Original subtitles

It's an $897-billion global industry

and it's found in nearly 100% of homes

across the nation: meat.

Today, we have everything

from bacon to breakfast sausage.

Hot dogs, bologna.

Turkey as a lunch meat, Genoa salami, Capocollo,

sliced pepperoni.

Beef stew.

Canned ham.

Chili.

You see all of that because of Oscar Mayer

and because of Hormel.

But before grocery stores

had whole aisles of prepackaged meat,

options are limited and suppliers are untrustworthy.

You didn't know where the food came from

or how they were made or what their ingredients were.

Until two upstarts herald in a new era.

Oscar Mayer is introducing Americans

to pre-sliced bacon for the first time.

They elevated it from mystery meat

into something that you know exactly what you're getting.

Deliciousness.

They'll have to fight-

There are bloody, violent strikes that go on.

And innovate-

That'll work.

To bring brand-new meat products-

It was something they could just have

in their pantry for months

and just eat it straight out of the can.

It was new, it was modern, it was creative,

it was sexy.

Into every home.

S-P-A-M.

Huh?

Whether or not you consume meat,

their legacy is firmly cemented.

We would not have the foods that built America

without Hormel, without Oscar Mayer.

It's part of the reason we have abundance of plenty

and a variety.

It's the late 1800s

and while nationally-shipped food products

are bursting onto the scene,

options for meat are limited.

Meat was extremely regional and extremely local.

People were really dependent

on what they could raise themselves for food.

Hogs were a very popular meat animal

'cause they're very easy to raise.

While butchers sell all varieties of meat,

pork is a bestseller because almost the entirety

of the animal could be used for food.

You've got parts of the animal that have meat,

which is perfectly edible, but not quite so palatable.

But a new wave of immigrants bring to America

their methods of using the less popular meat parts.

These are the pieces that you can't otherwise sell.

So they're cheap meats by themselves.

So the sausage really becomes the first cheap meat.

Sausages, at the time,

are niche foods popular with immigrants.

So when Germans come to America,

especially with heavy immigration in the 1850s,

Germans brought sausages with them.

Germans are flocking

to one American city in particular,

and at the time, its German population has pushed it

to become the sixth-largest German city in the world:

Chicago.

And in 1883 on the city's north side,

two German immigrant brothers are trying to break

into the meat industry.

It was a family business.

They came to the United States

from a very poor family in Bavaria.

Oscar began to work at the age of 11,

having learned meat cutting for a number of years.

His younger brother, Gottfried,

didn't come to America until 1883.

He was an absolutely integral part of the company.

Gottfried became an apprentice in Nuremberg,

and Nuremberg has very famous sausage.

So he became a wurstmeister

and came to America with a book of recipes.

The two brothers take out a massive loan

of $10,000, nearly $300,000 today,

to start their own butcher shop.

The Mayers, being German,

had, well, kind of sausage in their veins

and they knew how to make it.

They were putting real work into these wursts

and they wanted that hard work to be recognized.

Oscar Mayer was a more quality product

and more specifically German.

If you're in aficionado, German,

you do know the differences.

The Mayers focus

on creating superior-tasting sausages,

also known as wursts in Germany.

They are serving authentic, delicious Bavarian specialties

and there is a really significant

German immigrant population in Chicago

that can't get these products anywhere else in America,

with many authentic embellishments and flavors.

The brothers talk a lot about consistency.

Their quality was so good.

All of their products were made in house.

From the very beginning,

they advertised their products as the best, the purest.

But Oscar Mayer doesn't want

to just be the premier German neighborhood butcher.

He wants non-Germans

to appreciate his specialty products.

Sausages were not widely consumed by Yankee Americans.

To get their artisan products

outside of Chicago's German enclave,

the Mayer brothers plan to bring their wursts

to one of the biggest events in Chicago's history.

The Mayer brothers kind of see the Chicago World's Fair,

where companies of all types would showcase

their products as a way to really introduce their brand.

