20 Food Empires Born From Failures, Accidents And Wild Gambles

In 1894, W.K. Kellogg and his brother, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a physician at a sanitarium, accidentally figured out how to flake grain. W.K. wanted to sweeten it and market it; his brother would not. So, in 1906, W.K. founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company on his own. He signed each box himself. Later, he’d sue his brother for rights to the Kellogg’s name. So much for keeping business disagreements out of the family.

In 1891, William Wrigley Jr. arrived in Chicago with $32 to sell his father’s soap. To move it, he threw in free baking powder, which outsold the soap itself. He switched products, then started tossing in free chewing gum with baking powder orders. Once again, the freebie outsold the thing he was actually trying to sell. The gum outsold everything, and by 1893, Wrigley had abandoned soap entirely for gum. In 2008, Mars bought Wrigley for $23 billion.

In 1911, Frank C. Mars, having learned the art of hand-dipping candy from his mother, opened a candy shop in Tacoma, Washington. The shop didn’t work out. In 1920, he opened another one in Minneapolis, and in 1923, with his son Forrest Sr., created the Milky Way bar, which was designed to taste like a malted milkshake. It was a hit. In 1934, Frank died years before his son would invent M&Ms, and the company has remained private ever since. Today, the Mars family’s wealth is estimated at more than $117 billion.

Henry Heinz began marketing grated horseradish in clear glass bottles in 1869 so people could see for themselves that it wasn’t cut with anything else. The company failed during the Panic of 1873, a major financial crisis, and he relaunched it in 1875. Ketchup came out in 1876, and in 1896 the company put “57 Varieties” on all its bottles because he just liked the number. They had over 60 items then, anyway, so 57 wasn’t even trying to be accurate.

George A. Hormel didn’t invent SPAM. In 1891, he opened a pork packinghouse in an old creamery in Austin, Minnesota, where he competed against the bigger Chicago meatpackers. But that was a long time before his son Jay C. Hormel invented canned ham in 1926, then introduced SPAM in 1937, which became a staple of rations for US troops during World War II. The company now takes in more than $12 billion a year.

Joseph Campbell co-founded a canning company in Camden, New Jersey, in 1869. Campbell left the company in 1894 and died in 1900. In 1897, chemist Dr. John T. Dorrance earned $7.50 a week when he invented condensed soup by boiling out the water, cutting down on shipping costs. He later bought out his own uncle’s stake in the company, not Campbell’s family. Dorrance died in 1930 and left an estate worth $120 million.

In 1824, John Cadbury, a Quaker businessman, opened a small shop in Birmingham, England, selling tea, coffee, and drinking chocolate. He didn’t sell any solid bars yet. His sons, Richard and George, brought back a Dutch cocoa press in 1866, but even then, Cadbury didn’t begin to sell solid milk chocolate bars until 1905. The two brothers also helped to build Bournville, a model village, a planned community with houses for their workers. In 2010, the American corporation Kraft Foods purchased Cadbury, removing the company from family ownership.

In 1861, Adolphus Busch, a German immigrant, married Lilly Anheuser, and in 1865 he bought out a partner’s half interest to become a full partner in her father Eberhard Anheuser’s brewery. In 1876, Busch introduced Budweiser. But his true genius lay in logistics: he was the first brewer in America to use refrigerated railroad cars to ship beer and to adopt large-scale pasteurization, the heat treatment process developed by Louis Pasteur to destroy the bacteria that cause beer to spoil. This meant the beer could be sent anywhere in the country and not go bad. The company was sold to InBev in 2008 for $52 billion.

William Wallace Cargill purchased a grain warehouse next to a railroad track in Conover, Iowa, in 1865. His son-in-law, John H. MacMillan Sr., rescued the company after Cargill died in 1909. Today, Cargill is the largest private company in the United States. The Cargill and MacMillan families own approximately 88% of Cargill. It generates more than $150 billion in sales a year.

When Prohibition ended, two brothers, Ernest and Julio Gallo, founded a winery in Modesto, California, in 1933. They worked out of a rented shed with less than $6,000 and pamphlets on winemaking that they checked out of the local library. A rented shed and library pamphlets aren’t exactly what you’d picture behind a wine empire. Ernest handled sales, Julio handled production, and they eliminated the middleman by buying out distributors directly. This allowed them to scale their value brand, Thunderbird, quickly. Today, their family’s winery is worth between $10 billion and $17 billion.

