Original subtitles

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] It's one of America's most popular

and endlessly varied food staples.

- Americans can identify

a thousand different shapes of pasta.

They are making sauces from scratch,

making noodles from scratch.

- [Narrator] Today, US households buy

$2.4 billion worth of jarred tomato sauce,

and consume nearly 6 billion pounds of pasta each year.

- Pasta's an amazing food stuff.

(dramatic music continues)

It's very inexpensive to make. It's pretty much limitless.

- [Narrator] And Italian food can be found in every

corner of the country.

- In malls and airports,

and wherever you can get a bite to eat,

you can now usually get Italian food.

- If you could have bought stock

in just Italian restaurants,

you would've been a millionaire many times over.

- [Narrator] But just 60 years ago,

Italian food was barely known in the United States.

- In the 1960s,

Americans really didn't have a relationship with pasta.

They had no idea what al dente meant.

- If people only knew what good tomato sauce tastes like.

They don't even know what they're missing!

- [Narrator] It took bold entrepreneurs

working at two different food empires to change that.

- I'll give you carte blanche. Don't screw it up.

- Develop it on your own in secret.

- [Narrator] Creating a whole new food genre

with an all American twist.

- Real Alfredo sauce doesn't have any cream in it,

but if you ask any American today,

they would most likely tell you that it does.

- The most American thing

you can add to a tomato sauce is sugar.

- Can we go even sweeter?

- The chef said this is sounding like a dessert sauce.

It wasn't Italian food. It was Italian-American food.

- [Narrator] With nearly 50,000 Italian restaurants

operating across the United States.

- We were competing against every authentic

Italian restaurant in every town in America,

and we weren't authentic Italian. And we knew it.

- [Narrator] Over a 150 million cans of SpaghettiOs

sold each year.

- Kids love it.

Moms love it. SpaghettiOs is a massive hit.

- [Narrator] And 14.8 billion dollars in pasta sauce sales.

- If I was looking at three pasta sauces,

I'm gonna want the one that says, this is authentic.

This is the real deal. Prego.

- [Narrator] Italian- American cuisine

is now a cornerstone in kitchens throughout the nation.

[dramatic music]

It is the early 1960s,

and the food served at American dinner tables

is generally bland and repetitive.

- It was meat, potatoes and vegetables.

- Americans weren't generally

very adventurous with their cooking.

It was a lot of casserole, a lot of meatloaf,

a lot of jello molds.

They'd make a fancy sounding dish like chicken a la king,

but it's really just chicken casserole.

- [Narrator] Although families did eat canned

and boxed pasta like Chef Boyardee

or Kraft Macaroni & Cheese,

adults generally didn't serve these for dinner.

Italian food itself was a novelty.

- There were Italian restaurants,

but they were mostly in major population centers

like New York City where there are

a lot of Italian immigrants.

Most Americans weren't comfortable

trying to make Italian food at home.

- [Narrator] But a new type of Italian cuisine

is about to come from the most unlikely of places.

A century old American company

known for its line of condensed soups.

Campbell's.

- Campbell's was founded in 1869

by a fruit merchant named Joseph Campbell,

and an icebox manufacturer named Abraham Anderson.

- [Narrator] By 1963, the Campbell's Soup Company is run

by a board of directors and has become

a $600 million corporation.

- They were known for Campbell's soups

and for their acquisitions.

So we're talking about Swanson TV Dinners,

juices, and other products.

- [Narrator] None of Campbell's products

have anything to do with Italian food.

But an ambitious young manager is about to blaze a new path.

- Donald Goerke first joined the Campbell's Soup Company

in 1955 as an analyst and worked his way up

from marketing analyst to marketing manager.

- So Donald Goerke arrives at Campbell's,

an international company,

great reputation,

but he's coming with really high goals.

He wants to get promoted. He wants to prove himself.

- Don, I've spoken to the team

and we think you're ready to run your own division.

- Thank you. I'd be honored.

- From now on, you'll be overseeing

the Franco-American line.

- Franco-American?

- [Narrator] It's not exactly the promotion

he's been dreaming of.

Franco-American is a small division

under the Campbell's umbrella, and it's struggling.

- Franco-American was a brand of canned spaghetti,

you know, a red sauce.