In 1893, along with now-famous brands

like Cracker Jack and Heinz,

Oscar Mayer targets new, non-German customers

with a large display for the 27 million attendees

at the Chicago World's Fair.

Today, we have television, we have social media.

Back then, they had the world's fairs.

Even though they were a pretty small shop at that time,

that got them noticed.

Oscar Mayers's assortment of German meats,

including liver wursts and Vienna sausages,

begin to reach a broader customer base locally.

Even non-German customers are falling in love

with these traditional Bavarian delicacies.

Things like bockwurst, Weisswurst, knackwurst,

stuff that they've never had before.

So their business grew and grew and grew

and it became a major Chicago institution.

But as the brothers' meat infiltrates

every local butcher shop, they notice a problem:

how to differentiate their higher-quality product

from everyone else.

At the time, businesses just sold their customers meat.

There was no brand name involved.

They just sold them Vienna sausages or bratwurst.

So there was nothing to stop them

from telling their customers

that this meat came from Oscar Mayer.

How would they know?

You didn't necessarily know where the food came from

or how they were made or what their ingredients were.

To combat butchers passing off

knockoff products as Oscar Mayers,

they devise an innovative solution.

They decided they needed to have logos.

Something to mark them out.

So you had to distinguish for Oscar Mayer.

Oscar Mayer becomes a pioneer

of transforming what were no-name meat products

into a meat brand.

And it's a brand that will one day sell $3 billion

and introduce Americans to new meats

that will become iconic staples.

And their unprecedented breakthroughs in packaging

will shape the entire meat business,

spawning a $172-billion grocery meat industry.

But at the turn of the century,

Oscar Mayers' first packaged labels

tout his original brand name, Edelweiss.

Edelweiss.

It's sentimental German song and an alpine flower

which has meaning to Germans of that time,

like quality and purity.

In 1904, the Mayers used their new branding

to branch out from their butcher shop.

Usually people would travel between 500

and 1,000 feet and that was their butcher shop.

And you went to the butcher shop all the time

because you didn't really have decent refrigeration at home.

And they launch a bigger wholesale business,

hand delivering products to 280 butchers

and markets within Chicago.

And the business grows to employ 43 people,

including eight wagon drivers.

Suddenly, you're mobile and you're flexible

and you're able to get your products

into other places that you couldn't do before.

But just as Mayer has some success expanding,

in 1906, a journalist named Upton Sinclair

releases an account

of the unsanitary conditions he witnessed

at the Chicago Stockyards,

just miles from Oscar Mayer's shop.

Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" shocked America.

And it is still one

of the most shocking things you'll ever read.

It's horrendous.

Meat packing was kind of gross.

There's not a lot of refrigeration around.

It's still very limited.

Companies start to dump chemicals in it.

These kinds of disinfectants.

Borax, for example,

was widely used in sausage production

to prevent the meat from deteriorating along the way.

Workers covered with blood and feces,

cows that could infect consumers with tuberculosis.

These conditions didn't actually produce

the most sanitary meat.

At the time, tuberculosis

is one of the leading causes of death.

This, along with an increase in typhoid fever,

both of which can be contracted from food,

create mass hysteria around meat.

People get very obsessed about the quality of the meat

that they're eating.

And so they begin to push and lobby for better meat

and better inspection of meat.

The allegations and looming crackdown

could be disastrous for everyone in the meat business.

There is a lot of pushback against a lot of these ideas,

particularly from butchers and meat packers.

But for Oscar Mayer,

the outrage will be the spark

that pushes him to completely reinvent the meat industry.

meat industry is under firee

after alarming stories of unsanitary conditions

has customers frightened.

It was a time when you had a lot of foodborne illnesses.

Food poisoning, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, scarlet fever.

I mean, Americans were very wary

of where their food was coming from.

And rightfully so. It could kill them.

The revelations spark

a strict government crackdown on the industry.

And in 1906, the landmark Pure Food and Drug Act is passed.

