- [Narrator] Today, people eat 4.6 million
tons of rice a year.
And rice is part of a $448 billion convenience food market.
- Convenience foods was really born out of a movement
toward modernity and newness.
Everything was just getting easier.
- A lot of these convenience foods,
like these rice products,
opened up the world of multicultural cuisine
to the American palate.
It made anything available and easy to cook.
- [Narrator] But just over a hundred years ago,
Americans barely ate rice.
- People thought it was, like, an exotic product.
- Something foreign.
Maybe they're a little intimidated by making rice.
- [Narrator] It'll take a massive global conflict...
- The US Army just placed a pretty large order.
- How large?
- 400 million pounds.
- [Narrator] And a race in innovation and marketing...
- What our rice needs is a new identity.
- This is their key selling point, cooks in 20 minutes.
- Uncle Ben's rice tells housewives
that rice doesn't have to be a chore anymore.
- And what we need to do is sell her on convenience.
- We're talking about the race against time
to figure out how to make rice
the food that everybody needed,
and take a food, man, that was a staple in one land
and make it a staple in America as well.
- Two cups of water, one cup of rice, 20 minutes, let's eat.
- In the 1950s, that was blazingly fast.
- [Narrator] Competitors rise...
- Ours cooks in five.
- That's how we win.
[dramatic music]
- [Narrator] And new American classics are born.
- This is one of the greatest examples
of expert branding there ever was.
- Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat.
- [Narrator] Turning an ancient grain into a modern marvel.
- Rice alone accounts for 5% of America's caloric intake.
It's more than potatoes, it's more than pasta.
I mean, that's huge.
[dramatic music]
[dramatic music continues]
- [Narrator] One of humanity's oldest
and most important crops,
rice was first cultivated in West Africa and China
more than 9,000 years ago.
- In Asia, it's known as not only a food source
but a cultural symbol.
And in Africa,
it was part of these really sophisticated irrigation
and farming systems that were in place
long before Europeans ever reached the continent.
- Rice shows up in the Americas
primarily because of enslaved Africans
who were from West Africa,
where there is an indigenous rice culture.
- West African slaves have knowledge of irrigation
and cultivation practices,
and they really helped to make rice
a productive export for American planters.
- [Narrator] Due to its climate needs,
rice production in America is limited to the South.
- While there's a lot of rice being grown,
most of it is being exported to Europe.
It's really something that most Americans
are not eating regularly, if at all.
It's something that is seen as being in the South,
that immigrants eat this,
or descendants of enslaved people eat this.
- [Narrator] In the 1800s, at its peak,
rice cultivation reached over 200 million pounds per year.
- Rice became the single most valuable crop
coming out of the American colonies.
Why was it so valuable?
No labor costs.
Rice relied heavily on slave labor.
- Once we get to the emancipation,
when enslaved African Americans no longer
are forced to do this work,
you don't have the labor force
to really keep rice farming going.
- [Narrator] After emancipation,
production drops from 200 million to 73 million pounds.
And by the 1920s, rice is almost a forgotten grain
in most of the US.
- It's really Southerners and immigrants
who are strongly associated with rice
and some of the famous rice dishes in our country,
like jambalaya.
- One place that rice was consumed
is in the recent popularity of Chinese food.
Still is a niche,
but this was the most popular foreign cuisine
in the United States already before the Second World War.
- The US's population at that point
had a preference for potatoes and pasta,
and rice just wasn't very high on the list.
[dramatic music]
[rhythmic music]
- [Narrator] But for immigrants who were raised on rice,
it's a taste of home.
- There we are, my friend.
- Ataullah Ozai-Durrani actually came
from quite a wealthy Afghan family.
And he left the country, found himself in England,
where he studied petrochemistry for a while.
One thing led to another, he ends up in the United States,
- And even though he's made loads of friends,
he has not found a lot of work.
- So kind of was looking for something else to do.
- I couldn't tell you the last time I had rice.
- But what he does love doing
is sharing the flavors of his native Afghanistan
with his newfound friends.
