In the 1920s, the restaurant industry in America began to resemble its modern-day counterpart, at least in America’s coastal cities. Ethnic cuisines began to attract diners from outside their own familiar groups. In the cities, Italian, German, East European, Asian, and other restaurants began to offer their familiar and comforting foods to groups that had never experienced them before, and they quickly became popular across ethnic boundaries.
In between the coasts, in the vast region of the nation which later became known as flyover country, such was not the case. Ethnic cuisines were common in the ethnic communities of the Midwest, but between the cities there was little to be found.
Today, through the popularity of casual dining and fast-food restaurants, through pre-packaged meals and meal kits, and especially through the thousands upon thousands of pizza restaurants and delivery outlets, Italian food is ubiquitous across America. Or, at least the Americanized version of Italian food is ubiquitous. Its massive popularity in America did not exist a century ago; it was born of the convenience age and can largely be traced to the career of one man and the company he created. Ettore Boiardi was an Italian immigrant who trained as a professional chef, eventually operating his own restaurants in his adopted country.
For many, Chef Boyardee is a fictional character, a creation of the advertising industry along the lines of Betty Crocker or the Gorton’s Fisherman. But he was not. Chef Boyardee was a real person, an Italian immigrant who wanted to share his love for the simple foods of his childhood with his adopted country. He was a trained chef of considerable acclaim, who rose to prominence among the most famed professional kitchens of the age. Then, he turned his back on his chosen profession to change the way Italian food was perceived and received in his adopted country.
He used his love for the simple foods of his homeland to create a new industry in America, eventually making the creation of simple Italian dishes easier for American cooks using his products. His business became the largest importer of parmesan cheese into America, the largest importer of olive oil, and a major importer of semolina wheat, used to make pasta. He built and expanded farms in Pennsylvania until they were one of the largest growers of tomatoes in the world.
He named his company for himself and his profession, calling it Chef Boiardi. When he learned that his customers, and even many of his own sales representatives, had a difficult time pronouncing his name as it appeared in Italian he anglicized its appearance and pronunciation to boy AR dee. His own image, as Chef Boyardee, appeared on his products labels. It still does.
Today, Chef Boyardee’s products are largely viewed as cheap, quickly prepared, convenience foods for children and college students. Canned ravioli, lasagna, spaghetti, and other products are hardly considered gourmet foods. But they began as the opening of a new cuisine in America, which ushered in the preparation of Italian foods at home, even in non-Italian households. The preparation of spaghetti at home began with Chef Boyardee and led to huge changes in America’s diet and dining habits. Here is how it was done.
The Italian Born to Cook
There is a tale regarding young Ettore Boiardi, probably apocryphal, that his first rattle as a baby was a chef’s whisk. He was born in the small village of Borgonovo Val Tidone [bore go NO vo VAL tee DOE eh] in Northern Italy in 1897. As was common for that time and place, his childhood included working to help support his family; before he was 11, he was employed in a local restaurant, bearing the impressive title of apprentice chef. The restaurant was known as La Croce Bianca, Italian for the White Cross, and featured the local cuisine of the region.
The cuisine for which the region is, and has been, known is centered on locally grown products, including tomatoes, olives and olive oil, mushrooms, garlic, fresh herbs, fish and other seafood, and hard cheeses such as Parmigiano Reggiano. Pasta is usually fresh, rather than dried.
Ettore worked at La Croce Bianca in the kitchen, but had little to do with actual cooking, restricted to the more mundane chores of peeling potatoes to be used for gnocchi or chopping vegetables for soups and side dishes. The young Ettore had two overriding ambitions at the age of 11. First was to learn all that he could regarding his chosen profession, which was already to run his own kitchen. The second was to follow his beloved older brother, Paolo, to America.
After his own arrival in America, Paolo had taken work as a waiter at the Parisian Room in New York’s Plaza Hotel. The Parisian Room was a place where businessmen, politicians, and the idle rich mingled, and Paolo did well there, both financially and professionally, rising eventually to the position of headwaiter, and then Maitre d’Hotel. As maître d’ Paolo had final say over not only who was admitted to the Parisian Room, but where they were seated, which meant, more importantly, who they were seated near. The latter position afforded him considerable influence among the movers and shakers of New York society.
To America
Ettore left home and La Croce Bianca at 12, working in restaurants in Paris, London, and points in between, learning all he could absorb about the role of a chef in a then-modern professional kitchen. At 16, he took passage aboard the Lorraine, a French steamer, and arrived in New York at Ellis Island. Through his brother’s help, he obtained employment as a cook at the Plaza Hotel, which at that time held several restaurants as well as banquet facilities.
