Eggo Waffles
The golden frozen waffles you popped in the toaster on a school morning — and the ad campaign that turned a breakfast food into a battle cry: "L'eggo my Eggo!" The whole family fighting over the last one in the box was the point.
Eggo was invented in 1953 by Frank Dorsa, whose family ran a San Jose food business — the same family behind an "Eggo" brand of mayonnaise, which is where the name eventually came from. The waffles launched under the clunky name "Froffles" (frozen + waffles), but customers kept calling them "Eggos," and the company made it official in 1955. The pitch was pure convenience: a real waffle you could keep in the freezer and toast in minutes.
Kellogg's bought the brand in 1968, and in 1972 the ad agency Leo Burnett gave it the line that stuck: "L'eggo my Eggo" — a pun on "let go of my Eggo" — dramatized by family members wrestling over the last waffle in the box. Through the '80s and '90s that tug-of-war made Eggo a breakfast-table institution and one of the most quotable food slogans in America.
Decades later, the brand got an unlikely second act: Netflix's Stranger Things (2016) made Eggos the signature food of the character Eleven, sending a 1950s-born waffle back into the pop-culture spotlight for a whole new generation.
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