You've seen his face in commercials and the grocery store aisle — but just who was Chef
Boyardee ? This is the story of how an Italian immigrant popularized Italy's cuisine in America
— and built a global food empire in the process. The Chef Boyardee brand was created by a real
Italian chef, Ettore Boiardi. Born in 1897 in Northern Italy, Boiardi was 11 when he landed a
job apprenticing for a chef at a hotel in his hometown of Piacenza, per the Chef Boyardee
website. Soon after, he was training under esteemed chefs in Paris and London. By 1914,
he'd immigrated to the U.S. and begun working in the kitchen in New York City's prestigious
Plaza Hotel, where his brother Paul had already taken a job as maître d'hôtel.
Ettore Boiardi's work was so impressive, he was promoted to head chef after just
one year. Eventually, he found his way to Ohio, where he became the
head chef at Cleveland's Winton Hotel. On December 18, 1915, President Woodrow
Wilson married his second wife, Edith. According to the Chef Boyardee website, Chef Ettore Boiardi,
as he was still known at the time, was employed by The Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia — an elite
resort not far from the White House in Washington, D.C. — to supervise the catering for the event.
As the story goes, Boiardi impressed the President and the new First Lady so much
that a few years later, they asked him to oversee a dinner they planned for
2,000 soldiers returning from the first World War. While there's no reason not to believe
that the young chef did indeed experience these brushes with presidential fame, it's also worth
noting that verification as to whether Boiardi actually catered the wedding has proven elusive.
Boiardi met his future wife, Helen, while running the kitchen at Cleveland's Winton Hotel,
per Weird History Food. The two wed in 1923 and remained married until Boiardi's death
in 1985. At Helen's urging, Boiardi opened his own restaurant in 1924 in
Cleveland — Il Giardino D'Italia. The name translates to "Garden of Italy,"
and it was in this "Garden" that the Chef Boyardee brand was born.
"Hello, may I come in? I am Chef Boyardee."
Boiardi's authentic Italian fare was such a success with customers that there were lines
around the block to get a table. In fact, diners loved Boiardi's cooking so much that they began
asking him how they might learn to cook Italian cuisine themselves. Boiardi accommodated by
filling clean milk bottles with his house-made spaghetti sauce for customers to take home.
Soon, Boiardi was selling a make-at-home spaghetti kit complete with his sauce,
dried pasta, and grated Parmesan cheese. Demand was so intense that Boiardi hired
his brother Mario to help out with production, which eventually moved from the restaurant's
premises to a separate processing plant. In 1928, the Chef Boy-Ar-Dee brand was officially born,
with Boiardi, Helen, and the chef's two brothers Mario and Paul as partners.
By 1928, Boiardi had already adopted an Americanized first name, Hector. When
the Chef Boyardee brand was born, Boiardi made another concession — using the surname
Boyardee and marketing his new brand under the phonetic spelling, "Boy-Ar-Dee." Eventually,
the brand dispensed with the hyphens to become what it is today: Chef Boyardee.
In its early days, the company only sold its make-at-home spaghetti kit. It soon branched out,
starting with kits featuring one of three sauces — the original tomato,
meatless mushroom, and a spicy Neapolitan. By 1936, the company had outgrown its Cleveland
space, so Boiardi moved operations to Milton, Pennsylvania. Here,
Boiardi enlisted local farmers to grow tomatoes to meet his rising demand and
exacting standards. Business hit the big time when Paul Boiardi managed to get the brand into A&P,
the largest grocery store in the U.S. at the time, catapulting Chef Boyardee to national markets.
"Ask your grocer for Chef Boyardee spaghetti dinner with meat or mushroom sauce. Won't you?"
In 1946, American Home Products acquired the company for around $6 million. In 1996,
American Home Products spun off a new company just for its food. The resulting
International Home Foods was acquired four years later by its current parent, Conagra.
When Chef Boyardee moved production to Milton, Pennsylvania in 1936,
the nation was still in the midst of the Great Depression. Boiardi chose
Milton because of its richly fertile soil — a boon for growing the ripe,
red tomatoes Boiardi wanted to use in his brand's products, according to Chef Boyardee's website.
There was also the fact that there were many people in Milton who desperately needed work.
So, Chef Boyardee worked with the farmers to grow the crops and hired employees among the
townspeople to run the company's new production facility. The company even founded a mushroom
production facility, the largest of its kind in the U.S. But tomatoes were the star of this show,
becoming so central to Milton's economy that in 1978, the town began putting on the
yearly Tomato Harvest Festival, over which Boiardi presided as Master of Ceremonies.
Although Chef Boyardee's tomatoes are now grown in California, the festival remains a cherished
annual Milton event to this day. Moreover, Milton remains so indebted to Boiardi's
civic contributions that the city honored him by erecting a statue in his honor in 2013.
Today, you can head to the grocery store and choose from among an ever-growing line
of Chef Boyardee products. Indeed, many of us take canned pasta products for granted as being a basic
option in the Italian food family, unlike, say, freshly rolled pasta or homemade red sauce. But
there was a time when Chef Boyardee's quick and convenient premise was regarded as revolutionary,
as JSTOR Daily reports. Moreover, the brand's entry into U.S. supermarkets
afforded many Americans their first taste of Italian cuisine, and they wanted more.