And he makes them meals all the time.
- You never cook rice?
- Nah, never seems worth the hassle.
- It was perceived as an inconvenient product
by people who weren't sort of raised
in a tradition of rice as their major staple.
- There's an artistry to cooking rice.
It does take time, usually 45 minutes or so,
and you have to pay attention to it.
- You can burn it super easily.
You can spend an hour making it
and then you realize you added too much water
and it's this disgusting mush,
and you've wasted your time and money.
- Mm, no, really, you gotta sell this stuff. [chuckles]
[dramatic music]
- [Narrator] The suggestion
plants the seed of an idea for Durrani.
It's an idea which will one day transform
the way Americans cook, consume, and think about rice,
turning it from a foreign food to a $4 billion US industry.
But first, he has to make rice appeal to Americans.
[rhythmic music]
Durrani begins round the clock research.
- Durrani realizes that he just has to make it
less of a hassle for people to cook.
- His strategy is to find a way
to package ready-cooked rice
that just needs to be heated up and still tastes fresh.
But that turns out to be far more challenging
than he expects.
- You don't want the rice to be too mushy.
You want the grains to be fluffy.
You want them to be separate.
It was not something that was fast food, for sure.
- He's tried jarring it, and bagging it, and canning it,
and nothing has worked.
[dramatic music]
- [Narrator] Every time the rice gets reheated,
it breaks down, becoming soft, mushy, and overcooked.
- [Adrian] This takes years of testing.
It wasn't something that he immediately found a solution to.
- [Narrator] Finally, in 1939, Durrani has a realization
that there's one thing he's not yet tried.
- [Adam] Durrani realizes he could apply the same principle
behind dried fruit to rice.
- [Narrator] Rather than just packaging the cooked rice,
he can dehydrate it.
- He does this by blowing warm air over the rice grains
after they're fully cooked to start drying out the surface.
- [Adam] What he's ultimately doing
is creating little air pockets inside of the rice,
so when it's reintroduced to water,
the water rushes in to fill those gaps,
leaving behind fluffy, delicious, fully cooked rice.
- This brings the cooking time down to five minutes.
- All people will have to do
is add hot water to reconstitute it
and they'll be able to cook rice in a fraction of the time.
- [Narrator] But creating the product
is only half the battle.
He also needs to sell it.
[dramatic music]
- Durrani says to himself, I'm gonna go to General Foods
and do a demo right in their office
and show them how I can make rice
in just a matter of minutes.
- [Edward] General Foods can trace
its origins back to C. W. Post.
They started out as a cereal company,
but then when C. W. Post passed away,
his daughter took over the company.
She really was a pioneer
in the conglomeration of food businesses.
- But the real transformation for General Foods
happens in the 1920s,
when, under President Clarence Francis,
they start buying up promising food companies.
- General Foods quite honestly
wasn't looking for a rice product,
but Durrani goes in there pitching them
that America needs a quick-cooking rice product,
and this is something that people will buy.
- I have here my ready-cooked rice.
- So Durrani comes into the offices,
bringing his rice, some water, and a portable burner.
[dramatic music]
- They're skeptical, but Durrani is telling 'em
that his rice can be cooked in just a few minutes.
- And so he's saying, "I'm offering you rice,
which you may view as complex,
but we're gonna cut that cooking time
and we're gonna really embrace it."
[dramatic music]
- [Edward] And his demo was cooking the rice
right there in front of them.
And it was ready in just a few minutes.
- So this was revolutionary.
[dramatic music]
- Please, try a sample.
- That's a hell of a trick.
- It's almost like magic.
They see what Durrani sees.
They realize that you can turn rice into an everyday food.
- [Adrian] We get the same flavor, we get the same texture,
even though we're not cooking it for hours.
And we get that dish in a short period of time,
and that's a miracle.
- [Narrator] General Foods purchases the patent
for Durrani's five minute cooking process
for several million dollars,
making the inventor instantly wealthy.
- [Adrian] They buy it from him.
But your typical homemakers
think of rice as something exotic, something foreign.
