When Ettore Boiardi opened an Italian restaurant in Cleveland in 1924, his spaghetti dishes were such a hit that he started sending his customers home with take-out meal kits to meet the high demand — which led to the creation of the famous Chef Boyardee company.
Chef Boyardee CompanyEttore Boiardi started his career as a humble kitchen assistant, but he ultimately became a household name.
Ettore Boiardi introduced a generation of Americans to spaghetti. His canned ravioli fed millions. And he has one of the most recognizable faces in the food industry.
Yet few know the man behind the company that helped popularize Italian food in America. A 16-year-old immigrant who arrived at Ellis Island just weeks before the start of World War I, young Boiardi wanted to make a name for himself.
By the end of the war, he was serving up dishes at some of New York City’s most renowned eateries. A decade later, he’d opened his own restaurant and launched the company that would feature his name and face: Chef Boyardee.
So, how did Boiardi become Boyardee? As Ettore Boiardi himself once explained, “Everyone is proud of his own family name but sacrifices were necessary for progress.”
The Early Years Of Chef Ettore Boiardi
It didn’t take long for young Ettore “Hector” Boiardi to discover his love of cooking. Born in 1897 in Piacenza, Italy, Boiardi was working as an apprentice in a local restaurant by the time he was 11 years old.
His skills eventually took him to Paris, London, and New York. Like millions of other Italians around the turn of the 20th century, Ettore set sail for America, following in his older brother’s footsteps.
Paolo “Paul” Boiardi shared Ettore’s passion for the restaurant industry. When he immigrated, Paul worked as a waiter at the Plaza Hotel, eventually becoming maître d’.
In 1914, Ettore made the journey across the Atlantic to join Paul. After arriving through Ellis Island, Boiardi took a job in the kitchen at the Plaza.
National ArchivesOn his 1918 draft card, Ettore Boiardi listed his occupation as “cook.”
At the time, Italian food wasn’t widely known in the U.S., and all of the nicer restaurants served French cuisine. So, when Ettore Boiardi started serving up his Italian recipes, customers noticed. Soon, he had a job as the head chef at Barbetta, an Italian restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen. Then, a summer job reportedly connected Boiardi with a powerful patron: President Woodrow Wilson.
He is said to have catered the 1915 wedding reception of President Wilson and Edith Bolling at The Greenbrier resort in West Virginia. The president loved the food so much that he invited Boiardi to cook for 2,000 World War I veterans in 1918. Eventually, the chef’s rising fame landed him a position at Hotel Winton in Cleveland, Ohio.
From Head Chef To Businessman
At just 22 years old, Ettore Boiardi had become famous in the culinary world. And as a wave of immigrants from Italy boosted demand for Italian cooking, Boiardi decided to open his own restaurant in 1924 alongside his new wife, Helen Wroblewski.
Giardino d’Italia, or “Garden of Italy,” introduced Cleveland to the Italian food that Boiardi loved. He was soon serving up plate after plate of spaghetti with red sauce and Parmesan.
Chef Boyardee CompanyEttore Boiardi helped popularize spaghetti in the U.S. with his packages of pasta, sauce, and cheese.
Boiardi’s sauce became so popular that customers bought it in milk bottles to take home. The chef struggled to keep up with demand, eventually realizing that he needed his own factory to produce enough sauce.
With the encouragement of the owners of a local grocery store chain, Boiardi opened a canning and processing plant. His brother Paul relocated to Cleveland to help with the business, as did his brother Mario.
In 1928, Ettore officially opened the Chef Boiardi Food Company. The brothers sold traditional, mushroom, and spicy tomato sauces. However, customers struggled to pronounce the chef’s name. That’s when Ettore switched the spelling to Chef “Boy-Ar-Dee.”
How Chef Boyardee Changed Dinner Tables Across America
Running America’s first successful Italian food company created some challenges for the Boiardi brothers. For one, American farmers weren’t growing enough tomatoes. The business eventually moved to Milton, Pennsylvania, in 1936 to be closer to tomato fields. The factory there even grew its own mushrooms. Chef Boyardee also imported tons upon tons of olive oil, and at one point, the company was purportedly America’s largest importer of Parmesan cheese.
Gerry Dincher/Wikimedia CommonsThe Chef Boyardee factory in Milton, Pennsylvania, could produce 250,000 cans a day at its height.
In addition to sauce, Chef Boyardee began rolling out spaghetti dinner kits. Each came with dried spaghetti, a jar of sauce, and a small canister of Parmesan cheese.
Soon, the largest grocery chains in the country carried Chef Boyardee products, all with the smiling face of Ettore Boiardi on the package. Advertisements in magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal persuaded readers to pick up Chef Boyardee at the store to serve a quick, easy meal for dinner. Soon, Italian food, which had been essentially unheard of in much of the country just years earlier, was a staple in American households.
Ladies’ Home JournalAds for Chef Boyardee emphasized that Italian food was “something new” that Americans hadn’t tasted yet.
Then, the outbreak of World War II changed Ettore Boiardi’s business.
Ettore Boiardi’s Later Career And Death
As World War II raged on in the 1940s, Ettore Boiardi began using his factory to develop field rations for troops. The company expanded its workforce to 5,000 employees and began operating 24 hours a day. Sales skyrocketed to $20 million per year.
According to a 2021 report by NorthcentralPA.com, Ettore Boiardi wrote in a newsletter to his employees in March 1943, “Our soldiers will not let us down, and we cannot afford to fail them. It is up to us to make sure every soldier… gets plenty of good, nourishing food. That is our job, and no one can overrate its importance.”
Chef Boyardee CompanyThe original Chef Boyardee logo, which was used from 1938 through the mid-1960s, prominently featuring the face of Ettore Boiardi.
After the war, Ettore and his brothers decided to sell the company to American Home Foods for nearly $6 million. The chef stayed on as a consultant until he retired in 1978.
Chef Boyardee wasn’t Ettore’s only business venture, though. He also started a company to turn restaurant scraps into animal food and bought a steel company in Pennsylvania.
Ettore Boiardi died in 1985 at the age of 87. That year, the Chef Boyardee Company sold an estimated $500 million in canned goods. The tiny business the Italian immigrant started from a small restaurant in Cleveland had made him a household name, and his products remain a staple in pantries across the country to this day.
Ettore Boiardi transformed American cuisine. For more food history, learn about James Hemings, the enslaved man who introduced French cuisine to America. Then, read about the World War II spy career of Julia Child.