I have something special that I think you might like. In the early 1990’s I wrote the biography of Duncan Hines. I submitted the book to over 400 publishers and finally found a publishing company in 2002 and that book was republished in 2014.
Duncan Hines may be best known for the cake mixes, baked goods, and bread products that bear his name, but many people don’t know that he was a real person and not just a fictitious figure invented for the brand, like Betty Crocker.
America’s pioneer restaurant critic, Duncan Hines discovered his passion while working as a traveling salesman during the 1920s and 1930s. This was a time when food standards were poorly enforced and food safety was a constant concern. He traveled across America discovering restaurants and offering his recommendations to readers in his bestselling compilation “Adventures in Good Eating”. The success of this work and his subsequent publications led Hines to manufacture the extremely popular food products that we still enjoy today.
While the name Duncan Hines is presently associated with cake mix, from the Depression to the mid-1950s, the name was most commonly associated with a series of guidebooks pointing travelers to the best restaurants, hotels/motels, and vacation destinations. These books were overwhelmingly popular, outpacing even the venerable Michelin Guide. Prior to Hines, finding good food or safe lodging was a hit-or-miss proposition: restaurants were often unsanitary and the food of poor quality. Duncan Hines was trusted by his readers because of his adamant refusal to accept advertising or payment of any kind from the establishments he recommended.
Duncan Hines developed and nurtured a reputation for unimpeachable fairness and exactingly high standards of quality and cleanliness. Because of the popularity of his guidebooks and on the strength of his reputation, he almost single-handedly transformed the expectations of the restaurant-going public and thus indirectly transformed the hospitality industry in the United States. In the 1950s, in partnership with North Carolinian Roy Park, Duncan Hines sold the rights to his name to be used on a line of grocery items, including coffee, ice cream, canned vegetables, and of course, cake mix. These products sold extremely well at premium prices, because shoppers associated Hines’ name with quality and cleanliness. Not without reason: just as Hines had exacting standards for restaurants and hotels, he had very high standards for any food product bearing his name.
In my biography, I explore the story of the man, from his humble beginnings in Bowling Green, Kentucky, to his lucrative licensing deal with Procter & Gamble. Following the successful debut of his restaurant guide, Hines published his first cookbook at age fifty-nine and followed it with “The Dessert Book”, which included culinary classics including recipes from establishments he visited on his travels, favorites handed down through his family for generations, and new dishes that contained unusual ingredients for the era. Many of the recipes served as inspiration for mixes that eventually became available under the Duncan Hines brand.
In the summer of 2023 the producers of the History Channel ask me to come to New York City to participate in a special television broadcast that explores the beginning of the Duncan Hines and Betty Crocker food brands. I appeared on the History Channel program, “The Food That Built America – Let Them Bake Cake” (Season 5, Episode 5) which was broadcast in March of 2024.
You can watch the television series on the History Channel every Sunday, or visit the History Channel website:
https://play.history.com/shows/the-food-that-built-america/season-5/episode-5
If you want to know how Duncan Hines changed the entire restaurant industry, I explain it in detail in my book, “Duncan Hines – How a Traveling Salesman Became the Most Trusted Name in Food.”
Available on Amazon.com
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