‘Biscuit revolution’ stirred up a tasty competition

When General Mills of Golden Valley, Minn., launched its Bisquick brand of boxed biscuit mix in 1931, it created a “biscuit revolution” in the United States, according to Bryn Gelbart, a writer for The Daily Meal food and drinks website.

 

A bunch of competitors scrambled to introduce similar products, but none was successful in toppling General Mills from its perch of supremacy as market leader.

Meanwhile, also in 1931, Lively Burgess Willoughby received a U.S. patent for the manufacture of refrigerated biscuit dough. Willoughby operated a wholesale bakery in Louisville, Ky., and began experimenting with dough, cardboard and tin foil.

 

Willoughby cut and formed his biscuits using Fleishmann’s baking powder, packaged them in foil, loaded them into an Epsom salt-lined cardboard tube and glued lids on both ends.

Served 10 biscuits to a tube, these oven-ready jewels offered an easier alternative to homemakers, Gelbart wrote.

Marketed as “oven-ready biscuits” that were “ready to bake when you awake,” Willoughby’s “Ye Olde Kentuckie Buttermilk Biscuits” brand was acquired in the 1940s by the Ballard & Ballard Flour Company of Louisville (formed in 1880 by brothers Samuel and Charles Ballard).

 

The Ballards’ vast milling operations were purchased by Charles A. Pillsbury & Co. of Minneapolis in 1951. Pillsbury was the nation’s dominant flour milling enterprise at that time, having roots that dated back to 1855 when John Sargent Pillsbury opened a mill on the Mississippi River at the Falls of St. Anthony.

John Pillsbury’s milling enterprise was struggling financially in 1869, however. His nephew, Charles Alfred Pillsbury (shown below), arrived from New Hampshire to rescue the business by modernizing equipment and improving the milling process.

 

Charles Pillsbury established the “Pillsbury’s Best” brand and boasted it was the finest flour in the world, which quickly captured a majority share of the high-quality flour market.

 

Pillsbury had great success in perfecting Willoughby’s invention of cylindrically packaged biscuit dough, which would become “one of the company’s most important and profitable product lines.”

 

Opening the Pillsbury biscuit tubes is another matter, said Lena Abraham of the Simply Recipes website. “You have to smack them on the corner of a counter to get them to open…with a loud bang.”

Kim Ranjbar, a contributor to the Chowhound food website, said: “The pop is caused by a combination of the spiral cardboard design and half-risen dough.” The resulting slit releases built-up pressure inside the container, revealing perfectly shaped premade biscuits or rolls.

 

“The package was an ingenious design that revolutionized the industry, evidenced by the fact that we still see the same packaging today, nearly 70 years later,” she said.

Born from within one of those Pillsbury packages in 1965 was “Poppin’ Fresh,” the Pillsbury Doughboy. The mascot character “popped out” in the imagination of Rudolph Perz and Carol Williams, members of the creative team at Pillsbury’s Leo Burnett advertising agency in Chicago.

Milt Schaffer was the designer who helped the Pillsbury Doughboy take shape, careful not to strike a resemblance to “Casper the Friendly Ghost.” The anthropomorphic Poppin’ Fresh was given a scarf, a chef’s hat, two big blue eyes, a faint blush…and a soft, warm chuckle when gently poked in the belly.

 

Ordinarily, Poppin’ Fresh is a wee 8 ¾ inches tall (with his chef hat on), but in 2009, he was expanded into a 54-foot balloon, so he could “fly” in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. He has been a regular parade participant ever since.

 

Poppin’ Fresh celebrates his 60th birthday in 2025, representing one of the brands in the General Mills family of products. Surely, a big party is in order.