It meant visual meat inspection

and then a stamp put on sides of meat hanging

in the warehouses by an inspector.

While some meat producers

fight the legislation,

Oscar Mayer takes another track.

When the federal government

starts a meat inspection service,

the Mayer brothers are among the first to step up and say,

yes, we want you to inspect our product.

We know it's good. We want that stamp of approval.

Mayer uses the official government stamp

to prove his meat has been inspected

and to validate its status as a high-quality product.

Hey!

Oscar F. Mayer was a fanatic about this.

They signed on right away to the new meat inspection laws.

He thought it was a civic obligation to do this.

While today the FDA assures

the public of food safety, at the time,

the stamps are the only guarantee

that a company has complied with food standards.

Armed with some of the first certified government stamps,

Mayer wants to use them to bring his German sausages

into new markets and become the leading brand

in the industry.

That'll work.

So this becomes a huge asset for Oscar Mayer

to expand its operations throughout the Midwest.

And that really is their first step

toward getting outside the butcher shop mentality.

They're starting to grow as a company

and think about bigger things.

As more and more customers are asking

for his brand by name,

Mayer becomes one of the city's largest meat purveyors

and an industry leader at the forefront

of quality assurance.

And Mayer continues expanding,

growing his delivery service and purchasing a fleet

of the newly released Ford Model T automobiles

at a cost of $500 each, or $15,000 today.

So the Model T begins this kind of transformation

where, if you're a company like Oscar Mayer

and you're producing in one place

and you want to sell into a suburban area,

or you wanna place your meats with some country merchants

outside of Chicago in Illinois.

So that does change the geography of distribution.

But in the midst of his expansion,

the onset of a new American conflict with Germany

threatens to undermine the company's progress.

During World War I,

there was so much German backlash

that they changed the names of German streets,

they removed the language from the curriculum of schools,

and they basically were just trying

to remove any mention of German or Germany from our culture.

Hello?

No, no, this isn't Mr. Edelweiss.

No, you don't have the wrong number.

My name is Oscar Ma...

Hello?

With American boycotts of German products,

Oscar Mayer's Edelweiss brand name threatens

to not only stop his expansion,

but now, his entire business is at risk.

Meanwhile, 300 miles away in a small Minnesota town-

You ever heard of this farm?

A regional meat distributor is in danger

of losing his father's company.

No, I haven't.

I found the name of the owner.

It's your accountant.

His father, George, started working

in a meat packing house when he was 12 years old

and he eventually built the business

to a point where it was really supplying

much of the Midwest with its pork products.

But now the company's head accountant

has defrauded the business of $1.1 million,

the equivalent of about 20 million today.

And the father and son must try to claw their way back.

There's a meeting where they have to admit

to the bankers what's happened,

which of course made the company look pretty bad

since, you know, the guy embezzled a million dollars

over the course of a number of years.

And so, how good were your financial controls?

The company stands on shaky ground,

but soon, an unlikely meat product

will reverse the company's fortunes

and go on to sell nearly $300 million a year,

changing the way meat is distributed,

stored, and purchased.

But right now, Jay and George Hormel need to figure out

how to get back into the black and fast.

So, they're not a national company by any sense.

They are a regional company at this point.

You're up against some really hefty competitors.

By the 1910s,

a cutting-edge technology has turned the meat industry

into a monopoly.

Refrigerated rail cars, known as reefers,

now allow for freshly-butchered meat

to finally be shipped throughout the country.

These weren't refrigerated cars

like we think of today with coolant and a motor.

Instead, you had huge blocks of ice in a compartment on top

and the chilled air would naturally flow downward.

But this new technology is expensive,

with refrigerated rail cars costing nearly double

the price of regular stock cars,

allowing the few companies

that can afford it to corner the market.

The big five companies,

Armour, Swift, Wilson, Cudahy, and Morris,

create these national networks of refrigerated car routes

where they're killing cattle in Chicago,

they're putting the quarters of the cattle

in refrigerated cars

and they then have wholesale warehouses

in all the big cities

and a lotta small cities throughout the U.S.

would distribute the beef to local butchers.

