Six iconic food items that were invented in Oregon

By Finn J.D. John
December 1, 2023

AT THE TIME of this writing, the Christmas shopping season is just starting to spool up, and folks are getting ready for some serious holiday eating.

Most likely, that festive feasting won’t include many of the things on this list. Although inventors from the Beaver State have had a big impact at the grocery store, most of what they’ve created would be a bit out of place at a Christmas dinner.

The big exceptions are the products created by scientists at Oregon State University: Marionberries for pie, and modern-process Maraschino cherries for holiday punchbowls. So, let’s start with those:

The Modern Maraschino Cherry (1929):

Maraschino cherries originally came from Italy, where a particularly nasty variety of wild cherry called a “marasca” grows. Marascas, fresh from the tree, are sour and bitter, but the locals over the years figured out that they could be made into a particularly scrumptious kind of liqueur. Even better, when whole Marasca cherries were pickled in that liqueur, they became delicious.

The cherries caught on with high-society drinkers, who loved them in cocktails. The problem was, like a lot of wild fruits, marascas aren’t prolific. So the cherries were very expensive. Various other cherries were tried, both for the fruit and for the liqueur, and some non-alcoholic formulas were developed as well. Most of these faux-aschinos were pretty bad. Writer Inara Verzemnieks found a number of articles from early-1900s newspapers complaining about their quality.

Then along came Prohibition, and with it, the original Italian ones became unobtainable.

Meanwhile, cherry growers in Oregon were trying to figure out how to get into the market with a proper non-alcoholic Maraschino cherry made with a safe, reliable industrial process. The climate in the Willamette Valley is nearly perfect for growing cherries, but the ones that grow best there are big, sweet, juicy ones that break down into mush and turn unappetizing colors when pickled or preserved.

One particularly disgruntled cherry grower happened to be a brother-in-law of William Jasper Kerr, the president of Oregon Agricultural College (now Oregon State University). The college had just hired a hotshot horticulture professor named Ernest Wiegand a few years earlier; so Kerr put the problem before him.

Wiegand basically spent the second half of the 1920s working on it, trying various formulas to get the cherries right. In the end, he figured out that certain calcium salts would firm the cherries up. One of Wiegand’s colleagues, Bob Cain, developed a technique for safely bleaching the cherries so that they would end up ghost-white, ready to be dyed with food coloring (or, in the case of more recent offerings, extracts of beetroots and other natural colorants).

And with these twin breakthroughs, Oregon became the dominant player in Maraschino cherry production worldwide.

The Marionberry (1956):

The Marion cultivar of blackberries has been the most widely planted blackberry in the U.S. since the early 1980s, and for anyone looking forward to some home-baked pie after Christmas dinner, Marionberries just might be involved.

Blackberries, as most Oregonians know all too well, are a type of fruit that combines some of the worst qualities of a plant with some of the best. Few fruits are anywhere near as delicious as a ripe, juicy blackberry; but the vines tend to be sprawling and disorderly and covered with great spiky murder-thorns. At their worst, they grow astonishingly quickly, are very hard to eradicate, and shade out everything beneath them. The common invasive Himalayan blackberries that grow all over the wetter parts of the state are the best example of this type.

In the mid-1930s when OSU professor George Waldo set out to breed what would become the Marionberry, there was almost a direct connection between the quality of the fruit, and the density and awfulness of the brambles it grew on. One could find blackberry varieties that were well behaved and almost thornless, but the fruits were small and not very juicy. Or one could take the all-too-short walk to the nearest tangle of wild Himalayan blackberries and find the opposite.

Waldo set out to breed the perfect blackberry: one with delicious fruit AND well-behaved vines. He actually spent about two full decades on this quest, starting in 1935 when he cooked up a cultivar called Santiam by crossing Loganberries with Pacific Blackberries (the tiny ones frequently found on forest floors, with long not-very-spiny vines and few leaves). Then, in 1936, he crossed Santiam with the infamous and ubiquitous Himalayan blackberry to get a variety he called Chehalem.

Chehalem berries were tasty, but the vines they grew on were a little too reminiscent of their disorderly, horrible Himalayan parent. So Waldo made one more cross, breeding Chehalem berries with Olallieberries. (Olallie was another hybrid that Waldo had created the previous year by crossing two older traditional varieties: Youngberries and Black Loganberries).

The result was the Marion blackberry: A fast-growing but well-behaved vine, with thorns that were not overly vicious and large fruits that practically melt in your mouth. Its main “bug” is really a “feature” for home growers and farmers’-market customers — the berry skins are so tender that they don’t take rough handling very well, so mechanical harvesting is tricky. They also are very sensitive to cold, so about the only place they grow well is the Willamette Valley. Most Marionberries are still grown right in Marion County, the county they were tested in and named after.

