Omaha Exploration

While he’s not an Omaha native, Chef Boyardee maintains a large presence in Omaha. This comes in the form of a statue that sits on the ConAgra Foods campus next door to Heartland of America Park.

Born in Italy in 1897 as Ettore Boiardi, he worked as an apprentice chef at La Croce Bianca by the time he was 11. At 16 he worked in restaurants in Paris and London. He left for the U.S. in 1914, one week before war broke out across Europe, arriving through Ellis Island.

He found work at the famed Plaza Hotel in New York City, where he quickly rose through the ranks before becoming its head chef. By the end of World War I, he was supervising the welcome home meal for 2,000 veterans that President Woodrow Wilson hosted at the White House.

With help from his wife, Helen Wroblewski Boiardi, Hector started his own restaurant in Cleveland called Il Giardino d’Italia, or “the Garden of Italy,” in 1924. His spaghetti sauce in particular was a hit, and soon he began filling old milk bottles with it and selling it.

By the time he began canning his sauce in 1928, he was one of the country’s most famous chefs. The canning was the suggestion of Maurice and Eva Weiner, owners of a grocery store chain and regular customers at his restaurant. With that, he built a small canning plant in Cleveland and started selling his sauce in grocery stores. Within a year it was being sold across the country, so in order to meet the demand, he formed Chef Boiardi Food Company with the help of his brothers Mario, who still resided in Italy, and Paul. By this time, the company specialized in three flavors: traditional, mushroom, and Naples-style, which was spicier than traditional.

As it gained more exposure on a national level, many customers and salesmen found it difficult to pronounce his name, leading him to use an Americanized version, Hector Boyardee. In her book Delicious Memories, Anna Boiardi said that while her great-uncle was proud of his family name, he sacrificed in the name of progress, which helped the product reach as many U.S. consumers as possible.

By 1936, the company had outgrown its Cleveland plant and relocated to Milton, Pennsylvania, where they could grow their own tomatoes. Starting with sauces, the company expanded to pasta meal kits that included dry spaghetti, a jar of sauce, and a small container of Parmesan cheese. The operation was so large that the company smashed 20,000 tons of tomatoes each season, produced more than 250,000 cans of sauce each day, and became the largest importer of Parmesan cheese from Italy. His brother Peter helped get the meals on the shelves of A&P grocery stores, which was, by far, the largest grocery retailer in the country.

During World War II, the soldiers whose diets consisted mostly of meat and potatoes required more variety. Hector moved his bed into his office, set up a chalkboard, and worked long hours to figure out how to make the food shippable overseas. With that figured out, he began providing rations for the Allied troops, for which he later received a Gold Star of excellence. After the war, he sold the business to American Home Foods in 1946. He worked as a consultant for the company and continued as the face of its canned pasta until 1978. The chef passed away in 1985, and his company and its parent International Home Foods was acquired by ConAgra in 2000.

Back in Omaha, the Chef Boyardee statue can be found at 707 ConAgra Drive and can be accessed from the park trail. It was sculpted by John Lajba in 2011 using many photos for reference. Lajba said Boyardee “was a man who had a lot of class and a lot of charm.”

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More pictures

• Omaha World-Herald archives
• Chef Boyardee Statue in Omaha | Atlas Obscura
• Ettore Boiardi – Wikipedia
• Chef Boyardee Was a Real Person Who Brought Italian Food to America
• Hector Boiardi (1897-1985) – Find a Grave Memorial
• Chef Boyardee from the collection of Public Art Omaha | Artwork Archive
• The iconic chef on the pasta cans has a lasting legacy in Milton, Pa. | Life | northcentralpa.com