Maybe they're a little intimidated by making rice.
So General Foods never even put it on the market
even though they've got a faster way to make rice.
- That decision in retrospect seems insane.
[explosion banging]
- [Narrator] But then on December 7th, 1941,
Pearl Harbor is bombed
and the United States officially enters World War II,
instantly creating a new urgent market.
- The government understood
that food plays an important role in not only the nutrition
but also the morale of the soldiers.
And so they put out the word to American companies
to figure out ways to come up with new foods
that will travel well and will have good nutrition.
- [Adam] The government is spending a lot of money
to feed its fighting forces,
which leaves a lot of money to be made
by food entrepreneurs.
- [Edward] General Foods realize that Durrani's rice
is something that can be used for the army effort.
And, you know, if you landed a government contract,
that was very lucrative for you.
- Durrani gave us this template.
Let's run with it.
- [Adrian] And the US army tried it out
and they realized that this is a viable product.
And then before you know it,
millions of pounds of this rice
are now being sent to our troops around the world.
[dramatic music]
- [Narrator] But in London, an American businessman
is about to become General Foods' fiercest rival.
- Forrest Mars was the son
of famous chocolatier Frank Mars.
- Now he had a falling out with his father.
So at the time of World War II, he was actually in Europe.
- [Edward] He is driven, very smart, he's an entrepreneur,
and he feels that Europe is an untapped market.
- [Narrator] Mars has set out
to start his own chocolate business
to compete with his father's,
and he's just secured a military contract
for a new type of candy he calls M&M's.
- It was chocolate that doesn't melt.
- M&M's fit the bill for making rations better
and to actually give these soldiers
something they can kind of look forward to in the field.
- So now, with his government contract to supply M&M's
to the fighting forces, he thinks,
what else could I make money on?
- [Narrator] What he doesn't realize
is he's about to lead a food revolution
that has nothing to do with chocolate,
launching a $34 billion industry
and creating one of the most iconic food brands
of the century.
- [Narrator] Forrest Mars just made a deal
to supply the US army
with his new candy-coated chocolates, M&M's.
- Sue, did you get those reports on the other rations?
- It took some digging.
- [Narrator] And now he's eager to find more products
he can sell to the military.
- Ah, Hershey's got their D-Ration bar.
- As much as Forrest Mars is a chocolate guy,
he is first and foremost a businessman.
And there's a lot of competition in the chocolate space,
but he realizes that the World War
really has left a massive opportunity
for a food manufacturer.
- Pre-cooked rice.
[dramatic music]
Find out everything you can about it.
- At this point, the best customer you could possibly get
was the US Army.
- Rice?
- Yes, rice.
- Mars is a fascinating guy
'cause, you know, he's in the candy business,
so he's known for candy bars and all these other things.
- But now he wants to make a pivot into the rice business.
It's not something you would think a candy maker
would want to dive headfirst into.
[dramatic music]
- [Sue] Mr. Mars?
That rice man is here.
- Send him in.
- [Narrator] After learning
about General Foods' fast-cooking rice contract,
Mars is determined to get his own.
- [Adam] Forrest Mars has tracked down
a self- made inventor
who has created a method to make rice cook faster.
- [Eric] Erich Huzenlaub.
- Dr. Huzenlaub, tell me about your rice.
- [Narrator] Erich Huzenlaub
is a German chemist living in London.
- So Huzenlaub served in the German military,
emigrated to London to escape the Nazis.
- And ever since then, he is obsessed
with trying to find a way to make rice cook more quickly.
And he doesn't do this as a means
of personal gain or innovation
but as a means of ending famine,
something that he saw an excessive amount of
in the wake of a world war.
- I call it converted rice.
My process begins with steaming the grain
while it's still within its protective husk.
- How long does it take to cook?
- 20 minutes.
Less than half the time of typical rice.
- So he's somebody who's experimenting with rice
and he figures out a process called parboiling.
He's partially cooking the rice
before actually packaging it.
This greatly reduces the cooking time.