They crush a lot of small packing houses.

You had companies basically having a monopoly

and dominating the meat business,

so he needed to find something else.

Hormel's desperation will lead him

to an innovation that will change the industry

in unimaginable ways.

In 1918 in Chicago, Oscar Mayer is reeling

as the Great War has tarnished his Edelweiss brand.

From the onset of the war,

many German-American companies had to deal

with a backlash of anti-German sentiment

from the American public.

This really impacted their ability

to sell to people outside their own ethnic enclave.

So Mayer must make a difficult decision

on one of the first meat brands in America.

Their sausage line was called Edelweiss,

which has meaning to Germans of that time.

But non-German Americans are not gonna walk in

and look at a case of Edelweiss brand and say, "I want that."

He decides to retire the name he spent

so long building up

and replace it with a name that's also renowned

for its quality, his own: Oscar Mayer.

Now, Mayer wants a new product to launch with his new brand.

Oscar Mayer predicted that one day,

women would be freed from the kitchen

because they would only eat foods that were pre-prepared

and ready for heating or cooking.

And Oscar Mayer decided that convenience foods

were the way to go.

So they began experimenting with packaged foods.

Mayer is determined to break new ground,

making his products more accessible.

In Minnesota, with his family's company deeply in debt,

Jay Hormel is desperately seeking a new revenue stream.

Hormel had to address some real problems.

You're still limited to sales through butcher shops.

That's your basic problem,

is it all gotta go through butcher shops.

And that is an incredibly limiting process

for what your products can do.

With a virtual monopoly

on refrigerated rail shipping,

the largest companies are blocking Hormel

from distributing his fresh pork products nationally.

But Hormel realizes a new type of retail store

could provide an outlet for his meat.

Major changes happened in terms of the ways that we shop.

There's a big culture change that happens.

In 1916, a Memphis grocery store

called Piggly Wiggly pioneers a totally new model

of food shopping.

Rather than requesting items from workers behind a counter,

customers are now encouraged

to browse the grocery store aisles themselves,

picking out the products they want.

One thing that Jay sees is the different ways

that people are buying food.

These are not supermarkets.

These are grocery stores, but these stores are exploding.

And so Jay Hormel sees this

and he starts to try to figure out

how can his company have sales in stores

that aren't selling fresh goods?

'Cause if you could get your products

into these other venues,

suddenly, you are a national company.

So what this would look like is a meat product

that can sit on a store shelf

or even a home pantry without refrigeration.

To do it,

Hormel leans on the knowledge he gained

while serving in the military.

He's learned about how to move food from place to place

in these containers in the food transport division.

And he wants to apply it to the family business.

And he thinks it can really help them expand and grow.

He believes he can do

what no one in the meat business

has successfully achieved in America.

He wants to find a new kind of canning technology,

which was really not suited well for meat.

He wanted to get the jump on other meat packers.

If he can do that, that breaks open the market

for their products in a huge way.

But prior attempts to can meat

had disastrous results.

During the Spanish-American War,

Armour Company had supplied canned meat to the troops

and a whole batch of it was found to be fetid, rotten.

In what became known

as the embalmed meat scandal in 1898,

the illness was traced directly to canned beef.

This caused a huge uproar.

While only 280 were killed in the fighting,

another 2,600 died

of what the War Department deemed, "other causes."

But Hormel is compelled to crack the code

on a safe canned meat

that can sit on grocery store shelves indefinitely.

Jay Hormel is trying to figure out the canning.

But basically if you cook something too much

that's in a sealed can, the can explodes.

If you don't cook it enough when it's in the can,

the consumer opens it up there and it's disgusting.

It's complicated.

Cooking meat in the can is not easy.

He's left with four ounces of separated meat juice.

There's no way Hormel could sell it like that.

Damn it.

