- Have you ever eaten this?
Or those?
Have you drunk that?
You have?
Good.
Well, these creations are all from one man,
William A. Mitchell, an all American food chemist.
A junk food wizard as such.
And his road a sugar glory would change
the world's sweet tooth, forever.
(upbeat music)
Bill Mitchell started working at General Foods in 1939.
His job was to create new foods
for the world to sink their teeth into.
And who would be best to talk about such an inventor
than an old colleague, Marv Rudolph.
They worked together for six years in the same lab.
- Miller was the inventor at General Foods.
If you looked up inventor in the dictionary,
there was probably a picture of Bill Mitchell
next to the word.
He knew what amplified flavors.
He knew what colors to use
to make something more attractive.
If you had a problem, he was the guy to go to.
Management tried to promote Bill many times
and he said, "No, just keep me in my lab.
"It's what I wanna do."
- Bill had a superhero beginning,
just like the Hulk or Dr. Manhattan,
after his lab exploded and he survived.
- [Marv Rudolph] He was heating a beaker of alcohol
and the beaker had a crack and just exploded (explosion).
They said that he had burns over 80% of his body
(machine beeping) and he was in terrible pain.
He managed to come back from that explosion,
that accident, and start a career that was exemplary.
- The time is 1956,
Mitchell was hard at work trying to carbonate Kool-Aid,
a popular powdered soft drink.
- [Marv Rudolph] So he said
"Why can't I add carbon dioxide molecules to sugar?"
That was a great leap forward.
- And thus Pop Rocks were born!
The infamous popping candy.
You might have heard the few urban legends,
Pop Rocks and Cola together
will make your stomach explode (explosion).
- No way, it wasn't true, absolutely not.
But the rumor would never die.
And people would call up to General Foods
and they'd say "Are you the company
"that killed that dear little boy?"
- Soon after, Mitchell was on a roll,
he created a powder, when mixed together with water,
would create a bright orange liquid,
and it was 94% sugar, but it had Vitamin C.
- [Marv Rudolph] He invented Tang,
he invented the orange flavoring system,
which was much more intense
than just a typical orange flavor.
- And fun fact,
Tang even made its way to space.
First of all, John Glenn's Mercury flight in 1962,
it was used to make the spacecrafts water supply
stop tasting so much like metal.
Now it's 1967, early in the year Mitchell had patented
a faster setting jello.
- [Marv Rudolph] Quickset Jello was a very useful invention
because you didn't have to wait for the jello to set,
which took hours, and he cut the time in half.
- But why stop there?
Only a few months later, he was hard at work.
Ladies and gentlemen, I think
this is Mitchell's finest invention.
(drum roll) Cool Whip.
- [Marv Rudolph] Oh yeah, Cool whip
was the first freeze thaw stable nondairy whipped cream.
You could whip cream, but you freeze it
and it's going to separate.
That was a huge product, a huge success for General Foods.
- William A. Mitchell
was granted 44 patents in 35 years, an incredible feat.
But like any inventor, some did work and some didn't.
- [Marv Rudolph] One of them that didn't make it
was dry alcohol.
He would take wet alcohol and mix it
with this fluffy maltodextrin and it would stay dry.
There were problems with that, but it does work.
The funny thing about that was General Foods
was a completely non alcoholic company.
You couldn't even bring a bottle of beer
into General Foods, it was forbidden.
Management said, "What the heck Bill, what are you doing?"
- Eh, it's a shame,
I kinda like the sound of that one.
So a toast of Tang, and Pop Rocks on the side,
to William A. Mitchell,
the greatest junk food chemist that ever lived.