Celebrate this quintessentially Idaho snack food at upcoming local festival
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IDAHO FALLS – One of America’s most popular snack foods is being celebrated at an upcoming local festival.
The Greater Idaho Falls Chamber of Commerce is hosting the first-ever Tater Tot Festival at Sandy Downs on August 16 and 17, the weekend before National Potato Day.
Leslie Grigg, 71, of Ammon, whose great uncles founded the company that invented the tater tot, is one of the organizers of the event. He and his cousin, Steve, recently formed the Protect Your Tots Foundation, which raises funds for child abuse prevention. The purpose of the event is to promote that cause.
“We wanted to make tater tots become something more than just a beloved food, we wanted it to become an icon for child abuse prevention,” Grigg tells EastIdahoNews.com.
Grigg is a member of The Exchange Club of Idaho Falls, which devotes its efforts to many community service projects, including child abuse prevention.
Those who purchase a ticket or financially contribute to the event will help fund a new Family Justice Center, a central location for the Domestic Abuse and Sexual Assault Center to process cases.
The event will kick off at 6 p.m. on Friday night with a dinner and auction. It will be a Tater Tot-themed dinner with auction items donated by local businesses.
Jacie Sites, a two-time world fiddling champion from Rigby, will provide live entertainment.
From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. the following day, there will be a variety of games, activities and vendors in the Sandy Downs arena.
“Lamb Weston foods will be providing free Tater Tots,” Leslie says. “Expect to have lots of family fun.”
The birth of the Tater Tot
In December, Grigg told us how his uncles, Nephi and Golden Grigg, formed Ore-Ida in Ontario, Oregon, and created a popular product from leftover potato shavings by running it through holes in a board and deep frying it.
The original board has since been dubbed the holey board, which Grigg recently acquired from the J.R. Simplot plant in Boise. It signed a deal with Ore-Ida in 2022 to become the exclusive supplier and manufacturer of its products.
A woman named Clora Lay Orton came up with the name Tater Tot in a naming contest sponsored by Ore-Ida in 1953. The Grigg brothers liked her suggestion and the name stuck.
She’s since passed away, but her son, Lyle, who lives in the Blackfoot area, shares how she entered the contest.
“She and some other ladies were on their way to Ontario. They heard about the contest and entered it. The proposed names were put in a hat and somebody — I assume it was Nephi or his brother — went through all those names and picked one,” Orton says.
He isn’t sure how she came up with the name but describes his mom as an “artistic mountain southerner” who was always coming up with interesting names and titles for things.
Her family moved from Mississippi to eastern Oregon when she was little. She was raised on several thousand acres between La Grande and Baker, Oregon, Lyle says, and she only made it to the eighth grade.
“She was self-taught in just about everything,” he says.
She and all of her siblings had unusual names, says Orton, and Clora inherited that quirkiness from her mom.
Whether Clora was ever compensated for winning the contest is unclear.
He knew nothing about his mom’s accomplishment until he was an adult, and it still amazes him that his mom is credited with naming what is now one of America’s most popular snack foods.
“Isn’t that amazing?!” Orton says. “She wrote it in her life history and my mother was not one to make up stories.”
Seventy-one years later, Americans consume about 70 million pounds of Tater Tots annually.
Grigg is excited to launch what he hopes will become an annual event that preserves the Tater Tot’s history and image for future generations.
“I think it’s a big deal that the state has produced between one-fourth and one-third of the national potato crop for as long as I’ve been alive. It boggles my mind that we haven’t celebrated the potato in a broad way. It’s just beginning to happen,” says Grigg.
Shelley Spud Days, an annual celebration since 1927, has included a Tater Trot Run as part of its festivities for many years.
Tickets for the dinner and auction are $75 per person or $500 for a table of eight. Booth space is still available as well. To register or learn more, click here.
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