In brief
The first ready-mix pancake batter went on sale in 1888, under branding with a genuinely dark history. The non-stick pan followed from an accidental 1938 chemistry discovery. IHOP opened its first restaurant in 1958. And the pancake has since become a genuine sport: the current world record for the largest pancake ever made stands at over 15 metres across.
The first ready-mix batter
In 1888, Chris L. Rutt and Charles G. Underwood bought a flour mill in St. Joseph, Missouri, and began selling surplus flour as “Self-Rising Pancake Flour” under the name Pearl Milling Company — widely credited as the first ready-mix pancake batter sold commercially in the United States. It sold poorly at first.
Later that year, looking for a way to market it, Rutt took the name “Aunt Jemima” and an accompanying image from a blackface minstrel show — the name traced back to an 1875 minstrel song, “Old Aunt Jemima.” The mill was sold in 1890 to the R.T. Davis Milling Company, which developed the branding further; in 1893, a formerly enslaved woman named Nancy Green was hired to portray Aunt Jemima at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a widely documented origin point for the “mammy” caricature that shaped the brand's marketing for well over a century.
Quaker Oats, the brand's owner, announced on 17 June 2020 that it would retire the Aunt Jemima name and image, explicitly stating that the brand's “origins are based on a racial stereotype.” PepsiCo (Quaker Oats' parent company since 2001) announced the replacement name, Pearl Milling Company — reviving the mill's original 1888 name — in February 2021, with the full rebrand completed by that summer.
Bisquick and the biscuit-mix idea
General Mills' own company history credits the idea for Bisquick, launched in 1931, to a chance encounter: in late 1930, a General Mills salesman named Carl Smith was served biscuits on a train by a dining-car chef who kept a pre-mixed lard, flour, and baking-powder blend on ice for quick baking. General Mills' chemists developed a shelf-stable version of the idea, and Bisquick — usable for pancakes as well as biscuits — became one of the best-known packaged baking mixes in America. (This origin story comes from General Mills' own official history page; treat it as company lore rather than independently verified journalism.)
An accidental invention: the non-stick pan
The material that made the modern non-stick pan possible wasn't designed for cooking at all. On 6 April 1938, DuPont chemist Roy Plunkett was testing refrigerant gases when he discovered that a sample of tetrafluoroethylene had polymerised into a strange, slippery, chemically inert solid — polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE. DuPont trademarked it as Teflon by 1941 and began selling it for industrial uses in 1946. Nobody had yet thought to put it on a frying pan.
That step came from France. Engineer Marc Grégoire patented a method for bonding Teflon to aluminium cookware, and by 1956 had founded the company Tefal with his wife Colette to sell the first commercially available non-stick frying pans. By 1960, Tefal was reportedly selling around 3 million pans a year. (Sources vary slightly on the exact year of the original patent — 1954 or 1955 — but converge on 1956 for the founding of Tefal itself.)
IHOP and the pancake restaurant
IHOP — the International House of Pancakes — was founded on 7 July 1958 by brothers Al and Jerry Lapin, with investors Al and Trudy Kallis, in the Toluca Lake area of Los Angeles. It grew fast: by 1962, there were already 50 locations. It remains the most visible symbol of the pancake as a full commercial category rather than a homemade dish — a restaurant chain built entirely around it.
The pancake as a sport: world records
At some point, pancakes stopped being just food and started being a competitive event. Guinness World Records maintains an active, growing list of pancake-related titles:
| Record | Detail |
|---|---|
| Largest pancake | 15.01m diameter, roughly 3 tonnes — Rochdale, UK, 1994 (Co-Operative Union Ltd.) |
| Most pancake tosses in one minute | 140 — Brad Jolly, Sydney, Australia, 2012 |
| Highest pancake toss | 9.47m — Dominic Cuzzacrea, Cheektowaga, New York, November 2010 |
| Most people tossing pancakes simultaneously | 890 — University of Sheffield, UK, 2012 |
| Fastest marathon while flipping a pancake | 3hr 2min 27sec (26.2 miles) — Mike Cuzzacrea, Buffalo–Niagara Falls, 24 October 1999 |
| Most pancakes served in 8 hours | 26,994 — CF Chinook Centre, Calgary, Canada, 5 July 2025 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Continue the timeline
Sources & further reading
- Britannica — Aunt Jemima / Pearl Milling Company
- Smithsonian Magazine — "Quaker Oats to Retire Aunt Jemima Brand"
- NPR — "Aunt Jemima No More: Pancake Brand Renamed Pearl Milling Company"
- General Mills — "How Bisquick Got Its Start"
- Wikipedia — Roy J. Plunkett
- Science History Institute — Roy J. Plunkett
- Wikipedia — Marc Grégoire
- IHOP.com — History & Timeline
- Guinness World Records — "Flipping Amazing: Seven of the Best Pancake Day Records"
- Guinness World Records — "Most Pancakes Served in 8 Hours"
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