29/12/2023
Did you know that the invention of Tater Tots took place in Ontario, Oregon seventy years ago? Tater Tots, one of America’s most beloved frozen foods, was invented in 1953 by two enterprising brothers. Theodore Golden Grigg (1911–1991) and Nephi Grigg (1913–1995) created the Ore-Ida Potato Products in Ontario, Oregon in 1952.
By 1953, Ore-Ida was using a redesigned prune sorter to mechanically separate the fries from leftover potato scraps. For a time, the scraps were used in cattle feed, but Nephi Grigg was not happy seeing a “product that had been purchased from the grower, stored for months, gone through the peeling process, gone thru the speckling lines and trimmed of all defects, only to be eliminated into the cattle feed.” The brothers experimented, mixing the potato scraps with flour and seasonings, extruding the potato slurry through holes in a plywood board, and then blanching, quick frying, and freezing the result into nuggets.
Nephi Grigg took a fifteen-pound bag of their invention to the 1954 National Potato Convention in Miami Beach, where he persuaded the convention hotel kitchen staff to serve up samples at breakfast. “These were all gobbled up faster than a dead cat could wag its tail,” Grigg recalled. There are several stories of how Tater Tots got its trademarked name, but Steve Grigg, Nephi’s son, prefers the version in which Ore-Ida employee Clora Lay Orton came up with the name in a factory-wide contest.
Learn more about Tater Tot and Ore-Ida Foods, Co. with this entry by Jim Scheppke.
https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/tater-tots-and-ore-ida-foods-co/
Photo: Ore-Ida truck trailer carrying Tater Tots, 1961. Courtesy wikicommons.