- The biggest difference between what Huzenlaub
and Durrani are presenting
is that Huzenlaub's is parboiled,
which is partially cooked,
while Durrani's is entirely cooked and dried.
- Unfortunately, in Durrani's process,
rice has lost a lot of its nutrients
and a lot of it's sort of fluffiness.
- And how does it taste?
[dramatic music]
- See for yourself.
[dramatic music]
- Huzenlaub's method preserves more of the nutrients
and kind of results in a fluffier, tastier rice product.
[dramatic music]
Mars buys Huzenlaub's patent and they go into business,
creating a company called Converted Rice Limited.
- And so they were trying to figure out,
how do we take Huzenlaub's method
of creating quick-cooked rice
and turn it into a product
that could get us a really lucrative contract
with the US military?
- So the pitch basically was troops have to get fed,
they have to have energy, they have to have nutrients,
and the way we are presenting rice to you is perfect.
- And it worked.
[dramatic music]
- [Narrator] Now with the military on board,
Mars and Huzenlaub tracked down a rice source
back in the US.
- At this point you need rice farmers.
And one of the few places in America
where you could still find them growing rice was Texas.
- [Narrator] They team up
with Texas rice broker Gordon Harwell.
- Gordon Harwell spent his entire life
working in kind of the brokerage
and facilitating of rice.
- A rice broker is kind of like a rice middleman
between the growers and the producers.
- [Narrator] But decades of dwindling demand
has made business increasingly difficult for Harwell.
- When he's contacted by Mars and Huzenlaub
about how they need rice and this innovation that they have,
he is very eager to agree.
- [Narrator] But he has no idea just how much rice
Mars is looking for.
- The US Army just placed a pretty large order.
- How large?
- 400 million pounds.
[dramatic music]
- So for perspective, 400 million pounds is enough rice
to fill 100 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
- [Kate] Mars has promised the American government
that he can give them a ton of rice.
And if he can't fulfill that promise,
he can kiss his business goodbye.
- For when?
- Immediately.
- [Narrator] With a monumental order
from the government looming,
Harwell and Huzenlaub get to work sourcing rice,
while Mars pours money into setting up factories in the US.
- He thinks that by investing most of his money
into something that's profitable right now,
he can start to make a return.
- [Narrator] Soon, Mars' Converted Rice company
is producing 200 tons of rice per day for troops overseas.
- And it's a staggering amount of rice
and met some important needs
because food was an ongoing problem during World War II.
So anything that would essentially alleviate hunger
was welcome.
- [Narrator] And then in 1945,
with the surrender of Germany and Japan,
the Second World War is officially over.
- So of course everyone's glad that the war is over,
but the reality is that the world looks a lot different
after the war.
- [Narrator] The end of the war
means the end of military contracts
for Mars and General Foods.
- When the war is over,
General Foods sort of ceases their instant rice operations.
They thought there was no market for it.
- At this time still, rice was not something
that was really popular across the country.
It was still associated with immigrant cuisines
and then also the American South.
- [Narrator] But for Forrest Mars,
shuttering his rice operation
would be devastating to his young business.
- So the war ends and Forrest Mars has a significant surplus
of millions and millions of pounds of rice
just sitting there.
And he has to figure out what to do
with all of the rice that he has on hand.
- [Narrator] With a rapidly modernizing country,
Mars sees a growing trend in American homes.
- The United States in post-World War times
was starting to speed up.
Industry needed workers
and women started to enter the workforce.
Things like dinners needed to be made faster.
But, you know, housewives and mothers
were still interested in making sure
that what they were providing was nutritious.
- Americans have lived with austerity
for so long during the war that once the war is over,
they're hungry for new convenience items.
- We're starting to see appliances
such as the toaster, the blender.
We're seeing refrigeration.
- [Narrator] And with new technology
comes a new market for convenience foods.
- Everything from cakes, things like popcorn,
breakfast, you know, all these things that used to be
so labor intensive were now gonna be easy.
- [Narrator] And Mars is determined
to be a trailblazer in this new frontier
by selling his rice to the American public.
