Baby Food for Thought. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leib. And this is Ghost Town. Very few companies have branding so ubiquitous with the American family as the Gerber baby logo.

The logo, as I'm sure you know, is a black and white hand drawn depiction of a healthy infant, eyes wide, mouth open, presumably to receive Gerber's

number one product, baby food. There's no mystery as to why Gerber has been so successful

supplying America with baby food and products

under this adorable logo for almost a hundred years, no. The real mystery is, who is this baby?

Not such a hard question until you realize it's taken almost a hundred years to answer.

Today we're talking about the mysterious identity of the Gerber baby,

the face of America's number one baby food. Gerber was founded in 19... of the which made canned fruit and vegetables. The story deviates, but it kind of goes like this.

At the suggestion of a doctor, Gerber's wife, Dorothy,

began making hand-strained baby food for their seven-month-old daughter Sally.

One day after a visit to

her infant daughter's pediatrician, Dorothy toiled in the kitchen

straining fruits and vegetables for her child. After much hard work, she

suggested to her husband Daniel, whose family of course already

owned the Fremont Canyon Company, that they should create a baby food in an industrial setting,

lightning the load of mothers everywhere. Another interpretation still of this story is that

Daniel came home to his wife looking strained and miserable in the kitchen, not

wanting to quote exchange his beautiful wife for this kitchen-bound monstrosity, his words not mine, he then

invented the Gerber baby food product line. Whatever story you believe, Daniel, his wife Dorothy, wanted to create something to ease women's suffering in the kitchen and for, of course, a business opportunity.

Thus Daniel Gerber began making baby food under the Gerber canning brand.

Less than a year later, he had developed five products for the market, beef vegetable soup

and strained peas, prunes, carrots, and spinach. Six months after that, Gerber's baby food was distributed

...