The Tater Tot (1953):

As we turn our attention to what food historian Heather Arndt Anderson calls “Oregon’s prodigal spud,” we are straying into distinctly non-Christmassy territory. And yet, in the few dozen short years since brothers Golden and Neef Grigg invented it, the Tater Tot has become as much a part of American comfort food as the Velveeta-drenched macaroni noodle.

It all got started just after the Second World War, when Golden and Neef rented a flash-freezing plant in Ontario (the town in Oregon, not the province in Canada). They were in the frozen vegetable business, specializing in sweet corn.

A few years later, their landlord went bankrupt, and the brothers bought the plant out of foreclosure and expanded their sweet-corn hustle into a full-blown frozen-foods company, planning to add frozen French fries to their offerings as nearly the first order of business. Ontario being right on the Idaho border, the brothers — who actually lived on the Idaho side of the line — named their new company Ore-Ida.

By 1953 Ore-Ida was the biggest producer of frozen corn in the country. But the brothers knew the real money would be in those French fries. Another famous Idaho resident, J.R. Simplot, had figured out how to freeze potatoes without them turning black. Now the brothers wanted to use his system to create frozen, ready-to-cook fries; but this was turning out to be a bigger headache than they’d thought it would be.

The problem was, when a potato was cut up into fries, they needed a way to get rid of the irregular pieces and cut-off ends. They were having a hard time coming up with a mechanical solution to this, and customers were really not into buying a bag of French fries that was mostly half-inch-long slivers.

Then one day, a very confused salesman showed up to try to sell the brothers a prune-sorting machine. Of course, everyone got a good laugh when the salesman realized his error; but instead of hitting the road in search of the nearest actual fruit processor, he stuck around and visited for a bit. One thing led to another, and pretty soon the salesman was showing off his fruit sorter … and the brothers were thinking hard. The machine looked like it would, with the right modifications, do a pretty good job on potatoes as well. Sorting the potatoes by size would go a long way toward eliminating the tiny-fragments problem.

To his probable surprise, when the salesman left the Griggs’ shop, he had an order in his pocket. And with the modifications the brothers had specified, it turned out to be just what they needed.

But now they had another problem — a good problem, but a problem nonetheless: Lots and lots of ends and bits of potatoes left over from the French fry cutting process.

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They started out by feeding them to livestock. But the brothers hated this. There was nothing wrong with the potato bits they were getting; they were perfectly fit for human consumption. Feeding them to animals seemed like a waste of good food.

So they tried a few things — ways to turn tiny bits of potato into something people would want to eat. And one of the first things they tried was chopping the potatoes up fine, compressing them into a long, thin log like a giant pepperoni stick, and cutting the stick into segments.

Very quickly they figured out that they were onto something big.

The Tater Tots had their table debut the following year, when Golden and Neef brought a 15-pound bag of tots to the 1954 National Potato Convention. Neef persuaded the chef at the convention dinner to cook up the tots and serve a few of them on small saucers next to each diner’s plate.

“These were all gobbled up faster than a dead cat could wag its tail,” Neef wrote, colorfully if a bit incoherently, 35 years later.

The Corn Dog (1939):

On Labor Day in 1939, George Boyington, a Rockaway Beach entrepreneur who ran a hot dog stand downtown, was sitting in his kitchen glumly contemplating a huge pile of hot-dog buns. The buns were too stale to sell; he had ordered too many, and now was going to have to throw them out.

Remember, this was 1939 — plastic bread bags would not be invented for another 18 years. So throwing a bag or two in the freezer was not an option; buns had to come in from the bakery the same day they went out wrapped around a hot dog. That meant he had to estimate how many he thought he’d need the day before, place the order, and hope for the best. And usually, he'd order more than he thought he’d need — it was better to have to feed a few stale buns to the seagulls than to turn away customers because he’d run out of them.

So he threw away a lot of buns. And it always bothered him.

As he moped there, glaring at the unsaleable pile, Boyington started thinking about how awesome it would be if he could make the bun and the hot dog at the same instant, just before handing it all over to the customer.

That’s when it hit him: He could do that! Just, it couldn’t be a bun. But what he could do, is dip a hot dog in batter the way you do a piece of fish for fish-and-chips, and deep fry it, on the spot.

Boyington went home and started experimenting with recipes. Soon he nailed down what he thought was the perfect blend of flavors and textures to complement a hot dog … and then he went into business, marketing Pronto Pup Batter Mix in stores nationwide. Boyington moved to Portland to set up manufacture of his mix, to be closer to distribution networks.

Very quickly it became clear that Boyington had invented something special. He trademarked the name “Pronto Pup” and launched his hot-dog stand business as a franchise.