- Sending our rice to troops in the battlefield
is one thing,
selling it to housewives in the supermarket is another.
- Mars realized that the actual decision maker
in a lot of these growing families
was going to be the housewife or the mother.
And they had to find a way to convince them
that this was a good product.
- He has to take something that was a wartime ration
and turn it into a piece of a cozy home-cooked meal.
- Tell me, does this name inspire anyone?
Would a housewife in Des Moines pull this off the shelf?
[dramatic music]
- [Edward] So Huzenlaub is a scientist,
Harwell is a businessman,
but it is Mars that is actually the marketing savvy.
- We're never going to attract housewives
on some war time chemistry experiment.
What we need to do is sell her on convenience,
nutrients, and most of all, on a brand she can trust.
Converted Rice won't cut it.
What our rice needs is a new identity.
- [Narrator] Mars believes he needs to change the perception
that rice is a foreign food.
- Mars says, "I am going to tap
into good old American nostalgia of nutrition
and a hearty, home-cooked meal.
- Like, hey, we're taking you back into another time
that's much less complicated than now.
- [Narrator] In 1946, Mars' Converted Rice
enters the marketplace with a new name, Uncle Ben's.
- [Adrian] Historically, African Americans,
especially enslaved African Americans,
uncle and aunt was typically the nickname given to them.
And then they were not given the full dignity
to have their full names expressed.
- Their marketing strategy
was supposed to evoke the quality
of really, really good Southern home cooking.
- And so on the side of the carton
was the image of a domestic servant
who was African American.
- It was ostensibly named
after a Black rice farmer from Texas
who was known to produce
some of the best rice in the region.
- [Narrator] But the man on the box is not a rice farmer
and it's not Uncle Ben at all.
- The painting on the box
is modeled after a man named Frank Brown,
who was a Maitre d' in the city of Chicago.
They used his likeness to be Uncle Ben.
- So they had the branding they needed,
and off to the races they were
with the first quick-set rice to hit the market.
- [Narrator] The instructions touted simplicity.
- Two cups of water, one cup of rice, 20 minutes, let's eat.
- Now, to you and me,
that probably doesn't sound convenient.
But in the 1950s, that was blazingly fast for rice.
- There's also marketing campaigns that established rice
as a nutritious supplement to the American diet.
It's a convenient option for busy wives and mothers
who wanna prepare a hearty meal for the family.
- Uncle Ben's rice tells housewives
that rice doesn't have to be a chore anymore.
[dramatic music]
- [Narrator] The campaign works, and for the first time,
rice is at the center of America's dinner tables.
- So Uncle Ben's was really heralded
as quite an arrival in the grocery store aisle.
- [Narrator] But it doesn't go unnoticed by General Foods.
- This should have been us.
- We had quick rice first.
- Once they see that Uncle Ben's is doing well,
navigating the commercial landscape,
they realized that there is very much a market
for their quick rice product.
- Uncle Ben's is raking in the money on a product
that General Foods developed first.
This is a colossal misstep for General Foods.
- So General Foods realizes they need to adapt and change
to beat Mars at the game they created.
- This is their key selling point, cooks in 20 minutes.
- Ours cooks in five.
- [Executive] Exactly.
[dramatic music]
- It really became a culinary arms race.
- Sure, Uncle Ben's has created this rice
that is profoundly nutritious and hearty
and taps into the sort of home-cooked meal nostalgia,
but General Foods has a rice
that cooks four times as quickly.
- That's how we win.
[dramatic music]
- [Narrator] Gearing up for battle with Uncle Ben's,
General Foods is about to release
their own fast-cooking rice.
- The agency sent over the mockups.
[dramatic music]
- [Executive] Five-minute rice.
- It took five minutes to cook, but they thought,
hmm, with this convenience
being something important to the home cook,
maybe we could come up with something that's catchier.
- Why not...
- Even if it didn't taste as good or as it was nutritious
as maybe other things on the market,
convenience was the factor
that was really paramount to the home cook.
- Let's go with that.
