Everybody eats, everybody loves it. It's such an important part of who we are as a culture. For more than a century, American food has been dominated by some iconic brands. For many years in this country, if you wanted something cold to drink, you asked for a coke. If you want to ketchup, you wanted Hyen's Ketchup. It didn't matter that there were tons of other brands out there. When
people think of American chocolate, they think of Hershey's. When people think of American burgers and fries, they're going to think of McDonald Coca Cola, Hines, Hershey, McDonald's, Kellogg's. You know the names, the logos and the jingles. I remember my father me Rescupe singing k E double l O, double G Kellogg's best to you? But do you know
the stories behind them? The federal government claimed, with some justification, the Coca Cola was mislabeled because ironically it no longer had cocaine in it, so you can't call it Coca Cola corn flakes. It was an accident, and you stopping, you think, what if they didn't leave? What if they just disposed of what had gotten moldy and behind the
remarkable individuals who brought them to life. There were lots of stories about Ray Kroc walking into a franchise of the location, looking around, jumping up on the counter, and ordering everybody out of the restaurant because he wasn't satisfied. He was both an inventor a bit of a showman. He was notorious for wearing only white riding around Battle Creek on a bicycle with a parrot on his shoulder.
A Welcome to The Food That Built America a new podcast from the History Channel and Ozzie based on the History Channels documentary series The Food That Built America. I often wonder if the people behind these massive, unbelievably successful brands knew exactly the scope of what they were doing when they started out. It takes bold visionaries risking everything to create some of the most recognizable brands on the planet.
They had a dream, they had an idea, they had a vision, but they could never at the time have imagined just how big it would be because nothing else existed like it. Some people are perennial innovators. Some people are always looking for the next big thing. How am I going to grow this am I gonna let everybody in the world know that I'm a household name brands
that helped drive the most powerful economy on earth. Who doesn't want to be successful, Who doesn't want to, you know, change the world and make quite a bit of money doing it and bring millions of people together. The idea that you're eating something that somebody somewhere far away is eating, that's a connection. And so part of the thrill of these products is to participation in a national imagining that everybody else's participate. Painting in you'll hear the stories behind
some of America's most loved and iconic brands. And he would pitch fits. I mean he was known to you know, throw chocolates to the floor to you know, kick and scream, and he'd get bright red in the face. So car hops were very sexy, and the boys gathered to hang out with them, and that posed a problem if you were running a business, because uh, there were shenanigans going on in the parking lots. How they transformed American life
and culture. It's easy to forget that these stories of these amazing food companies tell the story of us as much as any anthem or any statue. If you are holding a bottle of coat or if you're eating a Hershey bar, that's a piece of America that's with you. And it's amazing how a food product can give you that that sort of field and change the world in the process. When you have these associations, it transcends being just the food and it becomes part of your life.
It becomes one of the signifiers for that moment in your life. Certainly that we did create something that really conquered the world, the food that built America. Coming on February four. Listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.