In 1928, an Italian-born chef named Hector Boiardi turned the popularity of his Cleveland restaurant into a packaged-food business. There was only one hitch: Americans had trouble saying his last name.
His solution eventually became one of the most recognizable names in the supermarket aisle.
Boiardi and his family spelled the name phonetically for American customers, turning Boiardi into the much easier-to-pronounce Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, which eventually became Chef Boyardee.
The man whose face appeared on the products wasn’t a fictional mascot, either. He was a real chef with an impressive résumé long before canned pasta made him famous.
Born Ettore Boiardi in Piacenza, Italy, in 1897, Boiardi began working as an apprentice chef when he was just 11 years old. As a teenager, he immigrated to the United States and found work in some of the country’s most prestigious kitchens.
According to Chef Boyardee’s official history, by age 17 he was working at New York City’s Plaza Hotel. He also worked at The Greenbrier in West Virginia, where he helped oversee catering for President Woodrow Wilson’s wedding reception.
But Boiardi’s biggest break came after he went into business for himself.
In 1924, Boiardi and his wife, Helen, opened Il Giardino d’Italia in Cleveland, Ohio. His Italian dishes proved so popular that customers began asking if they could take his spaghetti sauce home with them.
Instead of simply handing over the recipe, Boiardi began filling cleaned milk bottles with his sauce and sending customers home with pasta so they could recreate his dishes in their own kitchens.
Demand quickly grew beyond what one restaurant could handle.
In 1928, Boiardi joined forces with his brothers Mario and Paul to establish the company that would become Chef Boyardee. Its early spaghetti dinner included pasta, tomato sauce and grated cheese, bringing a restaurant-style Italian meal into American homes at a time when Italian cuisine was far less familiar to many Americans than it is today.
There was still the matter of the family name.
Boiardi’s American customers and even some of his salespeople struggled to pronounce it correctly, so the company adopted the phonetic “Boy-Ar-Dee.” The spelling was later streamlined into the familiar “Boyardee.”
Boiardi didn’t take changing his family name lightly.
“Everyone is proud of his own family name, but sacrifices are necessary for progress,” he once explained, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Progress came quickly.
By the late 1930s, the growing business had moved production to Milton, Pennsylvania, where the company had access to the tomatoes needed for Boiardi’s sauce. The factory became particularly important during World War II.
Beginning in 1942, the Chef Boyardee plant operated around the clock producing food for American troops. Case Western Reserve University’s Encyclopedia of Cleveland History reports that by the end of the war, Chef Boy-Ar-Dee Quality Foods was generating $20 million in annual sales.
But the end of the war created a new problem. The enormous wartime operation no longer had the same military demand to support it, potentially putting employees’ jobs at risk.
According to Chef Boyardee’s official history, Boiardi made the difficult decision to sell the company in order to keep the workers who had been hired during the wartime production boom.
In 1946, Boiardi sold the business to American Home Foods for $6 million.
He didn’t disappear from the company that carried his name. Boiardi stayed on as a consultant until 1978 and became the familiar face of Chef Boyardee in advertising, ensuring generations of Americans knew exactly what the real Chef Boyardee looked like.
Boiardi died in 1985 at age 87.
Nearly a century after he first began packaging food from his Cleveland restaurant, his face and the phonetic version of his Italian surname are still on grocery-store shelves, making Chef Boyardee one of the rare food mascots who was very much a real person.
Related: In 1977, a 20-Year-Old Housewife With No Business Experience Opened a Cookie Shop in Palo Alto; No One Bought a Cookie Until She Started Giving Them Away on the Street
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