- [Narrator] In 1946, General Foods' Minute Rice
hits supermarket shelves across the country.
- It basically takes a quarter of the time to cook this rice
than it does to cook Uncle Ben's rice.
- Minute Rice was also completely foolproof.
All you have to do is add water.
- But you have to remember,
Uncle Ben's has essentially parboiled the rice,
cooks it for 20 minutes, which means the customer
has to cook it for the remaining 20.
- [Narrator] General Foods puts out a commercial campaign
using slogans that directly undercut Uncle Ben's,
with tag-lines like, "No other rice is this easy."
- It's incredible, the idea of taking a product like rice,
making it so simple that almost even a child could make.
- It is eating into Uncle Ben's bottom line
and market share, and it's eating at Forrest Mars.
- Mr. Mars?
[pensive music]
Here's the "Minute Rice."
- Stay a moment.
Starchy.
Gluey.
Have you tried it?
- I have.
- Hmm, would you serve it at home?
- Oh, if saving 15 minutes meant serving this,
my husband would never let me hear the end of it.
- We have to remember, this was at a time
when the wife's responsibility
was to cook for her husband and her children
and keep the home.
And essentially this idea was to be the perfect housewife,
you must cook perfectly and cook quickly.
- [Narrator] Mars responds
with a targeted campaign of his own.
- [Announcer] Her marriage began with rice
and could have ended with it too.
- Hey, this rice is all stuck together.
- So Uncle Ben's claps back at Minute Rice's campaign
about being so quick to cook basically by saying
that saving that little bit of extra time
isn't worth ruining your marriage over.
- [Announcer] Marriages thrive on Uncle Ben's rice.
[rhythmic music]
- It's important to note that the 1950s
ushered in the age of television.
So food ads didn't just have to be a picture,
you could see the way the food moved,
you could see steam rising from it, it was appetizing.
And so food companies definitely used it to their advantage.
And when it came to the instant rice battles,
well, whichever one looked fluffier
and tastier on television was the one that was gonna win.
- [Announcer] This rice has big, perfect, separate grains.
- Big, perfect, separate grains?
- [Narrator] While Minute Rice is popular,
America's brand loyalty keeps Uncle Ben's
as the number one selling rice.
And by 1955, Americans are each eating
nearly five pounds of rice per year.
- The popularity of Uncle Ben's and Minute Rice
is part of the reason
that rice is on the American plate now.
They created a product
that's even easier to make than potatoes.
- Rice becomes such a simple dish,
so easy to store, so easy to prepare.
It's the best of all possible worlds.
- [Narrator] Today, the average American
consumes 27 pounds of rice annually.
- Now rice is a big part of the American diet
and it's everywhere and incredibly easy to make.
- [Narrator] Though Minute Rice and Uncle Ben's
have transformed rice, one thing remains the same,
its simple taste.
But in 1956, that's all about to change.
And it begins with two struggling pasta makers.
- Tom and Vince DeDomenico are brothers
who live in San Francisco.
They work for their father
who owned the Golden Grain Macaroni Company.
- And now, the brothers were running the company together.
- Good morning.
- You know, the family are Italian immigrants
and, you know, they take a tremendous amount of pride
in the pastas that they produce.
- The DeDomenicos in San Francisco
were running what we would call a high-end kind of business.
- [Narrator] But recent food trends
are threatening their sales.
- My wife served this to me for dinner last night.
She actually bought it, our competitor's product.
- The post-war boom is bringing major brands
and big box brands into the marketplace,
and it's eating into Golden Grain's share,
with the rise of things like Kraft Macaroni & Cheese,
a noodle dish that's able to be prepared
with everything all in one box.
- So small regional producers
like the Golden Grain Macaroni Company
are starting to get squeezed out
by these larger conglomerates
who have bigger national distribution chains,
who have bigger marketing budgets.
So a lot of these smaller companies started to suffer.
- People love it.
- Why?
- It's a gimmick, and gimmicks sell.