He has a huge problem.

Meanwhile, Oscar Mayer

also believes he can create a convenient meat product

for the masses.

And his experimenting with packaging

has led him to breakfast.

In the early 1920s, the growing popularity of cereal

is increasingly dominating American breakfast

since the Kelloggs pioneered it 30 years earlier.

There's more and more emphasis on convenience foods.

Eating cold cereals with milk was very common.

Those were considered fast, quick,

easy foods at that time period.

Before cereal, people ate leftovers for breakfast.

Meat, bread, whatever they had on hand.

Mayer thinks he could return the American breakfast

to its roots and make it easy and quick.

He thinks he's found a way

to turn a low-grade meat into the perfect breakfast food.

It's the fatty belly of a pig.

And at the time, it's sold in large slabs.

But one day, it will become

a $6 billion industry all its own,

producing 2 billion pounds in America alone.

Today, we know it as sliced bacon.

In 1924, with the large meat distributors

monopolizing the national market,

Jay Hormel's only option to grow his pork business

is to create a meat stable enough to bypass butcher shops

and get directly to grocery store shelves.

By the 1920s, A has stores all over.

And so Jay Hormel could benefit by A's national network

and have sales everywhere in the country.

If he can do that, that breaks open the market

for their products in a huge way.

After struggling

with designing a safe canned meat,

Hormel may have found the right man for the job.

They become aware, through various connections

of this meat company in Germany operated

by the Jorn family

and they've got a younger son named Paul.

And this company does meat canning.

Paul Jorn is considered an expert

in the canning process.

So the Hormels invite the young man over

and he helps them solve

these various technological problems

with canning meat in ways that are gonna work

and the meat's gonna hang onto its flavor.

Hormel begins experimenting

with a high priced but flavorful cut of pork,

a five-pound, boneless ham shank.

It's the intersection, if you will,

of air sealing and cooking,

where you wanna cook the meat in the can

and you also have to maintain an air seal.

And that's actually quite hard.

Jorn's process involves attempting

to seal the meat inside a gelatin filled can

and steam cooking it at the same time.

To find the sweet spot

between the length of time that you cook it

and the way that it's kept sealed inside the can.

As Jay Hormel attempts

to create a shelf-stable meat product for the masses,

meanwhile, Oscar Mayer is attempting

to transform a once unappetizing cut of pork called bacon

into a savory breakfast meat.

In the 19th century, it is a low-grade product.

It's not something that she would serve

on the breakfast table.

It's not this deeply beloved,

deeply sought after product that it is today.

Not at all.

It's really, at that point, is considered greasy.

It's a bit of a throwaway.

Bacon was essentially dry cured.

It was hard. It was salty.

You bought a big, big chunk,

maybe this long and this wide,

and you would then cut slices off it

to eat at various times.

To revolutionize bacon,

he plans to elevate it into a convenient breakfast food

by doing something that, at the time, no company has done.

In 1924, Oscar Mayer creates the first ever pre-packed

and pre-sliced bacon.

It's very hard to slice bacon

so they come up with an incredible innovation.

They develop a slicing machine

where instead of buying the whole belly of bacon,

you bought it in slices.

And to show off his quality sliced meat,

he'll use a groundbreaking new packaging technique.

The DuPont company develops

this amazing new packaging called cellophane.

And cellophane is the first clear packaging

available on the market.

You could see through the cellophane

and see the bacon that you're purchasing.

Suddenly, that changes the rules of the game

for bacon production.

Oscar Mayer unveils

the first-of-its-kind, pre-sliced, premium bacon

in clear see-through packaging,

laying the foundation of the pre-packaged meat industry

that will become the preferred way

to purchase meat in grocery stores.

Oscar Mayer invested pretty heavily

in packaging research and design.

So you can actually see the meat that's in there.

You can see the color, the uniformity,

the style of meat that you're buying.

And that really appeals to a lot of people.

