Austin, Minnesota: George Hormel and the Pork Shoulder That Fed the World

Austin, Minnesota is a quiet city of about twenty-five thousand people in the southeastern corner of the state, close enough to the Iowa border that the hog country on both sides looks like a single unbroken landscape. It is the kind of place that most Americans have never thought about, yet they have almost certainly eaten something that came from it.

George Albert Hormel was born in Buffalo, New York, in eighteen sixty, the son of German immigrants. He learned the meat trade in his uncle's Chicago market, then relocated to Austin in eighteen ninety-one with a business partner named Albert Friedrich. When their partnership dissolved, Hormel took the proceeds and transformed a small, abandoned creamery into a pork packinghouse. He and an employee named George Petersen built out a smokehouse and slaughterhouse, and in the first year of operation they butchered six hundred and ten hogs. The company was called Geo. A. Hormel and Company.

Hormel's strategy was unusual for the era. Rather than competing directly with the Chicago giants like Armour and Swift on volume, he focused on quality and innovation. By the early twentieth century Hormel was one of the largest independent meatpackers in the Midwest, and Austin's economy had organized itself almost entirely around the company.

The invention that made Austin famous worldwide came in nineteen thirty-seven, when George's son Jay Hormel was running the company. The Great Depression had created enormous pressure to find ways to use every part of every animal. Jay Hormel's team developed a canned product made from spiced pork shoulder and ham, blended to a consistent texture and sealed in a tin that required no refrigeration. A man named Kenneth Daigneau won a one-hundred-dollar prize for suggesting the name Spam.

When the United States entered World War Two, the military bought one hundred and fifty million pounds of Spam to feed Allied troops in Europe and the Pacific. Soldiers complained bitterly. Jay Hormel kept their letters. When the war ended and those soldiers came home, Spam had achieved global distribution, and in countries like Hawaii, South Korea, and the Philippines, it became a permanent fixture of local cuisine in ways that have long outlasted any military association. More than eight billion cans have been sold since nineteen thirty-seven.