[dramatic music]
- Outside of the San Francisco area,
somebody in the Midwest,
are they gonna choose Kraft Macaroni & Cheese
or Golden Grains Pasta?
They're gonna go with the Kraft
'cause that's what they've heard of.
- We need a gimmick of our own.
- Like what?
- Something fast and easy.
Something Kraft doesn't have.
- [Narrator] What the brothers come up with
will one day surpass $100 million in sales,
giving rise to an iconic $275 million empire.
But for now, their family business
is on the brink of failure.
- Little small pasta businesses like Golden Grain
realized that their days are numbered.
[rhythmic music]
- [Narrator] Tom and Vince DeDomenico
have been searching for a new product
to save their struggling macaroni company.
- We just need something Kraft doesn't have.
- Fun shapes?
Macaroni in a can?
- No cans.
We just need something else.
What else goes with macaroni?
- [Narrator] But despite their brainstorming,
they keep coming up empty.
[rhythmic music]
- It smells fantastic in here.
What is it?
- Something new.
Our landlady told me how to make it.
- Lois DeDomenico is a sweet Canadian woman
who has married Tom DeDomenico.
And even though she's not Italian,
she tries to learn as many recipes as she can
to feed her hardworking husband and friends that come over.
- It's called Armenian pilaf.
It's vegetables, spices, rice, and a little bit of noodles.
- Pasta?
As in macaroni?
- Mixing pasta with rice
is something that has been done in Greece
and parts of the Middle East, where the term pilaf is used
to cover both pure rice and rice cooked with pasta.
- Well, yes, but not the elbow kind,
thin noodles called vermicelli.
- Vermicelli noodles are a type of pasta.
It's a thin pasta, similar to spaghetti.
- Pilaf is this really savory dish.
They throw in a bunch of butter, onion, spices,
and you're left with this aromatic,
almost nutty flavor profile.
- [Narrator] But in the US,
the idea of pasta and rice together is unheard of.
[dramatic music]
- That's good.
- It's like lightning from a clear sky.
He just boom.
This was the light bulb moment.
- He realizes, this, this is the product
that if I can make it quick, convenient,
easy, and self-contained, this could be a product
for Golden Grain Macaroni Company.
I could use the macaroni I already have
with rice that now can be cooked more quickly than ever.
- Lois, how long did it take you to make this?
- Well, I had to make the broth first, so maybe two hours?
[dramatic music]
- If a dish takes two hours to cook,
that's not gonna be the dish
that's gonna save his company and his income.
[rhythmic music]
- So what's it called again?
- Pilaf.
- And it's pasta and rice together?
- Vermicelli, yes.
- And it's good?
- It's great.
The problem is you have to cook it in broth,
and it defeats the whole easy dish idea.
- Kraft Macaroni & Cheese is as easy as it gets.
Everything comes in the box.
You just need to add milk and butter and you're done.
[dramatic music]
- If they can put cheese powder into a packet,
why can't we do the same with broth?
[rhythmic music]
- So the DeDomenicos come up with this idea
to add chicken bouillon,
which is basically just dehydrated chicken broth.
- Bouillon was soup in powder form.
Well, now you had instant soup and instant rice.
No one had ever thought to combine the flavors of soup
with the instant rice
in a quick-cooking, high-flavor package.
- 'Cause you don't wanna create this product
that's gonna be kind of drab and taste just like white rice.
You have to have some flavor as well.
[rhythmic music]
- [Adrian] One challenge that Tom DeDomenico had
was adapting the flavor profile of the Armenian pilaf
for the American consumer,
'cause traditionally, a pilaf from Armenia
would be seasoned with lamb broth, cloves, nutmeg.
These weren't things that people normally had
in savory dishes.
- He decides to create an Americanized version of this
that uses chicken broth
and spices like onion and garlic powder.
- I think we're there.
[dramatic music]
- [Narrator] They've even landed on the perfect name.
- Rice and Macaroni is ready for the world.
- [Narrator] Or so they thought.
- Are you guys sure about the name?
[dramatic music]
- [Narrator] The DeDomenicos have landed
on an Americanized recipe and name for their new rice dish,
but not everyone is convinced they've gotten it right.