Pronto Pups (the franchise stores) are still all over the country and are super popular in the Midwest. Pronto Pups (the brand of corn dog) also have become synonymous with county and state fairs over the years, and are big crowd pleasers at any kind of summer outdoor event.

You don’t see much of them during the holiday season, of course.

There is, by the way, a special Pronto Pup stand in Rockaway, “The Original Pronto Pup,” to commemorate the town’s role in the invention of the world’s most iconic state-fair fare. People who are fans of their corn dogs sometimes make pilgrimages, or at least make a point of stopping by on their Oregon Coast vacations.

Big League Chew (1977):

Baseball players, back in the day, were somewhat famous for chewing tobacco on the field. Fans would see them pull a pouch of Red Man or Beech-Nut out of their uniform pocket, dip out a big pinch, and stuff it in “between the cheek and gum.” Sometimes it would even make a visible bulge.

Minor-league slugger Rob Nelson probably chewed the stuff too, although he played for the Portland Mavericks; in Portland, as in most of the Pacific Northwest, moist snuff products like Copenhagen and Skoal were (and still are) far more popular than pouch “chaws” like Beech-Nut. But, maybe not; the pouch was, after all, a sort of informal baseball tradition.

So in 1977, while waiting in the dugout for his turn at-bat, Nelson was not surprised to see the bat boy pulling a Beech-Nut pouch out of his trousers and taking a big pinch out of it. He wasn’t surprised, but he was probably a bit alarmed; the bat boy was not old enough to be chewing tobacco.

“Oh, no,” the kid said, when challenged on his “chaw.” “It’s just a tobacco pouch that I’ve put shredded licorice in.”

This got Nelson thinking: In a world of avid baseball fans who were too young to dip or chew, might there be a market for a candy product that simulated it?

He invested a little money in a bubble-gum-making kit and started prototyping. Within just a few years, he had a finished product and a patent, which he sold almost immediately to a subsidiary of the Wrigley company.

In its target demographic, Big League Chew was a huge and immediate hit. I myself remember how popular and ubiquitous it was on middle-school playgrounds in 1980, just three years after Rob Nelson saw that bat boy chewing what he thought was real tobacco.

The Gardenburger (1981):

If your family is on track for a vegetarian Christmas feast, this last featured Oregon food invention might actually be on your menu in some form! Or, at least, a product derived from it.

The Gardenburger — that looks-like-a-hamburger-from-far-away food product made of rice, mushrooms, and cheese — was invented in Gresham by a vegetarian health-food gourmet named Paul Wenner.

Wenner, in 1981, had just opened a vegetarian restaurant called The Gardenhouse in Gresham. One of the meals on his menu was something he called the Garden Loaf Sandwich. Its contents — the eponymous Loaf — was a formula he had developed previously when he’d mixed some chopped mushrooms into leftover rice pilaf bound together with cheese.

The Garden Loaf Sandwich was a hit, so he added another version of it to the menu: A patty made of Garden Loaf stuff. He called this, of course, the Gardenburger.

Well, the Gardenburger was a bigger hit than the restaurant. By 1984 Wenner could see that the restaurant was holding back the Gardenburger back. So he joined forces with a customer, Allyn Smaaland, got a meeting with the CEO of Louisiana Pacific for the financing end of things, and pitched a plan to take the Gardenburger nationwide.

The CEO, Harry Merlo, made the deal, with the understanding that L-P would take over operational control after Gardenburger got off the ground. So Wenner closed his restaurant, founded Wholesome & Hearty Foods, and set about hiring the staff he would need to market Gardenburger in health-food stores as well as the increasing number of mainstream supermarkets with “granola departments” or health-food sections.

The company got into some trouble by overleveraging in the 1990s, and had to take bankruptcy protection. It emerged a year later, leaner and stronger and now owned by a New York investment firm, which later sold it to the Kellogg breakfast-cereal company, which owns it now. Kellogg took everything out of Oregon; today, the company is based in Irvine, Calif., and its production plant is in Clearfield, Utah.

But Portland vegetarians still remember when Gardenburger was a local vegetarian delicacy — although their holiday feasts probably will lean more on the offerings of Tofurky served with plant-based cranberry sauce, rather than Gardenburgers.

(Sources: “The Fruit that Made Oregon Famous,” an article by Inara Verzemnieks published in the April 16, 2007, issue of the Portland Oregonian; “The Tater Tot is American Ingenuity at its Finest,” an article by Kelsey McKinney published in the Aug. 28, 2017, issue of Eater magazine; “How Two Oregon Brothers’ Efforts to Mitigate Food Waste Created the Tater Tot,” an article by Heather Arndt Anderson published by Oregon Public Broadcasting on Feb. 2, 2022; “A Classic American Concession was First Fried in Oregon,” an article by Meagan Cuthill published by Oregon Public Broadcasting on July 16, 2022)

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