cannery in the world at that time, in San Francisco. It employed 2,500 people and produced more than 200,000 cans of food a day. Though no longer a factory, it now houses shops and restaurants, you can still visit the old building at Del Monte Square.
Ahead of the curve, in 1971 Del Monte became the first major US food producer to put nutritional values on its food products. Before that, it was very difficult for consumers to assess pre-packaged foods and most meals were prepared from basic ingredients at home. Still today, Del Monte is one of the leading producers of premium canned foods.
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The cereal brand began life in Battle Creek, Michigan, in the 1890s. It was started by brothers John and Will Kellogg, who were both highly religious and believed eating a healthy and bland diet was the key to leading a pure life. The story goes, the duo were attempting to make granola and accidentally flaked wheat berry. They then experimented with corn and Corn Flakes were born.
When the business officially started in 1906, it was called Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company and was one of the first food companies to have a dietician. During the Great Depression, Kellogg's also helped out American citizens by splitting shifts so it could hire more people.
Throughout the rest of the century it followed with cereals such as Toasted Rice Flakes (Corn Flakes made with rice), Toasted Wheat Biscuit (giant Shredded Wheat), Toasted Bran Flakes, Pep (wheat flakes), Rice Krispies, Cocoa Krispies, Frosted Flakes, Special K, OKs (O-shaped cereal), Froot Loops and Mini-Wheats. They had varying degrees of success, but none as much as Corn Flakes.
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Invented by pharmacist John Pemberton in 1886, Coca-Cola was originally advertised as a brain tonic to relieve headaches and exhaustion. It contained ingredients from the kola nut, including caffeine, and cocaine. The US was in the midst of an anti-alcohol movement and the fizzy drink was just the pick me up people needed.
The brand didn’t get its major break until businessman Asa Griggs Candler bought it in 1888 and marketed it aggressively. It dialled up its free sampling and between 1894 and 1913, one in nine Americans received a free Coca-Cola. Under Candler’s watch the drink was also bottled for the first time and given its iconic contour packaging.
With Prohibition over, it was advertising that kept Coca-Cola an American staple. The first popular slogan was "The pause that refreshes", coined by ad man Archie Lee in 1929. The "pause" is still synonymous with Coca-Cola today and its advertising is still some of the best around.
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The bakery company has humble origins, starting as a dilapidated flour mill on the banks of the Mississippi River, Minneapolis. In 1869, Charles A. Pillsbury bought the company, decked it out in the latest technology and created a profit-sharing plan for the company’s employees. Within 20 years, it was one of the largest, most successful mills in the world.
It wasn’t until 1965 Americans got to meet their favourite mascot, Pillsbury’s iconic Doughboy. Poppin’ Fresh was thought up by copywriter Rudy Perz at the Leo Burnett ad agency to market its ready-made dough. The idea came to him when he popped open a can and imagined the lovable animation jumping out.
These days, Pillsbury is known not just for its flour but as a cooking and lifestyle brand. It sells dough for biscuits, rolls, cookies, brownies, bread, pie crusts and pizza. Need a recipe? It's got cookbooks too. Want to enter a competition? Check out the Pillsbury Bake-Off, which is where Tunnel of Fudge cake first gained recognition.
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Its most famous product may be ketchup, but 25-year-old Henry Heinz got his start making horseradish. It was 1869 and he was living with his parents, growing the pungent plant in the garden and following his mother’s recipe to make the condiment. What made Henry’s product different was it came in a clear bottle displaying its high-quality ingredients, while other companies used brown bottles to disguise theirs.
Next came pickles, vinegar, tomato ketchup – except it was called Catsup back then, sweet pickle, and many more condiments. By 1896 the brand had already sold well over 60 different products. But it wasn’t stopping, Heinz Baked Beans were released across the Atlantic in the 1900s. Back home, Beefsteak Sauce was a ground-breaking product of the early 20th century.
So “Heinz’s 57 Varieties” doesn’t refer to its product count. One day Henry spotted a sign advertising “21 styles of shoe” and simply liked the look of it. The company actually sells over 5,700 sauces and pantry items, including mash-ups of classics such as Mayomust (mayo and mustard), Mayochup (mayo and ketchup) and Mayocue (mayo and barbecue).
America’s most-loved hot sauce, Tabasco has been around since 1868 and is still produced in the same way and in the same place it always has been, on Avery Island, a salt dome surrounded by marshland in Louisiana. It all started when its founder Edmund McIlhenny grew a crop of capsicum frutescens peppers and decided to start producing the spicy condiment.
Once harvested, the chillies were pulped, aged in oak barrels, combined with salt and vinegar, then packaged into Tabasco’s famous little cologne bottles with the lids that only let you sprinkle rather than pour. When it was first produced the bottles were sealed with green wax, then sent to grocers all along the Gold Coast for one dollar a pop.
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These days, the sauce is sold in over 195 countries and the capsicum frutescens are grown in South America, as well as on Avery Island, and shipped back to keep up with demand. However, there’s one thing threatening the future of the brand, every year the salt dome is losing land due to rising sea levels caused by climate change.
The most famous Bourbon family in America, Jim Beam sold its first bottle in 1795, which was just three years after Kentucky became a state. The US government had asked settlers to move west to grow corn and the mild climate provided conditions so ideal they had surplus. Jacob Beam used his father’s whiskey recipe to turn his excess crop into whiskey-Bourbon.
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Prohibition brought production to a sharp halt and for 13 years no whiskey was made at all. But when it was repealed in 1933, then-owner Jim Beam got the business straight back up and running, rebuilding the distillery in just 120 days. Safeguarding the company’s future, he took a jug of his yeast home every weekend – and to this day the same yeast culture is still used.