Starting around 1949, the Grigg Brothers, Nephi and Golden, founded a frozen food operation in Ontario, Oregon, which is right on the border with Idaho.  Then, in 1951, they changed the name from Oregon Frozen Foods Company to a name you’ve probably heard before:  Ore-Ida.  Get it?  Oregon and Idaho... Ore-Ida?

So there they were, taking all those Idaho potatoes, along with Oregon potatoes, because they grow here, too, and making a lot of French fries.  The thing is, French fries are square-ish, and potatoes are round-ish.  So there were all these left over bits and pieces they didn’t know what to do with.  So the ingenious brothers ground them up and turned them into one of the greatest inventions of all time.  On October 21, 1958, the “Tater Tots” trademark was officially registered.

Like this is a shock, the name “Tater” comes from “potato,” and the name “Tot” comes from “small.”  And even though the name “Tater Tot” is a registered trademark, and even though that’s supposed to mean nobody else is supposed to use it, they do anyway.  “Tater Tot” has become genericized.  It’s what people call any cylinder-shaped small potato product.

And we love ‘em.  Americans eat around 70 million pounds of Tater Tots a year.  God knows I’m doing my part.  Broken down, that’s about three and a half billion individual tots.  That’s a lot of tots.  Even though they are now Ore-Ida’s best selling product, that wasn’t always the case.  They were not an instant best seller, as hard as that is to believe.  The problem was that they were priced too low.  Because they were cheap, people thought of them as cheap food and didn’t buy them.  So Ore-Ida raised their prices.  Problem solved.  By the way... Isn’t “Golden” a great name for somebody who makes stuff like Tater Tots and French fries?

​