Oscar Mayer starts using

that familiar yellow packaging for a brand

that has said repeatedly

that their character is their quality.

Well, you see it with the bacon.

Mayer's bacon is expensive,

but it's an ideal strategy for the new display shelves

of America's new self-serve grocery stores.

Oscar Mayer is introducing Americans

to pre-sliced bacon for the first time.

And being able to buy it already ready to go,

in a package, was a big shift for a lot of people.

As his bacon sales in the region take off,

Mayer is hoping it will finally be the product

that will catapult him into a national brand.

Meanwhile, Hormel has finally cracked the code

on its first canned meat product.

With the kind of knowledge

that Jorn have of the meat itself,

they're able to have the right temperature

to seal it in a proper way.

And the result is they're able to figure out the technology.

In 1926, they are the first company

to successfully can ham,

calling the product Flavor-Sealed Ham.

That takes Hormel and makes it a national company.

There is no other canned hams on the market, period.

I think Hormel is so far in front on that

that they don't face immediate competition.

The new product is a convenient way

for consumers to have a shelf-stable meat.

Flavor-Sealed Ham was gonna be an elite product.

So they sold it for a premium.

If you're a restaurant or hotel,

you can be sure that you have the sufficient supplies

to handle a rush crowd.

And also it's popular on the new steamships.

These big ocean liners

in which you put it on the shelf,

you don't have to refrigerate it.

And it's also tasty.

It's a big success.

But soon, the onset of the Great Depression

puts a stop to Hormel's newfound success

as premium products are abandoned across the country.

Now, meat packers are cutting wages and issuing layoffs.

But Jay Hormel tries to save his workforce.

As a goodwill gesture, Jay refuses to do layoffs.

Instead, he introduces the Spread the Work campaign

in an effort to keep as many of his workers as possible.

But with sales dwindling,

Hormel can't afford to pay his employees a full-time wage.

His workers term it, "Spread the Misery"

because Jay couldn't keep them all working

as much as they were before.

They weren't working full weeks

and this led to a lot of resentment

because it really left them not knowing how much money

they were gonna make from week to week.

It was very problematic.

When workers received their paychecks

and there had been a deduction taken from the paychecks

without their consent,

this really infuriates these workers.

Discontent erupts in 1933.

On November 11th,

armed strikers stormed the Hormel plant.

This is really the first strike

in the meat packing industry in the early 1930s.

They blockade the plant.

They expel the staff.

At this point, there are thousands of employees.

There's a lotta danger for Hormel.

In 1933, as strikers storm

his meat processing plant,

Jay Hormel is not just worried about his company,

but he fears for his life.

There are bloody, violent strikes that go on.

They blockade the plant.

While at the time,

most companies use force to crush labor strikes,

Hormel knows his options are limited.

What could he do? Call in the police?

Call the National Guard?

In such a small town, it's likely that family members

or friends of his laborers were going to be the police.

How is that going to work?

Hormel agrees to make concessions

and accommodate workers.

Jay negotiated what's known as guaranteed wage

or straight pay,

which is a guaranteed wage per week

for a set number of hours.

And what that allowed the employees

to have is wage security.

They knew how much money they were going to make every week.

That's very uncommon.

Right after the Depression hits,

you have stable pay on a weekly basis for these workers,

which allows furniture stores, television stores,

auto dealers, all sorts of people

to sell goods to these packing house workers

which they could not have purchased before.

So this transforms the area.

Five years before the federal government

guarantees a minimum wage,

Hormel guarantees the pay of all his workers

and they call off the strike.

Jay eventually becomes an advocate for his workers,

giving them unprecedented job benefits

like group health insurance plans, sick leave,

retirement plans before Social Security.

The pioneering plan becomes known

as the Hormel Plan.

In 1938, portions of the plan are adopted

into the Fair Labor Act and are still used today.

But despite Jay's forward thinking,

he's only increased his expenses.

Demand collapses for all sorts of products

and I think it's very tough for them.