Boiardi's grandniece, Anna Boiardi, wrote in her 2011 cookbook/memoir, Delicious Memories:
Recipes and Stories from the Chef Boyardee Family:
"I think it is fair to say that [...] [the Boiardi brothers], with no formal education
and very little money, can be credited with bringing Italian food to America."
In an interview with NPR, Anna Boiardi also said:
"The new company played a major role in introducing Italian food to the U.S."
Ultimately, the company influenced products Americans were looking for
in supermarkets — like olive oil, Italian-style tomatoes,
and Parmesan cheese — which helped guide grocers' inventory choices. But no one
boosted U.S. importation of authentic Parmesan cheese from Italy quite like Chef Boyardee. At
various points in history, the company was the number one importer of the product nationwide.
By the time the U.S. entered World War II in December 1941, the Chef Boyardee brand was
already well-established and well-loved by millions across the country. So,
it's not surprising the U.S. military sought a contract with the company to produce food
intended for military personnel. As the Chef Boyardee website notes, the troops fighting
in the war in distant countries were sure to be grateful for these simple "comforts of home."
And so, as the new year dawned, the Milton factory wasn't just producing food for
civilians shopping at supermarkets; rather, it was operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week,
to meet the demands of both the military and civilians at home. That's not all the
Boiardi family and its brand did to raise American spirits. The company employees were
equally involved in patriotic marches, carrying banners emblazoned with patriotic slogans like,
"Keep 'em flying! Keep 'em rolling! Keep 'em well-fed!"
After the war's conclusion, Boiardi was honored with the nation's Gold Star — the highest honor
that can be given to a civilian in support of the country's military.
As far as Ettore Boiardi's commitment to his employees and to the people of Milton,
Pennsylvania, in general, when World War II ended, he was left with a conundrum. During the war,
Chef Boyardee was running 24/7 to meet demands, and that meant hiring more people
to cover all those extra shifts, according to the company website. Unfortunately,
not all of the new hires would be needed to run the business in the aftermath of the war.
Plenty of businesses would simply lay off redundant employees in this situation. Boiardi
found another way: He sold the company he'd built from the ground up to a massive corporation,
American Home Products. Although he wasn't an owner anymore, he stayed on as a consultant — and
very famous spokesperson — until 1978. Even after that, Boiardi's face continued to appear on Chef
Boyardee products and still does to this day. The Boiardi family remains proud of its legacy,
even if it no longer has direct control over the product. Anna Boiardi told NPR:
"I try to inspire people to cook for themselves,
but even when I was growing up — and my mom is a fabulous cook — she would open
up a can of Chef Boyardee for us on certain nights when there just wasn't enough time."
"Thank goodness for Chef Boyardee."
In 2015, Chef Boyardee and its parent company Conagra Foods were hit with a class action lawsuit
accusing them of false advertising in violation of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act,
Top Class Actions reported. The premise was that while every Chef Boyardee product label
promised contents free from preservatives, many actually contained citric acid, which is in fact,
a preservative. The class action complaint sought $5 million in damages to be shared by
those who had purchased Chef Boyardee products in the previous three years.
In 2016, the suit was dismissed without prejudice — but not on the suit's merits. Rather,
the plaintiff had failed to properly serve the defendant companies, according to Truth
in Advertising. A dismissal without prejudice of this kind entitles the plaintiff to refile the
complaint with proper service. However, that does not appear to have occurred. Today, Chef Boyardee
boasts a number of pasta products containing "no artificial flavors, colors, or preservatives," per
the company website. The company does, however, continue to use citric acid as an ingredient.
Comfort food isn't necessarily synonymous with healthy options, but Chef Boyardee has been
making an effort as of late. For instance, in 2020 a person on Instagram revealed that
Chef Boyardee had just come out with a pasta that's made using cauliflower. Apparently,
however, this is not a gluten-free pasta because the pasta also contains wheat,
as confirmed by a quick glance at the label. In other words,
it consists of pasta with added cauliflower, as opposed to grain-free cauliflower pasta.
What Chef Boyardee's cauliflower pasta products do offer to consumers is an opportunity to sneak
some veggies past their unsuspecting kids, which is a perfectly acceptable practice,
as registered dietitian Toby Amidor tells Food Network. Amidor suggests offering kids veggies
with their meals as soon as they're old enough to chew them, in an effort to get them used to eating
veggies from the start. Although it's preferable to introduce vegetables to children in their
unadulterated natural state, it's worth pointing out that sometimes stealth vegetable delivery
may be a parent's best bet for making sure their little ones are getting enough of the good stuff.
As we mentioned earlier, Ettore Boiardi wasn't the only family member involved with the company — he
recruited his brothers into the business too, and his wife was also a partner. As it turned out,
one of the brothers, Mario, had a granddaughter who shares Boiardi's
love for cooking up authentic Italian cuisine. You can find recipes along those lines in Anna
Boiardi's 2011 cookbook slash memoir, Delicious Memories: Recipes and Stories
from the Chef Boyardee Family. Boiardi told Bon Appétit at the time of the book's publication:
"I am hoping that people learn these traditional recipes and it helps to preserve them."
Still, as previously noted, Boiardi and her extended family are proud of the Chef Boyardee
legacy created by her great uncle Ettore — even if canned pasta doesn't actually exist,
per se, in Italy. And in case you had any doubts, consider that the book includes
Chef Boiardi's cherished recipe for the original spaghetti sauce that started it all.