Fremont anchors Newaygo County as a genuinely modest West Michigan town whose name is nonetheless recognized in households across the entire country, thanks to a single frustrated mother's kitchen experiment that grew into one of the most enduring baby food brands in American history.
The Baby Food Capital of the World
Dorothy Gerber grew tired in 1927 of the tedious, time-consuming process of hand-straining fruits and vegetables to feed her infant daughter, and she suggested to her husband Daniel that the family's Fremont canning factory could do that straining work at industrial scale, sparing other parents the same daily hassle she had been enduring. Daniel Frank Gerber acted on his wife's suggestion, and Gerber Products Company launched its first commercial baby food flavors in late 1928, strained peas, prunes, carrots, spinach, and a beef vegetable soup, a modest initial lineup that would eventually grow into a genuine American household name.
The baby food line outsold the Fremont factory's original adult canned goods within just twelve years, prompting the company to formally rename itself Gerber Products Company in 1941 and abandon adult canned food production entirely by 1943, a complete pivot that transformed a regional Michigan cannery into a company whose brand recognition would eventually stretch nationwide and beyond.
The Secret Behind the Famous Face
The instantly recognizable Gerber baby logo originated from a company contest seeking a face for the new brand, and the winning entry, a simple charcoal sketch by artist Dorothy Hope Smith, depicted a baby named Ann Turner Cook, whose identity as the model behind one of the most reproduced images in American advertising history was kept secret for fifty years after the sketch's selection. The Fremont factory where it all began remains in operation today, still manufacturing baby food on essentially the same site where Dorothy Gerber's original 1927 frustration first sparked the entire product line.
Fremont has leaned into that legacy as a genuine point of civic identity, its connection to one of the country's most recognizable baby-product brands giving this otherwise unassuming Newaygo County town a national name recognition that towns many times its size would have difficulty matching.