Gerard Adriaan Heineken, at 22 years of age in 1864, bought a brewery in Amsterdam located on a site established in 1592. He switched to Bavarian-style lager, and in 1886 he hired Dr. Hartog Elion, a pupil of Louis Pasteur, to isolate a single strain of yeast for consistent flavor. The family still retains voting control of the $30-billion-plus brewing concern today under the leadership of heiress Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken.

John W. Tyson moved his family to Springdale, Arkansas, in 1931 and started hauling chickens commercially in 1935. In 1936, with $800 in savings and a $1,000 loan, he trucked 500 live chickens 1,400 miles to Chicago in a custom flatbed, clearing $235. That’s a very long drive with 500 chickens for company. His son Don Tyson later grew the business into a $50-billion-plus meat processor, though the family still controls it through voting shares.

The elder Pietro Barilla first started selling bread and pasta from a shop in Parma, Italy, in 1877. He and his sons industrialized the business in 1910. By 1971, faced with financial difficulties, third-generation brothers Pietro Jr. and Gianni Barilla sold majority control to the American conglomerate W.R. Grace. Pietro Jr. bought it all back in 1979. It’s been a family-run enterprise ever since, pulling in more than US$4 billion a year.

In 1891, a pharmacist named August Oetker in Bielefeld, Germany, began selling measured packets of baking powder out of his drugstore. They were pre-measured to raise one pound of flour exactly. He didn’t invent baking powder itself. While chemical baking powders existed before Oetker’s time, he standardized the dose. His grandson built the company into a global business that produced frozen foods, ran shipping lines, and managed hotels. The company suffered a family feud in 2021, but the Oetkers are still among Europe’s richest people.

George Weston was a bread delivery driver in Toronto when he bought out his employer’s route in 1882. By 1896, his bakery was Canada’s largest. In 1924, his son, W. Garfield Weston, took charge, expanding overseas and acquiring control of the Loblaw grocery chain by 1953. Later generations diversified into companies such as Associated British Foods and Primark; family wealth is currently estimated between $13 billion and more than $30 billion.

In 1920, Arthur W. Perdue left his railway job to sell eggs, buying 23 chickens for $5. In 1939, his son Frank started working with him, pushing the firm into broiler chicken production in the 1940s. Frank Perdue became the brand’s TV pitchman in 1971, and his line “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken” became closely associated with the brand. Perdue Farms remains 100% family-owned and does around $8 billion a year in sales.

In 1897, Jerome Monroe Smucker, a Mennonite farmer, constructed a cider mill in Orrville, Ohio, where he pressed apples picked from a tree supposedly planted by Johnny Appleseed (this is not confirmed). During periods when sales were sluggish, he turned some of the excess fruit into apple butter using a recipe passed down from his grandfather. He personally signed each crock as a guarantee that the contents were pure. Before printed branding took over, his signature was literally part of the sales pitch. By 1921, the company was officially registered, and today, five generations on, it makes more than $8.5 billion annually. It has acquired brands such as Jif and Folgers.

In 1920, Hans Riegel Sr., a confectioner, registered the name HARIBO while operating out of a backyard laundry room in Bonn with a sack of sugar, a marble slab and a copper kettle. Yes, the gummy bear empire really did begin in a laundry room. He produced a bigger, softer bear-shaped candy, the Tanzbar, or “Dancing Bear,” in 1922. After his death in 1945, his sons rebuilt the business post-war, eventually introducing the recognizable, trademarked Gold-Bear shape in 1960. Today, Haribo produces more than 100 million gummy bears per day.

In 1895, C.W. Post invented Postum, a cereal-based coffee substitute in Battle Creek, Michigan. Then he added Grape-Nuts in 1897, named partly for its crunch and because “grape” was an old term for sugar, despite containing neither grapes nor nuts. When C.W. Post died in 1914, his 27-year-old daughter Marjorie Merriweather Post inherited a $20 million business. She acquired Jell-O, Maxwell House, and Birds Eye, eventually bringing the businesses together under General Foods in 1929.

In 1946, in Alba, Italy, a pastry maker named Pietro Ferrero made a loaf of solid cocoa-hazelnut goodness called Pasta Giandujot and stretched scarce, rationed cocoa with abundant, cheap local hazelnuts. Later, his son Michele made the solid stuff spreadable, creating Nutella in 1964. Today, under Michele’s son, Giovanni, the company remains 100% family-owned, bringing in more than $15 billion annually. The loaf outlived its ration.

This content was created with the help of AI.