At HoneyBaked Ham, we’re big on tradition – which is why we’re thrilled to be celebrating the 60th anniversary of our company’s foundation!
Adhering to convention is one of the hallmarks of our brand – it’s a fondness for tradition that has kept us making the highest quality products using proven techniques for six decades. It’s tradition that keeps our loyal customers returning to our stores year after year to pick up their HoneyBaked Ham, the same proven holiday dinner classic their families have turned to since the middle of the last century.
To learn about and acknowledge our history is to understand why our traditions stand as they do. Our company values hard work, persistence and innovation – traits we’ve inherited from our founder, and which he embodied and established before the first HoneyBaked Ham store even opened. In honor of HoneyBaked Ham’s 60th birthday, we thought we’d peek back through the pages of time and recollect the story of our now-iconic company to get a sense of how we’ve become one of the most welcome and familiar flavors at holiday feasts across America.
A Foundation of Invention
In the mid-1920s, Harry John Hoenselaar headed from his hometown of Cheboygan, Michigan to Detroit, where he found work as a salesman for William Hubenet and his Detroit meat company called The Honey Baked Ham Company. At that time, bone-in hams had to be sliced by hand, which takes skill and training. For most customers without culinary expertise, slicing a ham takes several minutes and a lot of concentration to ensure every slice is uniformly thick. Harry Hoenselaar demonstrated an early knack for the long and tricky process.
Within about ten years, and after meeting, marrying and moving to New York with his wife Josephine, Mr. Hoenselaar began designing and constructing a machine in an attempt to automate, and thereby simplify, the slicing process. In December 1938, with scrap wood, a wood-handled knife, a tire jack, a pie tin and a washing machine motor, he completed the first prototype of the spiral-slicing machine you can find in almost all HoneyBaked Ham stores today. Over the next eight years, he built and tested many more slicing machines, demonstrating one of the earlier machines at the 1939 New York World’s Fair in Queens. Mr. Hoenselaar first filed for a patent in 1944 and solicited the largest national meat packing companies in search of a buyer.
The spiral-slicing machine can reduce the time it takes to slice a whole ham to about 30 seconds at full-speed. The process has never been fully-automated, requiring a human touch to load each ham, one at a time, aligning the femur bone perfectly on the rotating cam, and keeping an eye on the blade’s distance from the wide ends of the bone at the beginning and end of each spiral slice. Still, the machine manages to cut even, 1/6” slices from shank-end to butt-end within an average timeframe of less than two minutes, without ever separating the meat from the bone.
An Icon is Born
After securing the patent in 1949 and moving back to Detroit with his family, Harry Hoenselaar’s belief in his idea motivated him to persist in his search for a buyer. He wrote to meat packers and distributors for years, insisting they invest in the speed and efficiency of his invention. Then, in 1957, William Hubenet’s Honey Baked Ham Company was inherited by his widow, who offered to sell it to Mr. Hoenselaar for $500 (about $4,374 today). After re-mortgaging his house to make the initial payment, Mr. Hoenselaar opened the doors of his first store in October of that same year. Now, after 60 years of growth, The HoneyBaked Ham Company is still owned by the Hoenselaar family, and has developed into a powerful national brand with more than 400 stores, over half of which are locally owned franchises.
Tradition asks us to embrace the past, to honor the wisdom and deeds of those who came before us. Understanding the history that led us to where we are helps us see our work as part of the legacy of our founder. That’s why HoneyBaked Ham remains dedicated to putting the hard work and attention to quality worthy of Mr. Hoenselaar’s legacy into each and every product we offer, and every customer’s individual experience with our brand.
