People · 2026-08-26

Frederick C. Mennen

Incorporated Mennen Food Products at 506 Clay Street, La Porte, Indiana, in 1958 on about $6,000 raised locally, and started Jiffy Pop production there in 1959.
Patented the attachable wire form handle, U.S. 2,791,350, issued 7 May 1957, and, with Betty N. Robins of Detroit, the spirally wound foil cover, U.S. 2,815,883, issued 10 December 1957; both numbers appeared on the Jiffy Pop package.
Founded U.S. Packaging Corporation after running American Home Products' food division, and patented a non-culture test for Neisseria gonorrhoeae, U.S. 3,876,503 in 1975 and U.S. 4,018,653 in 1977.

A pan that was also the package

The product Mennen shipped from La Porte in 1959 did three jobs with one piece of aluminum. The pan held the kernels and the oil at the factory. It cooked them on a home burner. It became the bowl when the foil dome came off. A customer measured nothing, washed nothing, and watched the package inflate while the corn popped, which is why the television line Bruce Johnson records, and Troy Historic Village later repeats, was "as much fun to make as it is to eat."

Johnson, the La Porte County historian, writing in the Herald-Dispatch on 6 September 2023, dates the incorporation of Mennen Food Products to 1958, with offices at 506 Clay Street. That address turns up again two decades later as the inventor's address on U.S. Patent 3,876,503. Johnson describes the design target as a snack prepared in its own container: an aluminum pan, a wire handle, a cardboard cover, kernels and popping oil already inside. He puts the development in the kitchen of Mennen's best friend, Art Bowman, on Holton Road, where the two worked on a foil top that would unfold on a stove. The top that worked opened in a spiral. That Art Bowman has no connection to Charles F. Bowman, Redenbacher's partner at Chester.

The money was local and small. Johnson: about $6,000, stock at $2 a share, and soon 500 stockholders, many of them friends in La Porte County. Hometown News, quoting him at a later bridge vote, condenses that to "$6,000 in capital and help from a small number of local investors" and describes "a flimsy aluminum cover that grew into a balloon shape." Those two versions of the shareholder count sit side by side in the file.

Production began in 1959 in the Clay Street building. Within a year, Johnson writes, the company sold 7 million packages, and Hometown News adds a line of 200 workers. Those are a county historian's numbers rather than audited shipments, and they are the best figures the public record holds.

Minenko to Mennen

Johnson supplies the family record. Frederick Carl Mennen was born on 27 May 1928 in La Porte, the son of Russian immigrants who spent several years in Pennsylvania before Indiana. His father, Kiril Eghantow Minenko, was born in 1895, came to the United States in 1910, and was naturalized in 1925. His mother, Dora Stefanowna Walkow Minenko, arrived in 1912 and was naturalized in 1942. By about 1918 they were Carl and Dorothy Minenko of 406 Roosevelt Street in La Porte, and Carl worked as a machinist at Metal Door and Trim Company. Johnson names four daughters in the family, Mary, Nadine, Tessie, and Rose, and one son. The surname moves across the documents: Minenko, then Menenko, then Mennen.

The school record is chemistry from the start. Johnson lists La Porte High School, the National Honor Society, band, the presidency of both the Science and Biology clubs, and a 1945 win in the National Gilbert Chemical Research Contest. The New York Times, in its Associated Press obituary, called him a chemist involved in heavy metal manufacturing and food packaging.

On 28 April 1950, in Michigan City, he married Rosemary Alta of Benton Harbor, Michigan. They had three daughters, Deborah, Monica, and Michelle. Hometown News says he spent 29 years on Lakeshore Drive in Long Beach; Johnson gives the house number as 2704 and dates Rosemary's death to 10 July 2018 at 87. Johnson places their entombment in the Mennen mausoleum near the entrance to Pine Lake Cemetery in La Porte.

The chronology of the expandable pan

The dated sequence runs like this. On 2 March 1953 Benjamin W. Coleman filed the application that became U.S. Patent 2,673,805, assigned to Tip Top Products Company; it issued on 30 March 1954. The Seventh Circuit later described that claim as a metallic vessel holding popcorn and frying fat under an expansible metallic cover arranged concavely inside the vessel, so heat would inflate it into a convex enclosure several times the starting volume. The same court found that E-Z Pop had been on sale since July 1954.

Mennen's popcorn filings come next. U.S. 2,815,883, "Spirally wound covering for popcorn containers," was filed on 17 October 1955 by Betty N. Robins of Detroit, Michigan, and Frederick C. Mennen of La Porte, Indiana, and issued on 10 December 1957. U.S. 2,791,350, "Attachable wire form handle for utensils," was filed on 2 November 1955 in Mennen's name alone and issued on 7 May 1957. Mennen Food Products incorporated in 1958, and the line at Clay Street started in 1959.

Both 1955 specifications describe the market they entered. The cover patent states that packaged popcorn ready for popping was already sold in a thin aluminum container with a folded or wrinkled foil cover that billowed as the corn popped. The handle patent says that "at the present time there is on the market at least one type of popcorn pan which holds combined popcorn kernels and fats" under "an extensible cover." The improvements were filed against a product already on shelves, which the applications say in their own words.

What the patents claim

The spiral cover is a folding scheme. Robins and Mennen claimed a flat central portion with spirally arranged ribs and no sharp creases, designed to open under gas pressure from melting fat rather than under a battering of kernels. A crease is a failure point; a spiral unwinds evenly and holds shape as a dome.

