On this day in 1898, Daniel Frank Gerber, the creator of Gerber Baby food, was born in Fremont, Michigan. His wife Dorothy suggested making and selling baby foods at their canning company, leading to the creation of the Gerber Products Company. Their enterprise became the world's largest baby-food manufacturer by 1974.
TRANSCRIPT
In 1898, Daniel Frank Gerber, the creator of Gerber Baby food, and father of the original Gerber baby, was born in Fremont, Michigan, northeast of Muskegon. Daniel’s wife Dorothy suggested that they should begin making and selling baby foods at their canning company. Gerber, along with his father, contacted nutritional experts, distributed many samples, and conducted market research interviews before launching their product. The idea of strained baby foods was not entirely new, but the long-held American tradition was that babies generally were given a liquid diet until they were about a year old. It was risky to introduce this concept to the marketplace as they weren’t fully sure how mothers would react to this new idea. Their enterprise became the Gerber Products Company, which at Gerber’s death in 1974 the company claimed it was the world’s largest baby-food manufacturer.