This being the northwest, and with the Grigg brothers’ company surrounded by farmland, Nephi decided that the scraps would go to feed the cattle and other livestock owned by the Grigg family. Could the barrel be redesigned so that it would eliminate the unwanted pieces of potatoes from the very wanted french fries? It could. When an equipment manufacturing company inexplicably showed up at their plant to demonstrate a prune sorter, Nephi and his plant superintendent Slim Burton chatted with them about a redesign. But french fry creation had a technology problem: The machinery could cut the potatoes into fries, but, as Nephi wrote, “we had a problem of separating the fries from the slivers and small pieces of potatoes that occurred slicing the irregular shaped potatoes.”
Frozen tater tots how to#
Simplot figured out how to freeze french fries without turning them black in 1946, and was well on his way to billionaire status.
The factory, located on the border between Oregon and Idaho, spawned the name for their new company: Ore-Ida.īy 1951, Ore-Ida had already become the largest distributor of sweet corn in the United States. They paid $500,000 dollars for the space (over $4.5 million today). (In the early ‘40s, they also operated a 40-acre dairy farm and restaurant near Vale, Oregon.)īut convinced that the future of produce was in the frozen food aisle, the brothers Grigg mortgaged their farms for a down payment on a flash-freezing plant in Northeastern Oregon.
Frozen tater tots archive#
Griggs responded with a five-and-a-half-page personal account that starts with the line, “The Tater Tot is the hero in the history of the saga of Ore-Idea Foods, Inc.” Since his death in 1995, Nephi’s response has been housed in his personal archive it’s the source for most of the tot’s origin story that exists today.)ĭuring the Great Depression, Nephi and his brother just scraped by in their native Idaho, working as farmers growing and selling potatoes and corn like all of their neighbors. (In 1989, an employee of Ore-Ida foods reached out to Nephi Grigg desperate for the story of Tater Tots, noting there was no historical record of how the item came to be. Willard Marriot Library at the University of Utah. “Bite off more than you can chew,” he wrote, “then chew it.” “You can never go broke by taking a profit,” he relentlessly repeats in his letters to colleagues and his own “History of the Tot,” all found in his personal archive, currently housed at the J. He was a high school dropout prone to hyperbolic business proverbs. Born in 1914, Nephi came of age during the Great Depression and was the leader of the two. Nephi and Golden Grigg were two determined young Mormon entrepreneurs, willing to do anything to get their shot of the American Dream. And the Grigg brothers wanted a bigger piece of that very frozen pie.į.
Between 19, Americans bought 800 million pounds of frozen food. Entrepreneurs across America were realizing in the wake of the second World War that Americans really loved heating up their dinner. These were the money makers, the big winners of the frozen food aisle after all, this was the 1950s.
In 1953, no one at the Griggs’ family potato plant in Northern Oregon planned to make anything other than frozen corn and french fries. The golden potatoes had been cut into bite-sized pieces and fried, and they were a hit. “These were all gobbled up faster than a dead cat could wag its tail,” Nephi Grigg would write 35 years later. The innovation was cooked, placed in small saucers, and distributed on the tables as samples. What better test audience than a group of potato men? After some bribing, the chef agreed. In his bag he had carried 15 pounds of his new creation all the way from Oregon, and he wanted them cooked and served. Two stories below the dining room where all of the members of the 1954 National Potato Convention were sidling up to tables, talking shop, hungry for breakfast, Nephi was bargaining with the head chef. In the main dining room where breakfast was about to be served, the tables were dressed with white linen, surrounded by mid-century modern wood backed chairs all laid out beneath not one, but four massive, trembling crystal chandeliers. It was remarkably grand, irresponsibly luxurious. The Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami was the new shining jewel on Millionaire’s Row: the dramatic sweeping curve of its design facing the seemingly infinite ocean, all the tans of 1950s Miami laid out beneath the balcony views on hundreds of lounge chairs sidling up to the pool between the hotel and the beach. Nephi and his brother Golden had travelled 2,883 miles from the tiny Oregon border town where they ran their frozen potato company to the white sparkling sands of Miami Beach.
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