- Franco-American had sort of become

like the ugly step- sibling of Campbell's,

'cause the spaghetti wasn't selling.

- Nobody's expecting any miracles,

but keep your head down and who knows,

maybe in a few years we'll bring you back

under the Campbell's brand.

Congratulations.

- Thanks.

(light suspenseful music)

- Don Goerke was determined to prove himself.

He'd been handed a dud.

If he could create just one product

that would be a standout hit,

he could go back to the flagship Campbell's division.

- [Narrator] Goerke jumps head first into product research.

- The product's been on the market for like 30 years,

but it's not selling well.

He's looking for a lifeline.

He's looking for any market insight

that he can hang his hat on.

- Hey, yeah, I got the market research.

Listen, listen, I think there's been

some sort of mistake with the demographics.

- What they did was they put together

a bunch of focus groups to try out

and to taste this Franco- American canned spaghetti.

- Kids?

- The main takeaway from all this focus group testing

is that when they gave the canned spaghetti to kids,

the kids liked it.

- At this time, spaghetti was thought of as kind of exotic,

so they were really pretty surprised.

- [Narrator] Goerke sees an opportunity

with the youth demographic.

As America's baby boom peaks,

there will be an estimated 20 million children

under the age of five by 1965.

A product that can simplify a mother's life

and appeal to a child's taste buds could turn

the Franco-American division around.

- Goerke's wise enough to realize

he's gotta appeal to those 20 million kids.

He needs a kid-centric approach to canned pasta.

- So the good news is he knows who he needs to appeal to.

The bad news is he has no idea how to appeal to kids,

nor are there any models that he can learn from.

- [Narrator] The kids' food market

is still a young industry.

- You know, there wasn't a lot of food made for kids,

you know, if you're gonna give the kids something for lunch,

it was typically like leftovers.

If you're giving them something for dinner,

you were giving 'em what the adults were having.

The one kid-friendly product that's marketed

directly to kids is breakfast cereal,

and they eat a ton of it.

So Goerke gets the idea,

what if we do the same thing with canned pasta?

- [Narrator] But first,

Goerke will have to convince his team.

- Kids don't eat spaghetti. It's too difficult.

- Great, so let's make something that's easier for them.

- What would you like us to do?

Design a spaghetti they can eat with a spoon?

- Kids already know how to eat soup.

They love their cereal.

Let's give them a spaghetti they can eat out of a bowl.

- As a child, what was the first utensil

I ever used consistently? Easily? A spoon!

- The idea of kids trying to figure out how

to eat something that is really messy.

Make it, make it spoonable.

- Come on. This is exciting. We're gonna reinvent pasta.

- [Narrator] Overseeing the team is product development

supervisor Ralph Miller.

- Ralph Miller started at Campbell's in 1950

as an entry-level chemist,

and eventually worked his way up to oversee a team of chefs,

food scientists and technicians.

- Ralph Miller's got a huge responsibility

on his shoulders, but he also has a creative mind.

He's very, very smart.

- [Narrator] To entice kids to eat pasta,

Miller and his team experiment with a new idea.

- They wanna make something fun for kids,

and so they're experimenting around

with all kinds of shapes.

- [Narrator] They start with stars, baseballs,

cowboys, and astronauts.

- This idea was ahead of its time.

Today we're so used to food coming in unusual shapes,

especially if it's for kids, whether it be sour patch kids,

or Flintstones vitamins, but nobody was doing it back then.

- [Narrator] But the task of creating a precooked,

ready-to-serve, fun-shaped spaghetti

that's also easy to eat

is proving more challenging than the team anticipated.

- What, what is this?

- That is an astronaut.

- Or a cowboy?

- I can't sell this. The shapes need to be fun.

How can they be fun if the kids can't tell what they are?

- We'll keep working on it.

- To get a pasta that wouldn't fall apart,

would hold its shape, is really, really hard.

I mean, you know, that's landing on a dime, right?

In food composition.

- [Narrator] After nearly a year of trial and error,

Donald Goerke still doesn't have a viable product.

- His team's exhausted. He's losing hope.

Maybe this big idea of his is just not gonna happen.