- Are you guys sure about the name?
- Rice and Macaroni?
What, you don't like it?
- It's just, it doesn't sound new and exciting, you know?
- Rice and Macaroni was not the most sexy name
that you can come up with.
- Well, we agreed no pilaf.
Too exotic.
- Rice and Mac?
- So they've tried all kinds of names,
Rice and Macaroni, Macaroni and Rice.
Really, none of them very catchy.
- Rice and Roni?
- Or Rice-A-Roni.
[dramatic music]
- [Narrator] With a clever name for their product,
the brothers now need a marketing team to help sell it.
- And they hire a world renowned ad agency, McCann Erickson.
- So we've tested the name and it doesn't work.
Nobody knows what a Rice-A-Roni is, at least not yet.
We just need to tell them what it is.
- Okay.
How?
Do we sell it as a new Italian dish?
- Or even an Armenian dish?
- No.
Imagine trolley bells.
[bells ringing]
- They wanted it to sound a bit cosmopolitan.
And San Francisco
was one of the biggest culinary hubs out there.
- San Francisco's thought of
as a place with a lot of cultures coming together,
fine dining, a place that you wanna visit,
a place you'd fall in love with.
- [Narrator] In 1958, Rice-A-Roni hits the shelves
and McCann Erickson creates an ad campaign
capitalizing on San Francisco's reputation
as a culinary epicenter.
♪ Rice-A-Roni
♪ The San Francisco treat.
- White rice commercials must have existed,
but none of them come to mind.
None of them live in my head and heart like.
♪ Rice-A-Roni
♪ The San Francisco treat
- One of the most iconic jingles ever.
- Jingles were the way to get into someone,
into their head, into their thinking.
- San Francisco was both exotic and American, so safe.
It's not like saying that this is the Bangkok treat.
- This is one of the greatest examples
of expert branding there ever was.
- Their strategy is brilliant.
- When it came out, a lot of people in San Francisco
were surprised to hear of this famous dish
they'd never heard of.
But the thing is it worked.
We still know the jingle today.
- [imitates honking] That's the street car.
[bell ringing] [dramatic music]
- [Narrator] But it's not just the jingle
that makes Rice-A-Roni an immediate hit.
- Rice-A-Roni distinguished itself in the market
because unlike Uncle Ben's and Minute Rice, it had flavor.
If you wanted more flavor with Minute Rice,
you had to add it.
But along comes Rice-A-Roni,
where you don't have to do all of that.
You can just buy that package and you've got instant flavor.
- A lot of these convenience foods, these rice products,
really kind of opened up the world of multicultural cuisine
to the American palate.
It made anything available and and easy to cook.
[dramatic music]
- [Narrator] Brands like Uncle Ben's,
Minute Rice, and Rice-A-Roni helped change how America eats.
But as American culture evolves,
in 2020, Uncle Ben's makes a change to their branding.
- Fortunately, companies took a look and said,
"We're gonna get away from the racist underpinnings
of these images."
And ultimately the company decided to change to Ben's
and got rid of the uncle,
which I think was a very important step.
- [Narrator] Uncle Ben's becomes Ben's Original,
retiring the face of Frank Brown after nearly 75 years.
[dramatic music]
Today, with Americans consuming
an average of 27 pounds of rice annually,
the US produces 20 billion pounds of rice per year.
- Rice alone accounts for 5% of America's caloric intake.
Not 5% of side dishes,
just 5% full-stop of our entire caloric intake.
It's more than potatoes, it's more than pasta.
I mean, that's huge.
- [Narrator] Thanks to brands like Uncle Ben's,
Minute Rice, and Rice-A-Roni.
- And I think that's a reflection
of how successful these companies were in marketing rice
but also just the popularity
of other cultures around the world
that have rice as their basis.
- Rice has been around for thousands of years
in other cultures.
It just took America a little bit longer to catch on.
- The legacy of these products
is that they take a relatively obscure food source
and make it a pantry staple for American families.