He did not remain at the Plaza for long. His skills and the simple recipes he prepared based on the foods he remembered from his home in Italy made him immediately popular, and he left to take over the kitchen at Barbetta, a New York icon that remains, in 2025, one of the most famous Northern Italian cuisine institutions in the world. The restaurant opened in 1906 and has remained in the hands of the same family in 2025. Ettore took over as head chef at the age of just 18, an indication of the respect his credentials and skills commanded in the industry.
He also took over the kitchen at the Greenbrier Resort in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia, for the summer season. The Greenbrier was then, as it is today, a prestigious resort and spa. Working at the Greenbrier gave Ettore exposure to the cream of Washington DC society, many of whom resorted to White Sulfur Springs during the boiling heat of a DC summer in those days before air conditioning existed.
Ettore arrived at the Greenbrier in 1915, the same year in which a signature event occurred that rocked Washington DC society. Only twice before in the nation’s history had a sitting President been married, John Tyler and Grover Cleveland. In 1915, Woodrow Wilson, who had been widowed earlier in his presidency, remarried to the widow Edith Bolling Galt, whom he had met at a White House tea.
While at the Greenbrier, Ettore drew the attention of the wedding planners preparing for the rare event, the social event of the season, despite it being small in size and private in nature. On December 18, 1915, President Woodrow Wilson married Edith Bolling Galt in a private ceremony at her home in Washington. The ceremony included a buffet for invited guests, catered by Ettore Boiardi, then just 18 years of age. Once again, the selection of a chef so young over those of more established reputation speaks to his considerable skill in the kitchen, as well as to the innovation of his dishes. As he usually did, he featured Italian fare for the President’s wedding buffet.
Wilson was impressed enough with the young chef to call upon him again a few years later. In late 1918, American servicemen began to return to the United States from Europe after the armistice ended combat operations of World War I. Wilson hosted a welcome home dinner for returning American troops and again turned to Ettore to provide the menu and the food. The dinner included 2,000 returning troops, plus invited guests and the inevitable political speakers to give remarks. The logistics of catering such an affair were formidable, but Boiardi earned considerable critical acclaim for its success. According to some sources. Others claim that the entire story is apocryphal and that no such event occurred.
The young chef was clearly a rising star, but despite the acclaim, he wanted something more stable. New York beckoned, as did San Francisco and the great houses of Europe, but Ettore wanted to remain in America. He also wanted to establish his own house, rather than carry on the operations and traditions of an existing establishment.
By 1917, he had already explored some possibilities in Cleveland, Ohio, which had both a large Italian community and access to the fresh produce of the Midwest and Southern Canada.
In late 1917, Ettore accepted the position of head chef at the Hotel Winton in Cleveland. He introduced Italian fare at what was then the brand-new hotel, named for the entrepreneurial founder of the Winton Motor Carriage Company, one of America’s earliest manufacturers of automobiles. Ettore’s Italian cuisine was popular in Cleveland, and with the many automotive industry pioneers who made the Winton their home while in Cleveland.
Growing the Business
Among the many dishes Ettore introduced at the Winton was the spaghetti dinner. It seems almost mundane today, but spaghetti was rarely seen as a meal on its own before Boiardi’s innovation. Spaghetti was often served as a side dish in Italian restaurants, alongside a fish or veal course, but in Boiardi’s Italian hometown, spaghetti with a tomato-based sauce was often served as a meal. Boiardi’s spaghetti dinners were something new to most Americans, and they liked what they were served. It could also be replicated at home, with dried or fresh pasta, if the sauce can be achieved. The sauce proved somewhat difficult for most cooks. For one thing, the ingredients weren’t readily available at most markets.
It was during his tenure at the Winton that Ettore Boiardi, in response to popular demand, began to offer his sauce for customers to take home from the restaurant. At first, he simply filled milk bottles with sauce for favored customers. As word spread, the demand for sauce alone, “to go”, although that term had yet to be coined, meant that he had to maintain a stock of Mason Jars to meet his customers’ demands. Within a few months, he was preparing bagged spaghetti meals, containing a jar of sauce and a packet of dried spaghetti, for preparation by the customer at home.