- [Narrator] After yet another failed attempt

to develop a kid-friendly pasta,

one of the development chefs is cleaning up.

- Kurt Erbeling was doing dishes,

and he saw how a strand of spaghetti

curled around into a ring shape.

- [Narrator] A seemingly insignificant strand of pasta

is about to ignite a culinary shift,

paving a path that will one day make Italian cuisine

a cornerstone of American dining.

- [Narrator] After nearly a year of trial and error,

Campbell's product development supervisor Ralph Miller

finally stumbles onto a pasta shape

that holds together and is easy to eat.

- What if they just took regular pasta

and cut it into rings? Genius.

- Tube-shaped pasta has been around for eons.

Rigatoni, penne, and so on.

So if you just slice a section off

of that tube shaped pasta, you have an O,

and structurally it all holds together and cooks evenly.

- So the O shape, it's already popular with kids.

I mean, after all, Cheerios is a hit.

- [Narrator] After finding the right pasta,

the team's next challenge is to create the perfect sauce.

- A little too spicy.

- At this point in time,

Americans are beginning to eat pizza,

which typically has a sweeter tomato sauce on it.

- [Narrator] And Pizza Hut has not only

become a national chain,

but has set the standard for pizza for most Americans.

- There's a big difference between American palates

and Italian ones.

Americans mainly like things sweeter.

There's a huge difference between a traditional

Italian pizza sauce and what Pizza Hut puts on their pizzas.

(pots bubbling)

- It's, it's too thin. Can we add more body?

- [Narrator] After months of experimentation,

Miller adds cheese to his sauce.

- It's not fair to call it a sauce in a classic sense.

It has a tang, but it's not sharp.

It has a smoothness, but it's not creamy.

It has a density to it, but it's not thick.

- [Narrator] Now Miller wants to test

their unnamed canned spaghetti on his toughest critic.

- Are you hungry? - Yeah.

- [Narrator] His son.

- Great.

Because,

I have a special spaghetti

that I think you're gonna love.

Oh, sorry about that. Yummy.

- [Narrator] While Miller hopes to get

his son's approval on the taste,

he ends up getting something more.

- Uh oh. SpaghettiOs.

- Ralph Miller's son is actually credited

with inspiring a lot of the marketing

for the early years of SpaghettiOs.

Starting with the name.

SpaghettiOs took this very ethnic sounding word,

spaghetti, this Italian word,

and turned it into this very fun American word, SpaghettiOs.

- [Narrator] Running with inspiration from Miller's son,

Goerke quickly gets Campbell's ad agency

to create kid-friendly branding.

- They've got this amazing little face on the can, right?

This face. Two little eyeballs,

but his eyeballs are made of the actual SpaghettiOs, right?

And he's got a mouth with sort of like a tongue.

He's like loving the SpaghettiO flavor.

- [Narrator] Now the only thing left to do

is to see if enough kids respond to make it a hit.

On October 18th, 1965, SpaghettiOs

hit store shelves nationwide,

marketed as the first spoonable spaghetti.

- So to appeal to moms, they advertise this as a convenient,

easy-to-prepare food that's clean, right?

It's not gonna make a mess like regular spaghetti.

Not only that, they come up with this catchy tune sung

by this country singer called Jimmy Rogers.

♪ The neat new spaghetti you can eat with a spoon ♪

♪ Uh oh, SpaghettiOs!

- I mean, it's really kind of a perfect, perfect moment.

You just need to heat it in the pot.

The kids can sing "uh oh, SpaghettiOs!"

And it's easy to clean up and delicious.

- [Narrator] SpaghettiOs proved to be an instant success.

Within weeks, Campbell's factories go into overdrive

to keep up with demand.

- Kids love it. Moms love it.

SpaghettiOs is a massive hit.

I don't wanna say can't be kept on the shelves,

but it's almost to that level.

- It's really simple to serve.

You open a can. You warm it up.

A 10-year-old can do this for her younger siblings.

Kids love it. It's easy.

The convenience of feeding little kids

with SpaghettiOs was huge,

and it did actually make it neater to feed a toddler,

because they could use their little baby spoons

and eat SpaghettiOs.

- [Narrator] SpaghettiOs will go on

to sell more than 150 million cans each year,

and is credited with helping to introduce pasta

to American kids.

