History
Originally posted onMarch 9, 2025 @ 10:11 pm
The Food That Built America Recap for Baking Chocolate Chip History
-Tonight’s episode of The Food That Built America is titled Baking Chocolate Chip History and talks about the invention of the chocolate chip cookie.
-Cookies were initially store bought and popular thanks to Nabisco, who gave us the iconic Oreo.
-Ruth Wakefield, however, loved to bake her own treats at home. She and her husband Ken left their jobs to open their own restaurant and share their love of food and cooking. The place was homey and had both fancy and comfort food, as well as a kid’s menu and desserts.
-By the time they open, it is 1930 and the country is in the throes of the Great Depression. However, they chose a popular location and named it The Toll House, something that would become known worldwide….but for different reasons.
-The business started out slow, but would soon become popular, thanks to Ruth’s desserts. The most popular one was a butter pecan cookie, which was added to ice cream. Before long, people loved the cookies so much that they ordered them on their own. We now know these cookies as pecan sandies.
-Ruth was delighted, so she decided to make cookies as a standalone dessert. However, before she can make this happen, the Wakefields are robbed at gunpoint, bringing them back to square one.
-Ruth is determined to recover from this and works on another cookie recipe, one that will change the cookie industry forever. She is on a tighter budget than ever, so she goes through her ingredients to make something simple and delicious. She initially decided to make a chocolate cookie, but since the store was out of baking chocolate, Ken had bought her a Nestle chocolate bar. She decided to chop it up and add it to her batter, inventing what we now know as the chocolate chip cookie….and chocolate chips!
-Ruth loved the sweet and savory flavor of the cookie, especially with the addition of the nuts from her OG cookie. She began selling them as chocolate crunch cookies and they became so popular that people began asking for the recipe.
-The recipe was soon published in the Boston Globe and other publications, soon reaching Edouard Muller of Connecticut, aka the head of Nestle.
-Nestle is also struggling due to the depression, but Ruth’s cookie recipe is unknowingly helping their business. Edouard is so shocked by this that he decided to travel to Massachusetts to see what all the fuss was about.
-At first, Ruth thinks Edouard is upset with her, but he then buys the rights of the recipe and gives her a lifetime supply of chocolate. The recipe would be called Tollhouse chocolate chip cookies.
-The bars would then be pre-scored to make it easier to break, but this did not work, so they decide to make the chocolate pre-broken in uniform pieces….chocolate morsels….or chocolate chips, if you will.
-The nozzle that made the morsels would make a curly end, which is what made the chip so iconic.
-By 1945, Nestle is worth 225 million dollars, or 4 billion dollars today. Chocolate cookies are also a huge hit and are even sent overseas during the war. Once the soldiers came home, they wanted more cookies, causing them to grow in popularity.
-The invention of the cookie would get people more into baking and before long, baking mixes were added to the mix…no pun intended.
-Premade cookie dough was also invented in 1955 in order to make baking easier than ever.
-Chocolate chip cookies are now the most popular in America, beating Oreos in the cookie game.
-Nabisco gets wind of this and wants to beat the competition. Lee Bickmore, who was the CEO of the company, decides they need to get into the chocolate chip cookie fame. He has his team make their own chocolate chip cookies….in prepackaged form. The only issue they run into is making it so it wouldn’t go bad before being sold.
-It took years, but Lee decides to go with a crispy chocolate chip cookie. He does a test marketing with families across the country and learns that making the cookie without nuts is the way to go since Americans wanted more chocolate and no nuts. This also made it easy for people with nut allergies.
-The cookie would be known now and forever as Chips Ahoy! with the exclamation point added by Lee for fun. He then advertised on TV and magazines with Cookie Man to appeal to kids, promising sixteen chips in each cookie. It debuted in stores in 1963.
-Nestle is not happy about this, so they decide to beat Nabisco at their own game. This would also lead to the chewy vs. crunchy cookie debate. They work on the marketing for their morsels to prove that homemade is better than store bought.
-Nabisco is making over 700 million dollars. They also used their marketing to show that their shelf life was longer than homemade.
-More companies come out with prepackaged cookies, including Famous Amo’s, Mrs. Fields, Entenmanns and more.
-Carl Abegg, who worked for Nestle, would go on to expand the business into coffee, beauty and other foods.
-Chips Ahoy! is Nabisco’s cookie and worth billions.
-Nestle is worth over 100 billion dollars.
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