SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Generations of Thanksgiving cooks have saved time in the kitchen with a familiar pantry staple.
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TIFFANY AUDIA: Every year, I make my mom's corn bread dressing. Two boxes of Jiffy mix, and when it's cooked, crumble it up. Half a bag of stuffing mix. Some celery...
DETROW: That is Tiffany Arias (ph) in a TikTok video about her holiday hack for Jiffy corn muffin mix. You probably know it from the grocery store, where it's one of the top-selling dry good items in the United States, according to the company. As NPR's Neda Ulaby reports, Jiffy is a unique American brand.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: The company that makes Jiffy corn muffin mix has run this mill since 1901 in southeast Michigan. It also makes Jiffy cake mix, Jiffy pie crust, brownies.
HOWARD S HOLMES II: So we have buttermilk biscuit running here. Firing off the line at about 75, 80 boxes a minute.
ULABY: Howard S. Holmes II. He runs the Chelsea Milling Company, best known for Jiffy mix.
HOLMES: You see the mix packages being pushed into those chutes. And then it gets sealed, weighed, layers of food safety, metal detected.
ULABY: This company has been owned by his family for five generations.
HOLMES: The flour-milling business was created by Harmon S. Holmes.
ULABY: His great-great-grandfather.
HOLMES: And then there's Howard Samuel Holmes, and then Howard Sumner Holmes.
ULABY: His grandfather. His dad is also Howard Holmes, and so is his baby boy. But great-grandmother Mabel invented Jiffy corn bread mix during the Great Depression. Jiffy mix cost 10 cents a box back then. Right now, 50 cents at Walmart. That old-fashioned package, says Holmes, sells itself.
HOLMES: Historically, we've never had a marketing department. We've never had a advertising department. You'll never see a print ad for Jiffy mix. You've never seen a commercial on TV for Jiffy mix, and as far as I'm concerned, you won't.
ULABY: What you will see are paid partnerships on social media, a new thing for the company.
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SARAH O'PRY: Now, listen here, I like to make corn bread homemade just like anybody else. But if the Jiffy mix is on sale at the Pig for 50 cents a box, you know I'm going to take the shortcut.
ULABY: So many people show off their Jiffy hacks online, like influencer Sarah O'Pye (ph), it can be hard to tell which posts are sponsored. Food studies professor Amy Bentley teaches at New York University. As a kid, she loved making Jiffy corn bread mix but says she would be reluctant to make it now.
AMY BENTLEY: The sodium level is super high. A third of your daily allotment for a portion of corn bread or a corn muffin? That's ridiculous.
ULABY: But in spite of the sodium and the preservatives, Bentley says it's better than many fast food alternatives.
BENTLEY: You don't want to lose these mixes like this because they are cooking for a lot of people, and we want people to cook.
ULABY: Especially at Thanksgiving. It's the busiest time of year for the company, says Howard Holmes, which sells about 200 million boxes of various mixes a year. It keeps costs so low, he says, because it's family-run. No private equity, no shareholders. And everything is made here in Michigan, even those blue and white boxes that seem so unchanged. Although, there have been updates.
HOLMES: They're so small that you really don't notice them. That's, of course, by design.
ULABY: Holmes says the company does not waste money on splashy rebranding. It has never had a layoff, he says, and employees work there on average for 14 1/2 years. Most of the machinery you see at the Chelsea Milling Company is state-of-the-art, but there's also a room of old-school equipment that looks like an industrial museum. That vintage equipment still works. An old box-maker shoots out Jiffy packages on an antiquated metal rack that dates from World War II. Holmes says they use it every day.
HOLMES: This is 1940s equipment.
ULABY: Why do you keep the old machines around?
HOLMES: Why do we?
ULABY: Yeah.
HOLMES: We still use them.
ULABY: An ethos as quaint as that old-fashioned Jiffy packaging. Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
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