- SpaghettiOs is the key to the kingdom, right,

for opening up Italian- American cuisine

for American's palates.

So Don Goerke and his team have created this

amazing successful product.

- He was dubbed the Daddio of SpaghettiOs,

and it really strengthened the Franco-American brand.

He introduced over 100 products,

and being the leader of the Franco-American brand

was no longer something to be embarrassed of.

- [Narrator] After turning the Franco-American brand

into a moneymaker,

Don Goerke is moved back to Campbell's soups,

where he goes on to create the highly successful

Chunky Soup product line.

By 1975, SpaghettiOs is racking up sales

of $375 million a year.

As the Italian food landscape continues to slowly expand.

- At this point in time,

you could find Italian-American restaurants

outside of the major cities and outside of enclaves,

like Little Italy in Chicago and New York,

and eventually even non-Italian restaurants

were beginning to serve Italian food.

- [Narrator] But what's often served

isn't actually Italian at all,

especially one wildly popular new dish, pasta primavera.

- Primavera does not exist as a pasta dish in Italy.

Pasta primavera is an American invention.

- In 1977, pasta primavera is invented in New York City

at one of the most famous restaurants in New York,

Le Cirque by chef Alan Siacc.

The idea was we have all of these vegetables

in the restaurant, how do we use them up?

It was an ingenious idea.

'Cause one vegetables are really cheap,

and why not just, you know, crown it with an Italian name?

- [Narrator] By the eighties,

a new food genre is emerging.

Italian with an all-American twist.

And Campbell's wants to cash in on the trend.

Now without Don Goerke,

Ralph Miller gets a new mission.

Launch an Italian food product that can do for adults

what SpaghettiOs did for kids.

- Miller figured out how to appeal to baby boomers

as kids with SpaghettiOs, but now a decade later,

he's gotta figure out how to win 'em back as adults.

- [Narrator] If he can make a product for

a more mature demographic,

Miller and his team could transform

the Italian-American food market.

[rhythmic music]

- [Narrator] It is 1977 and Campbell's has hired

a new food scientist, Bill Hildebolt.

- Dr. Bill Hildebolt was a farm boy from Ohio.

Bill was a little bit gruff,

but his real passion was food science.

- [Narrator] Hildebolt is tasked with developing

a new product to recapture the baby boomer market.

- So if you think about it, baby boomers have grown up.

They're sophisticated adults now,

and they want a more sophisticated food

than SpaghettiOs.

- One night Bill's wife had made

a spaghetti dinner for them,

but when Bill looked at the dish, he noticed

that there was a line of liquid

around the the heap of pasta,

and that really bothered him,

and he said, I'm going to make a thicker,

more luxurious tomato sauce.

- Most Americans were not making their own tomato sauce.

It was still somewhat foreign and exotic to them.

They would eat canned sauces from Hunt's and Ragu,

which was starting to grow its national audience.

- So this is a big swing for Campbell's.

There are already two heavy hitter

tomato sauces on the market.

- Hildebolt begins by examining market leaders,

Hunt's and Ragu,

(suspenseful music)

but is unimpressed with what he finds.

- They're very thin, there are no real herbs.

It's just sort of tomatoes and sugar, a little bit of salt,

not really these robust tomato sauce flavors

that we think of today.

- Ragu and Hunt's both used cornstarch

to thicken their sauces.

That impacted the flavor in a negative way.

They also used extracts of spices rather than whole spices,

which led to a metallic flavor in the sauce.

- I can tell you as a kid who did not grow up

in an Italian-American household, I remember Ragu.

I will tell you straight up, God's honest,

that sauce was too thin.

It was really, really thin.

- [Narrator] Hildebolt believes Ragu and Hunt's are popular

simply because they're the only options on the market,

and that Campbell's can offer something better.

- At that point, Americans didn't have much experience

into what an authentic tomato sauce tastes like.

Americans are looking for convenience in

their tomato sauce.

They're not gonna make it from scratch the way

Italian families are going to do.

- [Narrator] Hildebolt decides to pursue

a little firsthand market research.

- How about Italian for lunch?

- Bill Hildebolt and his chef visit a local Italian

restaurant to study the flavors of a real Italian sauce.

