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When it comes to canned goods, especially related to Italian-style food, there are a few brands that are legendary. Canned food celebrity Chef Boyardee (who was a real person and a celebrity chef in his lifetime) and the now defunct brand Franco-American were vital to making these products incredibly popular in the United States. But there are others who also played a part in the history of canned food that haven’t gotten their proper due. One of them is Betty Ossola.
Ossola was the executive vice president and general manager of the J. Ossola Company beginning in the 1940s. Under her leadership, the company introduced a whole slew of canned Italian-style products geared towards American tastes under the Torino label. There was an olive salad with peppers and capers, lima bean soup (a novelty in the U.S. at the time), canned minestrone soup, and anchovy ketchup. Then there was Ossola’s canned product that included small rings of pasta called tubetti in a tomato sauce. It predated the slightly similar-looking SpaghettiOs that Campbell’s (which bought Franco-American in 1915) released in 1965, more than a decade after Ossola’s came out. This was a time before canned foods lost some of their popularity amid changing tastes.
A businesswoman ahead of her time
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Jack Ossola started his business in 1901 near Pittsburgh and, as it grew, eventually moved headquarters to New York City. Betty Ossola joined the firm after going to business school, but started at the bottom and worked her way up. It wasn’t easy being a woman in business, and her own dad wasn’t too keen on women in the industry. “But the things I’ve dreamed up have sold pretty well,” Ossola said in a 1952 interview with the Houston Post. “So now [Jack] sort of lets me alone.”
One especially memorable product Ossola dreamed up was the aforementioned canned ringed pasta product, an Americanized version of the Southern Italian dish pasta e fagioli. It included beans, but was less soupy than the original. Ossola named it Pasta Fazool, a popular slang expression teenagers and media personalities used in place of curse words that was a corruption of the name of the dish. Co-opting it was a coup. The product sold well and Ossola got lots of press, but the sexist nature of the era shone through in the various articles about Ossola that describe her as just “a pretty blonde,” among other descriptors.
Long before Franco-American lost the battle of the brands to Chef Boyardee, which Campbell’s phased out in 2004, Ossola and her culinary firsts had been all but forgotten. She died in 1986, by which time Ossola foods was part of another company. Even so, she should be remembered as a canned food visionary.
Dining and Cooking