The forgotten plywood board that built a billion-dollar empire by turning farm waste into America’s favorite side dish
Picture this…
Ontario, Oregon. 1953.
Two farm boys from Idaho, Nephi and Golden Grigg, stand in their frozen food plant—one they had bought for $500,000 (over $4.5 million today) at a bankruptcy auction two years earlier.
They had named their new company “Ore-Ida” because this new plant of theirs sat on the border of Oregon and Idaho.
And here they stood, staring at mountains of potato scraps.
These weren’t just any scraps—these were premium Russet potato slivers, trimmed and peeled and processed, ready to be dumped into cattle feed bins as they had for the last couple of years.
The corporate types would have called giving their leftovers to cattle “waste management efficiency.” The bureaucrats would have stamped it “acceptable loss.” But these boys, raised dirt poor during the Depression with thirteen siblings in a Mormon household, saw something different.
They saw opportunity where the establishment saw garbage.
What happened next reads like American folklore, except it’s been buried for seventy years. Nephi “Neef” Grigg wasn’t content watching premium potatoes become cow feed. He grabbed a sheet of plywood, drilled three-quarter-inch holes through it, and created what would become known as “the Holy Board.”
On one side, he’d shove a slurry of potato scraps mixed with flour and seasonings. His brother Golden stood on the other side, cutting off the cylindrical pieces as they pushed through.
This makeshift contraption, this piece of plywood with holes drilled by hand, would birth an empire. But here’s what they don’t want you to know: that original Holy Board still hangs on a wall in the Ontario plant, locked away from public view.
For seventy years, corporate America has kept this symbol of American ingenuity hidden, treating it like some embarrassing relic of a bygone era.
Why? Because the origin story of the Tater Tot threatens everything the establishment believes about innovation. Two high school dropouts, using lumber yard plywood and basic tools, created what became a billion-dollar industry.
No MBA consultants. No focus groups. No government grants. Just Depression-era grit and refusal to waste what others discarded.
Neef Grigg’s motto was “Bite off more than you can chew, and then chew it.”
The Grigg brothers took their creation to the 1954 National Potato Convention in Miami Beach. Nephi packed fifteen pounds of these golden cylinders in his suitcase, sweet-talked the Fontainebleau Hotel chef, and watched as potato industry executives devoured them “faster than a dead cat could wag its tail.”
Americans now consume seventy million pounds of Tater Tots annually. Ore-Ida has been a subsidiary of Kraft Heinz since 1965, which owns the trademark term for the crispy potato nuggets as well.
Today, corporate boardrooms profit from what two forgotten Americans built with their hands and a piece of plywood. Yet ask any executive about the Holy Board, and they’ll give you blank stares. The nephew of the inventors had to educate the corporation about their own artifact.
This isn’t just about frozen potatoes. This is about whose stories get told and whose get buried. The Grigg brothers represent everything the elites dismiss—rural Americans, religious families, self-made entrepreneurs who never attended the right schools or knew the right people.
Their innovation came from necessity, not privilege. Their success came from refusing to accept waste as inevitable.
The Holy Board should be in the Smithsonian, not hidden in a corporate facility. Instead, it takes the founders’ own family members, fighting to preserve this legacy, to remind America of what we’re capable of when we refuse to accept the establishment’s definition of worthlessness.
Every time you bite into a Tater Tot, remember: It came from two brothers who saw gold where others saw garbage, who built an empire with plywood and determination, and whose story the powerful would rather you simply forget.
Ready to discover how you if you have what it takes to turn that simple idea into something world-changing?
What we do is help you recognize and celebrate your ingenuity that they don’t want you to remember.
As always,
Brian