(suspenseful music) (forks clinking)

- Wow.

- It's robust. It is rich.

It's not overly sweet. It's thick.

It's almost part of the meal itself,

rather than just a condiment.

It really pops with a flavor of fresh, fragrant herbs.

Garlic. There's a much more savory, salty contrast.

- From that point,

he knew that they needed to put together

a spaghetti sauce that could go head to head

with something that was created in an Italian restaurant.

- [Narrator] Unlike the leading tomato sauce brands,

Campbell's is attempting to concoct a recipe

that can be mass produced using only fresh,

whole ingredients.

- One of the sources of pride in Campbell's Soup Company

was the promise to the consumers that there would

never be artificial flavors or thickeners in the products.

They saw that there was an opportunity,

specifically in spaghetti sauce,

because the competitors did not have that policy.

- You would think that if you put delicious stuff in,

delicious stuff comes out,

but actually it's really, really difficult

not to use additives and additional ingredients.

- [Narrator] But when the sauce is tested with focus groups,

Hildebolt and his team get unexpected feedback

that forces a change.

- Can we go even sweeter?

- What they're finding and testing

is that American palates like things a little sweeter.

They might have actually grown up on SpaghettiOs,

which had a slightly higher in sugar content tomato sauce.

So in a weird way, they could be dealing with palates

shaped by SpaghettiOs themselves.

- The chef said this is sounding like a dessert sauce,

but he reluctantly added sugar to it

and had struck the balance between making it

a little bit sweeter, but not making it too sweet.

- You can have the best culinary mind in the world.

You can know what will taste better,

but it's hard to tell the American public

that they should be wanting something else

when they're used to something different.

- What they learned from testing was that

the American consumer was not ready

for an authentically Italian sauce.

- [Narrator] But before they have a chance

to make adjustments to their recipe,

Hildebolt gets devastating news from Ralph Miller.

- I'm sorry, but it's not coming from me.

- The board flat out tells them to stop the project.

- If people only knew what good tomato sauce tastes like.

They don't even know what they're missing.

- Do you believe in it?

- I do.

- Then take it underground.

Develop it on your own in secret.

I'll throw some resources your way,

but keep it quiet.

- Both of them are defying a direct order

from their superiors to scrap the project.

So if this sauce is not the hit they think it's gonna be,

the project is toast and so are their careers.

- [Narrator] After several months of

fine tuning the recipe,

Miller and Hildebolt are finally ready

to reveal their secret project to Campbell's executives.

- Campbell's Very Own Spaghetti Sauce.

- Hildebolt and Miller are using a lot of time,

a lot of resources, and a whole lot of money

on something they were told to scrap ages ago.

- The guys must have thought they'd win their bosses over

with this dazzling pitch,

but it went over like a ton of bricks.

- [Narrator] The two men have one more

trick up their sleeve, but if it doesn't work,

their careers at Campbell's might just be over.

- [Narrator] At Campbell's Ralph Miller has one more

Hail Mary to try.

Convincing executives to sit down

and taste the new tomato sauce.

- Market research has our sauce beating Ragu

in a blind taste test three to one.

- It had a toned-down acidity,

which was one of the keys to its early successes

with all of the tasters.

What it was was sort of a great sweet, tart kind of balance.

- Even with Hildebolt and his team basically working

in secret against the direct orders of their superiors,

the executives realize they have a true hit product

on their hands.

- [Narrator] The executives are won over by the taste

and decide to green light the spaghetti sauce.

With one exception.

- Campbell's Very Own Spaghetti Sauce.

This was a terrible name.

- Not only is that a mouthful,

not only is that hard to say,

but all of the upper management at Campbell's

hated the name.

- They've been putting a lot of time, a lot of effort,

a lot of money into trying to come up with

an authentic Italian tomato sauce,

and they want the name to reflect that.

Looking through an Italian- American dictionary,

they saw that the word Prego means please

and thank you in a very quick Italian soundbite.

So it's perfect for a spaghetti sauce.

Easy to ask for, easy to pronounce, but really Italian.

- Prego sounds authentic.

If I was looking at three pasta sauces,

I'm gonna want the one that says, this is authentic.

