20 Canned Foods That Exist For Surprisingly Specific Reasons

I see the word “spam” and immediately think it’s junk, but give me “SPAM,” and it’s a whole other story. The canned meat was named in 1937 by contest winner Kenneth Daigneau at a New Year’s Eve party. During World War II, the United States military bought more than 100 million pounds of SPAM, introducing the vacuum-canned spiced pork shoulder to troops everywhere. But despite the widely touted explanation that SPAM means “spiced ham,” Hormel has never confirmed what the name actually stands for. Those four letters remain a mystery to this day.

If you’ve heard the claim that canned pumpkin isn’t really pumpkin, don’t worry: it isn’t made from squash imposters (that would be sad). Commercial canning of the Dickinson pumpkin began in 1929, when Libby, McNeill & Libby purchased a canning plant in Eureka, Illinois, from the Dickinson family. This tan-skinned, flesh-packed, sweet-tasting pumpkin variety is ideal for canning, saving you from hours of roasting and straining. It is a pumpkin, just not the jack-o’-lantern kind.

Albacore itself was nothing new, but steaming it before canning was. After the sardine run failed in 1903, Albert P. Halfhill of the California Fish Company’s San Pedro cannery began experimenting with albacore as an alternative. He discovered that steaming removed its strong natural oils and turned the dark meat into something lighter, whiter, and milder in flavor. He began selling his steamed albacore the next year.

There’s a popular story that spinach’s reputation as a superfood came from a decimal-point error that exaggerated its iron content, but food historians are skeptical of that tale. They point out that raw spinach was gritty and labor-intensive to clean of sand and dirt. Buying canned spinach meant you didn’t have to wash out all that grit yourself. In the 1930s, canned spinach sales increased by about 33 percent, helped by promotions linked to Popeye, the spinach-loving, hulking-biceped cartoon character created by E.C. Segar in 1929.

Fresh pineapples rotted easily during transport, and that certainly helped make the fruit an expensive luxury. After 1911, however, engineer Henry Ginaca built a machine for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company that automatically peeled, cored, and sized pineapples. The original model processed 35 to 50 pineapples per minute, tripling the productivity of hand labor. Improvements through the 1920s and 1930s pushed that rate to 100 fruits per minute.

Soup was once mostly a dish prepared at home, but Dr. John T. Dorrance of Campbell’s helped turn it into a canned pantry staple. In 1897, he found a way to remove about half the water from soup before canning it, which cut the costs of tinplate, packaging, and transportation. With less water to lug around, Campbell’s could sell its condensed tomato soup for just 10 cents a can.

In 1912, Massachusetts cranberry grower Marcus L. Urann, who would later co-found Ocean Spray in 1930, started canning cooked, strained, overripe berries. The familiar canned cranberry sauce that slides out of the can in one solid, jellied cylinder—yes, the one that still has the can ridges on it—was introduced by Ocean Spray in 1941 and became a Thanksgiving fixture. Fresh cranberries, however, are highly perishable, and their harvest season is limited to fall. The canned product lengthened the life of the fruit, transforming a short-lived autumn crop into something that could be enjoyed long after harvest.

Despite the name, canned fruit cocktail has never been an alcoholic cocktail. The term fruit cocktail could evoke a fresh fruit appetizer served in stemmed glassware, sometimes with alcohol, but the canned version was simply mixed with light syrup. Its creation was helped along by Herbert Gray’s 1930 patent for a mechanical fruit dicer, which made it possible to use excess and imperfect fruit rather than throwing it away. Del Monte first sold the canned mixture under the name Fruit Cocktail in 1938.

That familiar trapezoidal corned beef tin wasn’t designed that way just to make opening it interesting. In 1875, Chicago meatpackers Arthur A. Libby and William J. Wilson patented the shape so the compressed meat could slide out in one piece, making it convenient for slicing, while the cans could also be packed more tightly during transport. Meanwhile, across the world in Fray Bentos, Uruguay, the Liebig Extract of Meat Company operated a huge export plant producing canned “bully beef” that was shipped throughout Europe.

The William Underwood Company supplied Union troops with canned lobster and canned beef during the Civil War. Three years after the cannons fell silent, Underwood introduced its canned deviled ham, a spicy, ground-ham meat spread. The company registered its Red Devil logo in 1870, and the mark is currently the oldest active food trademark in the U.S.

Chef Boyardee founder Ettore Boiardi started making his spaghetti sauce and pasta kits from his Cleveland kitchen in 1928. During WWII, canned ravioli was used in military rations, helping the brand become nationally recognized. Beefaroni followed in the 1950s, extending that success.

The first canned sardines date back to the 1830s, when the French food processor Joseph Colin, based in Nantes, France, perfected the process of packaging fried sardines in oil in a sealed tin can. Canned sardines were one of the first mass-produced canned foods worldwide and were widely used as light rations by 19th-century European militaries, proving that sealed-can preservation worked for fish, too.

In 1864, William Hume, George Hume, and Andrew Hapgood opened the first Pacific salmon cannery on a crude scow on the Sacramento River and soon moved operations to the Columbia River and Alaska. Previously, inland working-class people had no practical way to get fresh salmon—the Humes’ scow changed that.

Evaporated milk can be used in cooking as well as for baby food. Swiss immigrant John B. Meyenberg patented high-pressure steam sterilization of canned milk in 1884 and started the Helvetia Milk Condensing Company in 1885, later known as Pet Milk. Unlike Borden’s sweetened condensed milk, Meyenberg’s unsweetened version relied on heat rather than sugar to preserve the milk.

Each grapefruit segment has a stubborn coat of bitter white pith that isn’t exactly pleasant to eat. In 1921, Florida citrus packers found a remedy: a mild hot lye bath that dissolved the pith without destroying the grapefruit segments. The segments could then be packed whole in light syrup. Riding on a popular breakfast trend and this new chemical breakthrough, canned grapefruit grew in demand. By 1929, more than a million cases were produced annually in Florida.

Minnesota Valley Canning Company (now Green Giant) realized that less liquid meant a better-quality product, and introduced vacuum-packed “Niblets” whole-kernel corn in 1929. Until then, sweet corn canned in large amounts of brine was very mushy and pale, almost cream in consistency. Removing most of the air and liquid allowed the kernels to remain firm and retain their color better.

The Van Camp’s marketing story about being a supplier of canned baked beans during the Civil War is just that: a myth. The canning of baked beans didn’t start in Boston until around 1877. Van Camp’s did supply canned meats and fruits during the war. In 1894, Frank Van Camp began making canned pork and beans in tomato sauce, which prompted national demand. Heinz began mass production of beans in 1895.

When Hormel introduced Dinty Moore Beef Stew in 1935, the shelf-stable combination of beef, carrots, potatoes, and gravy borrowed its name from Dinty Moore, a saloon keeper in George McManus’s popular comic strip Bringing Up Father. The familiar pop culture reference helped consumers discover this new canned meal.

Chili con carne had strong local roots, having long been sold on the streets of San Antonio, Texas by women known as Chili Queens. In 1936, Hormel began shipping their product nationally, bringing the formerly regional Texan food to store shelves all over the country.

Condensed milk has a permanent place in the pantry, but its history isn’t that long. Before the mid-1800s, milk in cities would often spoil quickly and spread disease. In 1856, Gail Borden received a patent for condensing milk in a vacuum and then preserving it with sugar in airtight cans. Starting in 1861, his contracts with the Union Army grew his small business into an industrial undertaking.

This content was created with the help of AI.