Raising prices did the trick in boosting sales, and in 1965 the Griggs sold Ore-Ida to Heinz - the makers of tater tots’ best mate, ketchup. The only problem was that consumers didn’t trust a product that was essentially made from trash and sold for a song. They were adopting a more American mainstream cuisine, combining processed, ready-to-eat foods, turning Jell-O and canned fruit cocktails into “salads” or cream-of-whatever soup and frozen potatoes into casseroles. Released into grocery stores in 1956, tater tots captured the zeitgeist of midcentury America.Įven in the Mormon community whence the Griggs came, tater tots couldn’t have come at a better time.Īccording to Washington State University professor emeritus of sociology Armand Mauss, the 1950s saw Mormons pulling away from the wholesome, from-scratch farm fare. Voila, the tater tot.īy 1955, Ore-Ida had already been advertising its frozen diced potatoes and shredded potato patties in earnest, so by the time the tater tot was released a year later, the product was well-positioned to be embraced by American households. The Griggs came up with a solution: chop up those bits, extrude them into logs, blanch them, and coat them in oil to prevent them from sticking together in their freezer bags.
The waste products from processing corn into niblets and potatoes into French fries could be offloaded as livestock feed, but unlike corn husks and stripped cobs, leftover potato scraps were technically edible for people, too. This solved the scrap-sorting problem, but there was still the matter of waste.Ī file photo of a bag of Ore-Ida tater tots. Nephi and his plant supervisor Slim Burton inquired to the salesman about reconfiguring this machine to handle potatoes and learned that the machine was up to the task. Corn was fairly straightforward, but the downside to processing potatoes was that it was tricky to separate the fries from the scraps - and there were a lot of scraps.Īs Kelsey McKinney wrote for Eater in 2017, an equipment salesman happened upon their door, selling a machine for sorting prunes. Ore-Ida was the top producer of frozen corn in the country, and French fries were already proving a sound investment. In the 1950s, frozen foods were selling like hotcakes. The company's "moving billboards" helped drive up sales and increase the popularity of tots. Ore-Ida Foods advertised its frozen tater tots on the sides of a fleet of 30 trucks and trailer units, shown here in this 1961 photo.
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