This is the real deal. Prego.

- [Narrator] In 1981, Prego hits the shelves

as the first home- style spaghetti sauce.

- The product launch is one of the best

product launches of the 1980s.

- [Narrator] Within a month of its release,

Prego seizes 16% of the tomato sauce market.

- We had shifted as a culture.

In the eighties we were thinking about sophistication,

we were thinking about a wider world,

and Prego said, I'm part of that.

In the 1980s, the power suit to wear was Giorgio Armani.

It wasn't Brooks Brothers.

That was your father's generation,

and this was the pasta sauce to go with that kind of spirit.

- The name Prego, that word, which was just two syllables,

easy for English speaking Americans to pronounce

and made them feel like they were maybe a little bit

cultured, a little exotic,

and they could get that in a jar on the grocery shelf.

- [Narrator] In tandem with their new product release,

Campbell's airs a series of iconic ads.

- I used to think spaghetti sauce was spaghetti sauce,

but you know. when you see Prego and Ragu side by side,

the difference really comes through.

- The ad campaign is a comparison between Ragu

and the essentially chunkiness of Prego.

- Essentially what they're depicting in the ad

is that Ragu is too thin and falls through

various implements like the spoon and spaghetti,

because it does.

- [Narrator] But Prego's aggressive ad campaign

has raised the ire of industry leader Ragu.

- Have you heard about this?

Ragu's trying to sue us.

- Ragu sees this new ad campaign as a threat,

and ultimately sues Campbell's.

- Now, Ragu is saying that this is,

well, you just can't do that.

This is defamation of pasta sauce character.

- Good. That means we're winning.

(impactful music)

- Prego is a thicker sauce

and stands up to scrutiny in the lawsuit.

- [Narrator] The court rules in Prego's favor,

and in the first year alone,

Prego rakes in over a hundred million dollars in sales

and captures 28% of the pasta sauce market,

eventually overtaking Ragu

to become the number one pasta sauce in America.

- The launch of Prego really showed the American people

that they can access Italian-American foods.

- [Narrator] Next, Campbell's releases

a Prego Italian recipe book with dishes

that can be prepared using its product.

- People all over the country are now cooking dishes

that were once only found in Italian homes

or Italian restaurants.

- It's not like SpaghettiOs,

which is one simple meal in a can.

You could use it on spaghetti, on lasagna,

veal or chicken parmesan.

I mean, it was the jar on the shelf

that could create 20 different meals.

It's very, very versatile.

- [Narrator] As families across the country

embrace Italian- American cuisine,

another food giant spies opportunity.

The newly appointed chairman of General Mills,

H. Brewster Atwater, is looking for any opportunity

to drive sales for his growing conglomerate.

- In the 1980s General Mills is a juggernaut.

They have the number one cereal in America, Cheerios.

They have Wheaties, they have Gold Medal flour.

They even expand into the restaurant business

and acquire Red Lobster, and turn it into a mega chain.

- Bruce Atwater was smart,

personable, intimidating

as chairman of the board

of General Mills, but fair.

And Bruce had a vision to say,

let's go make General Mills the biggest

conglomerate in America.

- This looks fine.

No changes.

- [Narrator] Working to achieve Atwater's vision

is his director of new concept development, Blaine Sweat.

- At the time to make an impact,

what General Mills was looking for was the concept

that could grow to be a billion dollars in sales.

Huge number.

And a gentleman named Blaine Sweat,

one of the smartest guys out there,

who was a creative entrepreneurial guy

working for General Mills came along and said,

I have an idea.

- Think Red Lobster, but spaghetti and meatballs.

- The popularity of Prego helped make

Italian-American food more accessible.

It was something people were, were buying more of.

The pizza sector had exploded.

You had chains like Domino's and Pizza Hut,

but there wasn't anything really on a national level

that was a sit down, casual, family-style restaurant.

So they set about to come up with

and develop a new restaurant that would fill that space.

- Okay, let's find an existing chain and acquire them.

- We can't, that's the thing, they don't exist.

I know this is gonna sound crazy. What if,

what if we created our own?

- Our own what?

- Restaurant chain.

Design it ourselves, build it from the ground up.

