Spam Won World War II for the Soviets and Then Stayed in Hawaii

George Hormel founded a meatpacking company in Austin, Minnesota in 1891 and ran it on a model that needed pork shoulders to do something. The shoulder was the cheapest cut on the carcass; Hormel's son, Jay, took over the business in 1929 and spent most of the 1930s trying to figure out how to sell it. The answer he arrived at — finely ground pork shoulder, cured with salt and a little sugar, sealed in a tin can with potato starch — went on the market on July 5, 1937. The name was supplied by a Hormel executive's brother, who won a $100 prize at a company naming contest, and is generally taken to mean spiced ham; the company has never officially confirmed it.

The product met its market in the war. By the time the U.S. entered in 1941, Spam was already filling military ration cans because it required no refrigeration and could be eaten cold. Over 150 million pounds were shipped to U.S. and Allied forces between 1942 and 1945. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, recalling lend-lease, said in his memoirs: "Without Spam, we wouldn't have been able to feed our army." GIs called it "ham that didn't pass its physical" and grew sick of it; soldiers stationed in occupied Pacific territories left enough cans in circulation that the food became permanent local cuisine across Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, and Korea.

Those markets stayed. Hawaii now consumes roughly 7 million cans of Spam a year, the highest per-capita rate in the United States; Guam averages about 16 cans per person annually. South Korea was the world's second-largest Spam producer as of 2004. Hormel marked the eight-billionth can sold in 2012; the figure passed nine billion in 2026, distributed across 48 countries. There is a Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota.