Oscar Mayer

My Bologna has a first name

Before Oscar Mayer & Co, other meat packers sold their meat anonymously. The Mayer’s were the first to affix a brand name to their product. They were one of the first recognized meat brands, one of the first companies to be approved by the Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) and were the first to actually volunteer. The FSIS was created to ensure the purity of the products sold. The Oscar Mayer Company set new standards for the meat market industry.

At the age of fourteen, Oscar F. Mayer immigrated to America form Germany. He first started when he answered a “help wanted” poster as and a butcher’s boy. Over a period of six years while Oscar was in America his brother Gottifried became a well-established “wurtmacher”(sausage maker) and ham curer. In 1883 Oscar and (newly immigrated) Gotterfried set up their first small retail store near Chicago’s north side where business flourished from the first day. From that the business grew into a well-known industry. Oscar Mayer’s life here was devoted to his family and the family business. When he died, his son Oscar G. Mayer was elected chairman of the board and his son Oscar G. Mayer Jr. was elected president of his grandfather’s company.

The Oscar Mayer CO set itself apart from the others. Not just by their size or quality but also by packaging. Have you ever noticed how all Oscar Mayer products come in yellow packaging? That yellow packaging started out as a yellow band that was wrapped around Oscar Mayer’s wieners. In 1944 the company invented a machine that wrapped the yellow bands around the products automatically, thus eliminating hours of hand wrapping. By 1968, the Oscar Mayer CO reached out through prime time television. They ran their commercials during such classics as “The Carol Burnett Show”, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “ The Wonderful world of Disney”. Not to mention the appearance of the wiener mobile which heavily promoted the company at store openings and public events. They gave out free samples of the meat and pressed a wiener whistle in to every willing hand. In addition to the wiener mobile, their jingles got stuck in your head for days and days at a time. Songs like “the Oscar Mayer Wiener song”(1963) and the wildly popular “Oscar Mayer BOLOGNA song”.

What does Oscar Mayer mean to me? Oscar Mayer stands for family and its merger with Kraft Foods (which took place in 1989) has kept it going strong. My first memory of the Oscar