The Ingenious Origin Of Tater Tots

Salmon, grunge music, Sydney Sweeney — the Pacific Northwest has given America so much. But there's one thing that came from the region that many people wouldn't necessarily expect. The humble tater tot is difficult to imagine being invented, even though logically it had to have been; it always sort of seemed like bags of the stuff started appearing in the kitchens of high school cafeterias and the lunch ladies just rolled with it.

But not only were they invented, tater tots were invented by none other than Ore-Ida, the frozen potato company founded in Oregon near the Idaho border (hence the name). The Grigg brothers, F. Nephi and Golden, originally made their fortune in selling sweet corn before expanding into potatoes in the early 1950s – specifically, frozen French fries. Business was brisk, to be sure; this was the frozen food boom of the '50s, after all. But the real innovation was right around the corner.

The Grigg brothers had a problem on their hands. The machine they used to slice potatoes into fries didn't make use of the whole potato, leaving small, irregular scraps behind. They were too small and too weirdly shaped to be made into more fries, so F. Nephi's first thought was to use it as cattle feed. But there were a lot of potato scraps being produced, so F. Nephi and Golden figured they had to think outside the box.

Their solution? Take the potato scraps, roll them into thimble-sized cylinders of potato, blanch them, and fry them before freezing. Initially this new creation was given the rather unappetizing name of "potato logs", but a company-wide contest prompted one employee, Clora Lay Orton, to come up with the name — the abbreviated 'tater referring to the tuber and "tots" as the baby or diminutive versions of it — and the adorable name stuck. And so these crunchy bites of potato scraps found their place in food history, ending up next to frozen pizzas in the freezer aisles of supermarkets across the country.