Exec Life
PATENTS AND INVENTIONS
Mix of Fate Mabel White Holmes, of Chelsea, built Jiffy ready-mix biscuits into a global brand. BY NORM SINCLAIR
A
84 DBUSINESS || July - August 2024
RISING ABOVE A skilled baker, Mabel Holmes used a twin-oven stove in the 1940s. During that time, she served as president of Chelsea Milling Co. following the death of her husband, Howard S. Holmes, in 1936.
As America’s first prepared baking mix, Jiffy quickly gained the attention of consumers when one of the country’s largest grocery chains, C.F. Smith, which had 600 stores, began stocking the new Jiffy mix. It was also significant that the product, which cost less than $1, was introduced during the Great Depression, making it a budget-friendly staple for family meals. Today, Howard “Howdy” Holmes, Mabel’s grandson, is CEO and chairman of the board of Jiffy’s parent company, Chelsea Milling Co. He relates how his grandparents brought out their baking mix product just ahead of the competition. “As it turns out, there was a General Mills sales guy who was in Detroit checking on things and he happened to see this box of Jiffy all-purpose baking mix,” Holmes says. “Of course he couldn’t get back to Minneapolis (General Mills’ headquarters) fast enough; I believe he took the train. He told his people what he saw in a Smith store and, of course, they followed suit and developed their mix, Bisquick, which came out nine months later in 1931.” Mabel White Holmes was born in 1890. She graduated from Chelsea High School and Eastern Michigan University, which was known then as Ypsilanti Normal College. Her father owned White Milling Co. in Chelsea, which was later purchased by Harmon Samuel Holmes, a prominent local businessman and mill owner. Harmon Holmes would later turn his milling business over to his son, Howard Sumner Holmes, Mabel’s husband. The name of the combined businesses was changed to Chelsea Milling Co. in 1923. After Mabel White Holmes’ ready-made mix hit the market, it changed the focus of Chelsea Milling from producing flour for households to creating Jiffy
baking mixes. In 1936, the Holmes family was devastated when Howard Holmes, then age 50, fell 90 feet to his death in one of the company’s grain silos. Mabel White Holmes succeeded him as president of the company. Her twin sons, Dudley and Howard Jr., then 23 and recent graduates of the University of Michigan, joined her. The transition she and the twins made running the company wasn’t always smooth, Howdy Holmes says. “My grandmother thought up this idea: One year Dudley would be president and my father, Howard, would be vice president, and then they would trade off every year,” Holmes says, chuckling. “They tried it for a while but that didn’t work out very well.” As president of the company, Mabel White Holmes solidified the Jiffy brand as the top player in the prepared mix market in the United States. In 1940, she stepped down as president while remaining active with the company for decades on the board of directors. She died in November 1977, a month shy of her 87th birthday. She was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame in 2015. Howard Holmes succeeded his mother as president and ran the company for the next 50 years, while Dudley became secretary and treasurer. When America entered World War II, Dudley Holmes enlisted in the U.S. Navy and saw combat in the Pacific theater. After the war ended, he worked briefly as a commodities broker in Chicago and Detroit before returning to the company. The brothers are credited with modernizing the Chelsea operation and keeping it ahead of their rivals. Dudley, who oversaw plant operations, designed an advanced test kitchen in the plant.
COURTESY OF JIFFY
lunch date with a schoolmate, arranged by twin brothers Howard and Dudley Holmes at their Chelsea home in April 1930, provided the catalyst for a new industry in Michigan — and the world — that continues to flourish today. Although the twins’ mother, Mabel White Holmes, had prepared a meal for the boys, their friend’s father, a single parent, packed a lunch for his son. While the boys were outside, Holmes peeked inside the visitor’s lunch. At the top of the bag was a flat, unappetizing-looking biscuit that she later described as resembling a hockey puck. In that moment, she realized just how difficult it must have been for that father to make a baked treat from scratch. Inspired by the dad’s hard biscuit, she decided she would invent a prepared baking mix that would be so easy to make that, as she said, “even a man could use it.” Howard S. Holmes, who operated Chelsea Milling Co., shared his wife’s enthusiasm for the project and encouraged her as she experimented with various ingredients and measurements in the kitchen. It helped that her family also had owned a mill, so she was knowledgeable about flour and baking products. Mabel White Holmes envisioned a mix that included most of the necessary ingredients inside a box. The package would contain just enough mix to produce baked treats for one family meal, keeping waste to a minimum. After much trial and error, she came up with a product that required only the addition of milk and an egg to make perfect biscuits every time. The couple now needed a name for their new retail offering. It came soon after, as the pair was driving home through heavy rainfall from a business trip to Chicago. As she rode in the car, Mabel White Holmes had a “eureka moment.” Reminiscing about her childhood, she recalled her father’s fondness for hot biscuits, and remembered the family cook announcing at lunchtime that the biscuits she was making would be “ready in a jiffy.” “That’s it!” she exclaimed. “That’s what we’ll call it.”