In 1924, Ettore left the Hotel Winton, opening his own restaurant in partnership with his new wife, Helen. They called their restaurant Il Giardino d’Italia, The Garden of Italy, establishing it on East Ninth Street. Patrons from the Winton followed him to his new location, and his reputation spread. Business was good, both for in-house dining and in the sale of packaged dinners to go.
In the mid-1920s, changes were affecting America’s food industry in many ways, not the least of which was in the grocery store. Self-service was replacing the grocer and his aides in serving customers. Shoppers began to move about the store, selecting items on their own and placing them in carts to be taken to a cashier for checkout. Before self-service stores, customers handed their lists to the grocer, who filled the order and oversaw payment.
In 1928, a married couple who were entrepreneurs of the self-service concept approached the Boiardis with a proposal. Maurice Weiner and his wife Eva proposed a distribution deal with their small self-service grocery chain offering Boiardi products for sale at retail. The Weiners believed that they could, through their own grocery suppliers’ distribution chains, ensure nationwide distribution of Boiardi’s sauces and pasta products. Ettore was intrigued, recognizing a greater profit potential than that offered by a restaurant. A restaurant was limited, after all, by the number of patrons it could seat every day.
Ettore recruited his brother Paolo, another brother, Mario, from Italy, and his in-laws to join together in a small canning facility in Cleveland. Together, the group launched the Chef Boiardi Food Company in Cleveland in 1928. They marketed spaghetti sauce in three flavors and spaghetti dinners, the latter consisting of a package containing sauce, a packet of dried pasta, and a small can of grated parmesan cheese.
Creating Chef Boyardee
Meanwhile, the Weiners arranged nationwide distribution through their distributors for other products sold in their stores. By 1930, Chef Boiardi products were sold nationally, though no longer under that name. Too many people, both customers and employees, stumbled over pronouncing it properly. Ettore accepted the anglicized pronunciation of boy AR dee, and the company became Chef Boyardee. At the same time, he accepted the anglicized first name of Hector over Ettore, and his image appeared on the company’s labels as Hector Boyardee.
In late 1929, the stock market crashed, and years of profligate spending and borrowing led the world economy into a crushing depression. Businesses failed, banks failed, governments fell, and economic chaos reigned. Yet, Chef Boyardee’s business continued to grow. Spaghetti dinners proved to be an economical way to feed people cheaply, while at the same time providing suitable nutrition, not that nutrition was a major consideration at the time.
By the mid-1930s, the Cleveland plant proved insufficient to meet the demand generated by Chef Boyardee’s growing customer base. At the same time, the business environment made expansion eminently affordable. Shuttered businesses liberally dotted the United States, with nearby labor forces languishing out of work. The Boiardi’s found such a site, which featured a former textiles factory, near rail lines. The company purchased the site in Pennsylvania, near Milton, where they constructed a larger processing and canning facility, and tracts of land on which to grow their own tomatoes and eventually mushrooms. The Cleveland facility was shut down.
As America lurched toward World War II, Chef Boyardee was processing 20,000 tons of locally grown tomatoes each year, producing up to 250,000 cans of spaghetti sauce per day. And it barely met demand, with national grocery chains including A&P and Piggly Wiggly stocking their products. Hector Boiardi operated two restaurants in Cleveland, and Paolo continued to maintain his contacts and influence through New York’s Plaza Hotel.
The War Years
The United States entered World War II in December 1941. The following month, rationing began. At first, impacting tires and rubber, rationing eventually expanded to cover many foods. Once again, Chef Boyardee products were positioned to profit during times of shortages. The sauces and pasta provided calories and nutrition without overly straining rationed supplies. Yet, though the market was good for their products, the company again found severe challenges in meeting demand. Their production facilities were needed for other products beyond those intended for at-home consumption.
The United States needed to feed soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, both within its own ranks and those of allied nations. Chef Boyardee’s facilities were needed to produce food for the military, both to supply camp kitchens and commissaries and to produce canned rations for troops in the field. For the first time, the factories and processing facilities in Milton operated 24 hours per day, and Chef Boyardee employed over 5,000 workers at the Milton plants alone.
Many of the products still sold under the Chef Boyardee name today appeared on military mess hall tables and in field rations, including Beefaroni, Spaghetti and Meatballs, ravioli, and lasagna. The meals were fully cooked before canning, and though they were undoubtedly more palatable if heated, they could be eaten cold from the can and often were.
Despite growing their own tomatoes, the company frequently experienced shortages of the fruit and employed area rangers to actively lobby local growers to produce more tomatoes for their use. They also developed additional recipes that did not rely on tomato sauce as a base, including white sauces and others, though they met with limited success.