- He decides he is going to find a way

to make Italian food accessible to the entire nation,

create a nationwide chain,

and keep it somewhat authentic and somewhat Americanized.

- General Mills said, if we're gonna put money

into a concept,

it has to be able to have the potential

to grow to be a billion dollars.

- I'll give you carte blanche.

I have one condition. Don't screw it up.

- Blaine said, okay, I need to find some people

who really can help me do this.

- [Narrator] Not only does Sweat not know the first thing

about Italian-American food,

he's never launched a restaurant before,

let alone a nationwide chain.

- He wants to go from zero to a hundred locations

across the country, basically instantly.

That, in a word, is risky.

- [Narrator] It is 1981 and Blaine Sweat

is assembling a handpicked team to develop

an Italian restaurant concept for General Mills.

- Okay guys, everybody gather round.

- They assemble an elite strike force.

- [Narrator] The team consists

of operations mastermind Mark Given.

- Mark Given, he had been at Red Lobster

and had run operations.

- [Narrator] Italian chef, Gino DeSantis.

- Gino was the culinary guy,

straight off the boat from Italy,

had all his mom's recipes.

- The last person was this poor guy

that they pull out of accounting and they basically say,

you're the chief taster, you are the bookkeeper

and you're gonna wash all the dishes.

- [Narrator] And accountant Dave Manuchia.

- I was a financial guy and I sort of kept,

kept everybody in line a little bit.

- Alright, we are going to be spending

a lot of time together, nights, weekends,

whatever it takes, and I can't give any of you guys raises.

If this doesn't work out,

we are probably all going to get fired.

So if this isn't for you,

I understand. Now would be the time to leave.

(suspenseful music)

Are you in?

- What General Mills is doing is pretty bold.

The traditional model is you start a restaurant,

you build a following,

and then when that following hits a threshold,

you open location number two, maybe number three,

but to create a chain from scratch, it's not easy.

- [Narrator] Italian chef Gino DeSantis gets to work

preparing potential dishes to be put on the menu.

- We were inventing a taste that would be acceptable

to a wide variety of Americans.

So it was a bigger challenge.

We'd lay out 15 pans of lasagna,

take a bite, spit it out, take a bite, spit it out,

until we found one that we felt like,

okay, that one's pretty good.

We did the same thing with every recipe.

We made changes to the red sauce, to the lasagna,

to the Alfredo sauce.

- [Narrator] Traditional Alfredo sauce

is made using only butter, parmesan cheese and pasta water,

stirred by hand until it becomes a creamy emulsion.

Instead, the team uses an ingredient not commonly used

in Italian cuisine to mimic the texture and flavor

without the elbow grease,

cream.

- Real Alfredo sauce doesn't have any cream in it,

but if you ask any American today,

they would most likely tell you that it does.

- They also let go of Italian foreign sounding ingredients

like capers, and instead they use terms

like Italian dumplings instead of gnocchi,

which is hard to pronounce for Americans

and doesn't really tell you what it is.

- They also had their cooks make decisions

like overcooking the pasta for about a minute.

So it matched this texture of a SpaghettiO

more than it did an actual Italian pasta dish.

- They're moving away from really serving Italian cuisine

and instead creating a new kind of hybrid genre

of Italian-American, mass-produced cuisine.

- [Narrator] To test the concept's national appeal

and serve as the chain's first restaurant location,

they select a city where Americans from every corner

of the nation travel to visit, Orlando, Florida.

- It's brilliant. If you want to test the most Americans

in the most agreeable frame of mind,

cross-section of travelers, cross-section of spenders,

people who are there with families

and need to eat full meals.

If you want to test a concept,

Orlando is the perfect city.

- So we took over a restaurant down on International Drive

called The Green Frog.

- They begin to add terracotta tiles, the stucco walls,

and they're, they're recreating this idea of a Tuscan villa.

- They even come up with the perfect name,

a name that would call to mind Tuscan hillsides

and things that are naturally abundant in Italy.

- The name was Olive Tree.

- [Narrator] But just days before opening-

[phone ringing]

- This is Blaine.

What are you talking about? What's the matter with it?

- [Narrator] The team is thrown an unexpected curve ball.