The canned hams are high-end products,

not a great product to have when the Depression is going on.

If Hormel wants to survive

the Great Depression, he'll need a cheaper product.

And for Oscar Mayer,

the Great Depression has put a stop to his expansion.

After years of popularity,

sales of his pre-sliced bacon are slumping,

forcing him to seek out an inexpensive alternative.

Making a food that's widely available and cheap

for people of all income levels,

particularly lower income levels, is really important.

It fulfills America's desire for meat.

To find a cheaper meat,

Mayer looks to one that's popular among Italian Americans.

It's essentially a large sausage.

There's a casing and some kind of

seasoned, prepared meat paste piped into it.

And you could use less than select cuts of meat.

Originating in Bologna, Italy,

it's a higher end product made

from the fatty parts of a pig, even organ meat

and it's known as mortadella.

The process of making mortadella

is very similar to sausage.

It consists of pork, mostly neck fat of a pig and fat cubes.

And it's seasoned using peppercorns and pistachios

and a bunch of other flavorings.

But Mayer has a way to make

a new type of mortadella,

one that doesn't use expensive fat.

Oscar Mayer uses different underutilized meats.

They grind them into this uniform paste,

which is then seasoned to perfection.

After that, it's just processed into loaves.

It was slightly cured and cooked

and the the importance of that is that it's ready to eat.

Mayer believes the thinly-sliced meat

will make for an affordable, protein-rich meal.

It's a product that will pave the way for lunch meats

as we know them.

He calls it bologna.

And just like he did with bacon,

Mayer makes it a consumer friendly product,

launching his bologna pre-sliced.

If you can make it more convenient to eat,

then bologna has the potential

to become the number one sliced meat.

It was the one thing

that, whether your parents had a lot of money

or not, everybody ate.

Oscar Mayer Bologna was something that was so cherished

and people loved the convenience.

Oscar Mayer Bologna is one of the first

pre-sliced lunch meats available

to the growing number of self-service customers.

But as soon as he releases his bologna,

he notices a problem with the packaging.

When you would take out a slice,

the end-most part would dry out.

So there was a lot of loss.

Nobody wanted that dried end of bologna.

It wasn't appealing.

With his distribution network expanding

throughout the country,

his bologna will need to stay fresh longer.

For a company that had an excellent reputation

when it came to quality,

this product was not up to their high standard.

So they had to find a solution quickly.

Meanwhile, Jay Hormel is attempting

to make his premium canned ham more affordable

for the masses.

Jay Hormel's canned ham is targeted to the elite,

but he thinks if he can find a cheaper way

to produce this product, he can widen his customer base.

To make a more accessible canned meat

for struggling Americans,

Hormel eyes an underused part of the pig, the pork shoulder.

The front shoulder of the pig

was always an issue for meat packers

'cause you could always sell the rear leg as ham,

but the front part, what do you do with it?

The sort of front shoulders of a pig

have a bunch of little knobbly bits of meat,

and they knew that there had to be some way

of using this meat.

So, in an effort to create a shelf-stable,

highly-affordable, highly-versatile meat,

taking all these cuts of meat not commonly used,

pressing it together in a block

with different seasonings and flavorings, Hormel creates-

S-P-A-M.

Huh?

Is that short for spiced ham?

I was thinking shoulder of pork and ham.

In 1937, the Hormel Company

devises an inexpensive version of canned ham,

a product once reserved for the wealthy.

SPAM.

And they don't know it yet,

but it will fundamentally change how the world buys food.

I like it.

has invented a cheaper versionl

of his premium canned ham product called SPAM.

They haven't ever revealed what the name really means,

but most people think it means spiced ham.

It was convenient. It was nutritious.

It was something they could just have in their pantry

for months and just eat it straight out the can

when they needed a quick meal.

To have a canned product, meat product,

that you could have on your shelf,

that you could open and slice up and serve for lunch there,

was a revolution.

And of course it was new, it was modern,

it was creative, it was sexy.