World War II was both a boom time and a crisis for the Boiardi brothers. Italian immigrants themselves, they all felt the anti-Italian sentiments directed toward Italian-Americans throughout the war. Hector fought against it by becoming a community leader in Milton, organizing patriotic parades, metal, rubber, and paper drives, and supporting war bond sales drives. By the end of the war, he was a locally honored citizen, well-respected for his support of the American war effort and for returning veterans. His company was awarded a Gold Star by the War Department for its services.
During the war, Missouri Senator Harry Truman headed a committee that investigated government contractors and vendors for signs of graft, malfeasance, and other transgressions against the American taxpayer. A large percentage of such crimes occurred in service contracts for items such as uniforms, boots, personal items, and food.
During the war, the company grew to the point where it was too large for the Boiardi brothers, who had limited commercial business training, to run. It was not an unusual situation at the time. Many American companies profited during the war only to find government contracts suddenly cancelled in 1945, leaving them with too many employees and too few projects. To the Boiardis, reducing the company to its prewar size seemed impossible, and none of them knew how to proceed. Meanwhile, food rationing ended, returning veterans sought housing and families, and eating trends changed.
In 1946, a newly formed conglomerate, American Home Foods, offered to buy Chef Boyardee’s name, the company, and all its facilities for $6 million, about $105 million in 2025. Hector Boiardi agreed to stay on as a paid consultant and as the face of the company, Chef Boyardee. The brothers agreed, and Chef Boyardee became part of American Home Foods just as America entered the post-war era.
New Era, New Products
Fast food was not yet in existence in 1946, but the age of convenience foods, which could be prepared quickly and eaten on the run, so to speak, was at hand. Hector Boiardi, who was a trained professional chef, probably looked askance at how some of his products had come to be consumed by the 1940s. But as a spokesman and consultant for the company, which still bore his name, or at least the anglicized pronunciation of it, he marketed the products vigorously.
In the 1950s, Hector began appearing in commercials for the then-new medium of television. He appeared in a chef’s toque, presenting his boxed spaghetti dinner, touting its flavor and nutritional value, as well as its convenience, all for just 15 cents per serving.
Homemade pizza kits were another product of the 1950s, which were not a rousing success, as they produced a flatbread covered with tomato sauce and parmesan cheese, and nothing else. The company continues to market pizza kits today, with presumably more appealing results.
In the 1950s, and continuing into the 1960s and beyond, consumer tastes changed rapidly, often driven by forces that hadn’t existed before World War II.
Product sizes began to change. Before the war, canned foods were marketed in sizes meant for couples, small families, and large families. Post-war, individual serving sizes began to appear. Cans or waxed cardboard cartons meant to be heated in vending machines appeared, promising a hot lunch or snack while on the go. Chef Boyardee pasta products appeared in such sizes that by the 1960s were marketed for use with the new icon of modernity, the microwave oven.
The canned pasta products of the prewar era also faced challenges from another new dining treat of the 1950s, the frozen TV dinner. These took convenience to a new level, without the need to even soil a saucepan while preparing a full three-course dinner, including dessert.
Gradually, Chef Boyardee transitioned its products to be, rather than a dinner alternative, a convenience food for when time, budget, or both are limited.
Following the sale of the company, Hector Boyardee continued to promote it through print and television commercials into the 1970s. As a consultant, he advised on recipes and helped develop new recipes and products. The company continued, at his insistence, to avoid the use of preservatives, though since his demise, its parent company has been the subject of lawsuits over its claims in that area. None have been publicly settled as of 2025.
He also returned to his lifelong love of cooking, operating several restaurants in the Cleveland, Ohio, area, though his contract with American Home Foods prevented him from using the name Boiardi in the name of his restaurants. He died in 1985 in a nursing home in Parma, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. Today, the company that bears his name and his likeness on its labels is owned by ConAgra Brands, which still produces Chef Boyardee products at Milton, Pennsylvania.
ConAgra Brands is one of America’s largest food conglomerates, a major part of what is often disparagingly called today’s agribusiness, the bane of the small farmer and the farm-to-table movement. In many ways, Ettore Boiardi was a champion of both farm-to-table and shopping local, using locally produced foods to prepare simple, nutritious, and delicious meals. Ironically, the company he founded on such ideals is now part of the mass production food industry. Ironic, and more than a little sad.