(receiver snaps into cradle)

(exasperated sighs)

- [Narrator] It's 1982, just days before the grand opening

of General Mills new chain restaurant, The Olive Tree.

When the team receives devastating news.

- They want us to change the name.

The Olive Tree's taken.

- Back in the day, there were no computers.

So at General Mills headquarters in Minneapolis,

they had a room that literally had 5,000 telephone books.

So somebody looked through all the telephone books

to see if there were any other Olive Trees in the country.

There was one in California

and the owner of that trademark

wasn't willing to give it up.

So we had to call the sign company and say,

you can't do Olive Tree.

- [Narrator] With time running out before the grand opening,

the team is forced to go with an alternate name.

- General Mills said in the interest of freshness

and abundance, what if we call it Olive Garden?

And everybody said, olives don't grow in gardens.

It doesn't matter.

- Olive Garden opens its doors on December 13th, 1982,

but opening night gets off to a rocky start.

- Guys, table six has been waiting for almost an hour.

- We were way busier than we ever expected.

That as the printer in the kitchen

kept spinning out tickets,

Mark Given would hold the tickets in his hand

and not give them to the cooks

because they were overwhelmed.

So as a result, the guest was getting a little antsy

about how long it was taking to get the food out.

- First impressions mean everything

in the restaurant business.

You need open night to go smoothly,

or you'll be closed in a week.

When a customer has a good experience,

they might tell one or two people.

When they have a bad experience, they tell ten.

(kitchen sounds)

- Breadsticks.

Grace, take this to table six.

Keep them coming, as many as they want.

Alright? Hold on, salads, too.

- Let's give them more bread. Let's give them more salad.

Let's give them free cokes,

which was unheard of at the time,

and that kept the servers from having to apologize.

But it also kept the guests going, wow, this place is great.

Otherwise, we would've crumbled.

- [Narrator] What starts out as an opening night solve

becomes the Olive Garden's most recognizable signature.

- Olive Garden was one of the first chains

to market the idea of unlimited.

Unlimited breadsticks, unlimited salad,

and it gave everybody the idea of value.

- As soon as you come in, boom, breadsticks, enjoy,

let go, have lots of yummy, doughy, bready,

pasta-y, saucy things.

And at the end we hope you come back and people did.

- It covered up a lot of the mistakes

that we were trying to figure out in the early days,

and it turned out to be the signature of Olive Garden,

now for 40 plus years.

- [Narrator] Spurred by the runaway success

of their test location,

General Mills races to open new locations

across the country.

And by 1989, Olive Garden has opened

close to 150 restaurants,

becoming General Mills' fastest-growing business,

further establishing a new food genre,

Italian with an American twist.

- We were competing against every authentic

Italian restaurant in every town in America,

and we weren't authentic Italian, and we knew it.

- [Narrator] By the end of the eighties,

a poll is conducted by Restaurants

and Institutions Magazine on the tastes of America,

and more than 70% of Americans report

that when eating out they choose Italian food.

- Olive Garden helped ensure

that Italian-American food is available

at every corner of the United States.

- When I was editor of Food and Wine,

when we put Italy on the cover,

when we put a pasta dish on the cover,

it would always be a bestselling cover.

That's just how Americans feel.

I think people think of,

of pasta as something

that is actually

quintessentially American,

even though it's Italian.

- [Narrator] Around the world,

720 million SpaghettiOs are consumed every single day.

- Amazingly, it's not until 2004 that Campbell's

finally puts their name on the can.

Campbell's SpaghettiOs.

But Franco-American can still be found on the back.

- [Narrator] Today, Prego is the front runner

in a billion-dollar spaghetti sauce industry.

- Look at how much shelf space

tomato sauce gets at a grocery store.

It's bigger than soups,

it's bigger than apple pie, it's huge.

- [Narrator] And Olive Garden is the biggest

Italian-American restaurant chain in the world,

with 893 locations generating $3.3 billion annually

and serving 529 million breadsticks a year.

That's 1.6 breadsticks for every US resident.

- The explosion of the interest in Italian-American cuisine

wasn't just pizza, it was about going out for pasta

and lasagna and tiramisu and veal piccata and

and all of these terrific things.

We fell in love with Italian food,

and I don't think we've ever fallen out of love with it.