The handle patent solves the other half of a disposable pan. Its claim is a contractible wire form that seats under a lip, so a thin pan with no rim strength can be held over a burner and shaken. The Seventh Circuit later noted that both patent numbers appeared on the Jiffy Pop package, which is how a shopper in 1960 could read the intellectual property off a grocery shelf.

Taylor-Reed v. Mennen, 1963

Taylor-Reed Corporation, owner by assignment of the Coleman patent, sued Mennen Food Products, American Home Products, and Frederick C. Mennen. The district court in the Northern District of Indiana found the remaining Coleman claim valid and infringed, and found no unfair competition and no willful appropriation. Only validity and infringement went up on appeal. The Seventh Circuit, in Taylor-Reed Corp. v. Mennen Food Products, 324 F.2d 108 (1963), reversed on infringement and left validity standing.

The reasoning is prosecution history. Coleman had canceled fifteen broader claims after a Patent Office rejection and accepted a single claim limited to a concave nesting cover. An attempted reissue covering a flat cover was rejected and abandoned. The court then compared the two commercial products. Taylor-Reed's E-Z Pop was a shallow pan with a foil "button," a cardboard handle, and later a wire handle. Jiffy Pop was a shallow foil pan with a flat spirally wound cover, a waxed cardboard lid, and a wire handle. Neither package matched the narrowed claim, and file-wrapper estoppel blocked stretching "concave nesting cover" to cover a spiral sheet.

Later retellings blur the case. Troy Historic Village, in a 24 February 2015 note, describes spiral versus button accurately and then calls the suit copyright infringement; it was a patent case. Philip Potempa, in the Post-Tribune on 8 March 2024, gets closer, dating the suit to 1963 and noting that the district court result was later overturned, without the estoppel holding that decided it.

American Home Products, Fail Road, then Conagra

Johnson writes that the company expanded and was sold in 1963 to American Home Products Corporation, marketer of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee foods. Hometown News, quoting him, uses the same year and adds a larger industrial complex on Fail Road. The 1963 appellate caption already lists American Home Products as a defendant that had taken the assets, which fits the local date. Snack-history pages that put the sale in 1958 or 1959 run against both. This record uses 1963.

Potempa writes that Mennen "teamed with American Home Products and pharmacologist Alvin Golub who further assisted fine-tuning the product and design." Golub appears in that 2024 column and in later snack-history pages, and in neither the Times obituary nor Johnson's county history. He belongs in the file as a later credit rather than as a second inventor.

Johnson then follows Mennen to New York as head of American Home's food division, and back to La Porte, where he founded U.S. Packaging Corporation. Hometown News puts that company on Clay Street. The brand trail afterward is corporate: International Home Foods was formed in November 1996 out of American Home Products' food business, and on 23 June 2000 ConAgra announced an agreement to acquire International Home Foods for about $2.9 billion including assumed debt. That release names Chef Boyardee, PAM, and Gulden's, and does not name Jiffy Pop; Potempa and Troy Historic Village both place the brand at Conagra afterward.

The other patents

U.S. 3,876,503, filed 29 October 1971 and issued 8 April 1975, is "Method and instrument for the detection of Neisseria gonorrheae without culture," with Mennen as inventor at 506 Clay Street. The abstract describes a presumptive test that skips culture: a swab, a dry pledget impregnated with a phenylenediamine oxidase reagent, a frangible ampul of wetting agent, and a color change on the specimen within about two minutes. U.S. 4,018,653, filed 30 December 1974 as a division and issued 19 April 1977, claims the instrument and is assigned to U.S. Packaging Corporation. Johnson calls the product Gonodecten and says the Food and Drug Administration cleared a test that told a physician within three minutes whether a man had the disease; this essay did not retrieve an FDA letter, so the trade name and the clearance stand as Johnson's sentences.

Johnson also credits Mennen with Strike-One instant-igniting charcoal, later sold to Royal Oak Charcoal Company, and with a self-cleaning rotary lawnmower blade and deck assembly.

Long Beach, 19 March 1991

The New York Times obituary of 22 March 1991 records the death: an industrialist and inventor who founded the Jiffy Pop popcorn business, dead on Tuesday, 19 March 1991, at his home in Long Beach, Indiana, after a long illness, at 62. Potempa, quoting the same obituary in 2024, adds the 1977 gonorrhea-instrument patent and the survivor list of wife Rosemary, three daughters, and a sister. Johnson confirms the date and the age.

The stovetop pan arrived while theater attendance was falling and home popping was picking the volume up. Natasha Geiling, writing in Smithsonian on 3 October 2013 and interviewing Andrew F. Smith, dates the slump to television and the recovery to home products, naming EZ Pop and then Jiffy Pop; popcorn.org's "Slump and Bump" paragraph tells the same arc without the brand names. The second box office covers the lobby years that preceded it, and The foil pan and the TV tray covers the burner years that followed.

Potempa, writing about the chalet at Stop 27 in Michigan City, names daughter Deborah Mennen as the present owner and records neighborhood stories that the house came from the Century of Progress or from Europe; Deborah holds the original blueprints and says it was built on site. Johnson records a Frederick C. Mennen Memorial Scholarship for chemistry majors at the Purdue Foundation, a page this essay did not retrieve. Hometown News, covering a 1 September commissioners' vote, reports that the Fail Road bridge over the Norfolk Southern tracks north of Indiana 2 now carries his name, a few hundred yards from where the pans came off the line.