ZMT: Daily Fact: Tater tots were created to reduce waste

Daily Fact: Tater tots were created to reduce waste

Original photo by Andrea Skjold Mink/ Shutterstock

Tater Tots were invented to reduce waste.

If Tater Tots are your favorite fast-food side, you have the ingenuity of two brothers — Golden and Francis Nephi Grigg — to thank. However, when the pair invented the crispy potato composites in the 1950s, they didn't set out to change snack food history. Instead, their potato creation came from a quest to reduce the amount of food waste produced at their frozen foods plant.

Before becoming successful spud salesmen, Golden and Francis sold frozen corn. Around 1949, they decided to diversify into other fruits and vegetables, and converted a factory in Ontario, Oregon (on the border with Idaho), into a potato-processing plant they were later able to purchase. In 1952, the Griggs launched the Ore-Ida brand, which became popular for its frozen french fries. The crispy potato spears were a hit among home cooks at a time when prepared meals and frozen foods were becoming more widely available thanks to postwar technology.

The downside to booming french fry sales, however, was the waste left behind. Initially, the Griggs sold vegetable byproducts to farmers as livestock feed, but they soon looked for a way to nourish humans instead. They began experimenting with chopping up the potato scraps, mixing them with flour and spices, then shaping the result into a rectangle with the help of a simple, homemade plywood mold. The first Tater Tots — named, by one account, after an employee won a contest by suggesting "tater" for potato and "tot" for small — debuted in 1956. At first, shoppers seemed skeptical of the inexpensive scrap-based snack, but after prices were raised slightly to suggest an air of sophistication, Tater Tots quickly found a permanent home in frozen food aisles, where they continue to reign today.

Numbers Don't Lie

Purchase price of Ore-Ida paid by Heinz in 1965 (about $286 million today)

$30 million

Year the first Tater Tot Festival was held in Ontario, Oregon (the birthplace of tots)

2021

Acres of U.S. farmland used for potato growing in 2020

1 million

Rough percentage of annual U.S. potato crop used for french fries, tots, chips, and other processed foods

Miners traded gold for potatoes during the Klondike gold rush.

Between 1848 and 1855, an estimated 300,000 people made their way to California, hoping to strike it rich by mining the supposedly plentiful gold just beneath the Earth's surface. Unfortunately, many miners at the time faced a common foe: malnutrition. Food costs were often inflated in remote mining towns, and nutritious fresh food was generally hard to come by, meaning many miners had limited diets of shelf-stable goods like bread, salt pork, and beans. For gold hunters who trekked farther north to Alaska for the Klondike gold rush, which kicked off in 1896, that often meant an increasing risk of scurvy — a vitamin C deficiency that can cause fatigue and tooth loss, among other effects. Scurvy could be remedied with potatoes, a vegetable that Klondike miners could more easily source than many other fresh produce items. However, shortages and unscrupulous peddlers increased the price of potatoes, forcing many prospectors to trade their hard-won gold for spuds in an effort to ward off the effects of the illness.

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Daily Fact: Tater tots were created to reduce waste