George Foreman Grill
The Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine: a clamshell of ridged nonstick plates, tilted so the grease ran down into a little plastic tray you could hold up to the camera. George Foreman grinned through the infomercial, the tray filled, and the grill ended up in every dorm room and first apartment of the late 90s.
The grill was not George Foreman's idea. Michael Boehm of Batavia, Illinois, came up with a countertop grill that cooked both sides at once, with a floating hinge and a slanted surface so the fat drained away into a separate reservoir; Bob Johnson did the engineering. They pitched it to Salton, Inc. in Mount Prospect, Illinois, as "The Fajita Express," playing a camcorder tape of grease dripping into the tray. The fajita grill had been shown at trade shows in the early 1990s to little interest. Salton eventually sent samples to Foreman's people, the two-time heavyweight champion tried it, and in 1994 it went on sale as the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine.
The infomercials did the rest. Foreman's affable pitch, the promise to "knock out the fat" and the line "It's so good I put my name on it!" made the grill one of the defining products of the infomercial era. Foreman had signed with nothing up front in exchange for a share of the profits, which at the peak reportedly came to about $4.5 million a month. In 1999 Salton paid him $137.5 million in cash and stock to buy out the right to use his name on food-preparation products outright, and his total take from the grill is estimated at more than $200 million, considerably more than he earned in the ring.
By 2003 some 10 million grills had sold in the United States, and worldwide sales passed 100 million units in a little over 15 years. Imitators followed, including the Evander Holyfield Real Deal Grill and the Carl Lewis Health Grill, and in Asia the same grill was sold under Jackie Chan's name as well as Foreman's. Hulk Hogan has told a story for years that the grill was offered to him first and went to Foreman only because he missed a phone call; Boehm's family says Foreman was the only celebrity ever approached. The grill itself kept evolving, with removable plates in 2006 and ceramic ones in 2014, but the memory is the original: the black clamshell, the drip tray, and a boxer telling you it was so good he put his name on it.
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