There are foods that, if you believe the origin stories, came into being by accident, when a cook replaced a common ingredient with something novel, or someone left a dish to burn or freeze too long. Other dishes are created out of necessity, based on poverty or regionally available ingredients, But sometimes, a popular food item comes about because someone decides to play mad scientist. Such is the case with the tater tot. The deep-fried nuggets of diced potato that finish off school lunches or top Minnesota’s famous hotdish began life as a way to use up bits and scraps at an Oregon potato farm and french fry processing plant.
It’s not very often a food product is as well documented as the Tater Tot. That’s because its inventor, Francis Nephi Grigg (who went by Nephi), wrote everything down in 1989, in a five-page essay titled: “The Tater Tot: A Success Story.” The name, by the way, is proprietary and trademarked by Ore-Ida, a subsidiary of what is now Kraft Heinz since 1965. Anything else should be called something like potato gems, tasti taters, or the inexplicable spud puppies (though restaurants regularly dub their house-made versions “tater tots”). If ever there was an example of a rustic American dream success story, Tater Tots have got to be it. What began as a simple frozen food in 1954 now shows up in elevated form on menus from Seattle to Atlanta. We even have 20 ways to use those frozen Tater Tots.
A french fry and a dream led to tots
Francis Nephi and Theodore Golden Grigg came of age during the Depression and were determined to make serious money, despite living on a family farm on the Oregon-Idaho border (hence the Ore-Ida company name). They opened a processing facility in 1953 making frozen french fries, a technology perfected after WWII by Idaho neighbor J.R. Simplot (Simplot would make his wealth supplying McDonald’s the technology and most of its potatoes in the 1960s).
The french fry business was strong. But the story goes that Nephi grew frustrated that leftover potato shavings were “wasted” as cattle feed. A new sorting machine retrieved the scraps, and the brothers experimented with combining diced potato scraps, flour, and seasoning, pushing them through Tater Tot-sized holes in a plywood board. The frozen Tater Tot was born. In 1954, Nephi hauled 15 pounds of Tater Tots on dry ice to the National Potato Convention in Miami (which is still a thing – Potato Expo 2025 took place in January of 2025), where tots were a big hit.
According to Nephi, Tater Tots weren’t a commercial success on their launch in 1956, because they were priced too low. Coming out of WWII, families were ready to spend money on premium goods. Stores raised the price, and the frozen nuggets quickly found an audience (they’re a game-changing base for nachos). And that trademarked name? The origin is murky, but one version is that employee Clora Lay Orton entered the winning name in a company-wide contest.
