We all know Duncan Hines as the brand for delicious and fluffy cakes that are a cinch to make. However, there’s more to this brand than just the box.
Duncan Hines, born in 1880, was actually a travelling salesman from Bowling Green, Kentucky. Of course, life on the road meant living from hotel to hotel and eating at roadside restaurants. With the good food came the bad which was the perfect content for his 1935 book, the Adventures of Good Eating. He later went on to publish books on the best hotels and motels throughout America.
Adventures of Good Eating took the reader on a tour through his favourite places and highlighted all the best dishes. With this under his belt, Hines was inspired to bring great food to everyone. He teamed up with Roy Park to establish Hines-Park Foods Inc. Eventually bought out by Proctor & Gamble, the Duncan Hines label lived on and introduced a line of cake mixes.
With such a great devotion to great American food, a section of Route 31 West in Bowling Green was named after him. It is officially known as the Duncan Hines Highway.