SPAM was not what we think of today back then.

SPAM is a huge hit.

It absolutely flies off the shelves.

After its release, Europe erupts into war,

thrusting the United States into battle

and with Hormel's creation in tow.

Over 150 million pounds of SPAM are consumed

by troops in the war effort.

It becomes the cornerstone of their diet

and also a useful wartime tool.

The grease layer on top could be used to waterproof boots,

it could be used for lantern fuel,

and it could also be used to lubricate guns.

So it had a lot of different uses

other than food for the soldiers of World War II.

And SPAM's newfound popularity

has a profound effect on the diets

of people around the world.

For the better part of the war,

huge amounts of SPAM are sent to England

as rations for the British population

that is being pummeled by the German military,

and after the bombing stops, is still struggling

with the burden of the war there.

And so, for decades afterwards,

SPAM has a place in British food and British memory

as a food which helps them survive World War II.

So SPAM has this tremendous popularity and positive image.

After the war,

SPAM soon becomes a staple of local Hawaiian cuisine.

Deep-sea fishing was something

that was almost a completely Japanese-American industry

and in an effort to keep Japanese Americans

under the scrutiny of the U.S. government,

they forbade any Japanese-American

from engaging in deep-sea fishing,

which meant no protein,

which meant Japanese Americans in Hawaii

had to find an alternative protein source,

which meant SPAM.

The restrictions on the fishing industry

pushed SPAM to become a beloved protein replacement

in sushi, as well as many other recipes still enjoyed today.

You can't talk about food in Hawaii

without mentioning SPAM.

SPAM is undoubtedly something

that is ingrained, not just in Hawaiian culture,

but is actually popular in Asian cultures around the world.

By the time George H. Hormel dies in 1946,

he has lived long enough

to see his son pull the company he founded

out from the brink of default.

Today, it's a food empire worth over $20 billion

with almost 13 cans of SPAM consumed every second.

With his sights set on national distribution,

Oscar Mayer needs a way to keep his pre-packaged meat fresh.

And in 1950, they innovate a new unique packaging

called the Slice Pack.

I think that really set the standard

for a lot of other companies who then had

to adapt to what Oscar Mayer was doing.

Oscar Mayer pioneers pre-sliced meats

in a vacuum-sealed container

and essentially, you were able to take the slices you wanted,

use them as you wanted,

and you could close the package up,

let it preserve the life, taste, quality,

and flavor of your bologna.

It really starts, kind of, taking America by storm.

So that became a big success

and helped turn around the company

in that time of economic hardship.

Oscar Mayer Bologna

becomes the quintessential lunch meat for American children.

In 1955, Oscar G. Mayer Sr. passes away,

having seen his small Chicago butcher shop expand

to 9,000 employees and nearly $260 million in sales.

The new head of the company, Oscar Mayer Jr.,

picks up where his father left off.

What Oscar Mayer was very good at

when it came to marketing, is figuring how

to insert its products into popular culture.

I guess you would call it earned attention

in the advertising world.

Everyone knows the bologna commercial.

♪ My bologna has a first name ♪

♪ It's O-S-C-A-R

♪ My baloney has a second name ♪

♪ It's M-A-Y-E-R

With the success of packaged bologna,

Oscar Mayer becomes a grocery store fixture

from coast to coast.

Today, pre-packed meat like Oscar Mayer bologna and bacon

account for 83% of grocery meat sales,

fueling a nearly $300 billion meat industry.

American palates and American culture

will always, always come back to meat

in some way, shape, or form.

Since their inception,

Oscar Mayer and Jay Hormel have been a driving force

of innovation within the meat industry,

helping move it out of the butcher shop

and into the grocery store.

Hormel found a way to take foods that people loved,

make them shelf stable, make them available,

and you see how Oscar Mayer took this processed meat

and really placed an emphasis

on quality, accessibility, longevity,

and revolutionized the foods we enjoy,

the foods in our lunch boxes,

and the foods that built America.