George Foreman's famous grill wasn't always a knockout

CBC

24-03-2025

When heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman signed a profit-sharing deal in 1994 on the kitchen appliance with which he would become synonymous, his expectations were modest.
Foreman was already being courted by blue-chip companies, who paid money up front. The outlook didn't improve when the second royalty cheque for what would be named the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine, paid just $2,500 US — less than the first cheque.
"I just signed the contract so I could get 16 free grills for my homes, my training camp, my friends, my mom, cousins and other family members," he wrote in the 2009 book Knockout Entrepreneur, co-written with Ken Abrams. "That's all I really expected to get out of the grill deal."
In the same book, he admitted he had ignored the test product sent to his home. It was only after his wife Joan extolled its virtues that Foreman put pen to paper.
Just a few short years later, the CEO of Salton, the company that bought the grill, estimated that Foreman was earning more than $4 million in monthly royalties. The company bought him out in 1999 — wisely not severing Foreman's name or removing his ever-smiling image from the product — in a deal reported to have paid him about $160 million, mostly in cash.
The total was at least three times more than his career boxing earnings — and Foreman earned more than the vast majority of fighters.
Rick Cesari, who worked on the grill's direct response marketing campaign, estimated that by 2011, the product was in some 15 per cent of American households.
For the second time, Foreman — whose death at 76 was announced by his family on Friday night — wildly exceeded expectations.
'Santa Claus in boxing trunks'
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously mused about "second acts in American lives," and Foreman's reinvention was like few ever seen.
Foreman grew up in Houston's hardscrabble Fifth Ward, but squandered a lot of good will after winning a gold medal at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. By the time he lost the heavyweight title in a stunning 1974 knockout to Muhammad Ali in Africa, Foreman rarely smiled, and was an intimidating presence who often sneered at reporter questions.
Foreman experienced what he characterized as a born-again experience in 1977 and retired, preaching on Houston streets before sermonizing at the Pentecostal Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. Near poverty once again, he got back in the ring in 1987, in large part to earn money for the church and its youth community centre.
Few hardened boxing observers took his comeback seriously, but Foreman persevered, with a new, positive disposition.
"The old George Foreman smoked, drank, chewed and swore," wrote famed Los Angeles Times sportswriter Jim Murray in 1990. "The George Foreman we all know today is a Santa Claus in boxing trunks."
At nearly 46, Foreman stunned the much younger Michael Moorer to win a heavyweight belt nearly 20 years to the day he lost to Ali.
Even as he succeeded in the ring, Foreman was vocal about his battle with the bulge. He was weighing in for fights anywhere from 20 to 50 pounds heavier than during his 1970s bouts.
Madison Avenue heard him, and there would be Foreman-centred campaigns with McDonald's, Doritos, Oscar Mayer and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Infomercial heyday
As that was taking place, shopping channels were flourishing on cable television. Local TV channels that once signed off with the national anthem were now increasingly filling post-midnight slots with infomercials for various gadgets and products for the kitchen, garage and home gym.
Inventor Michael Boehm began to sense a trend for health-conscious food in the late 1980s, he told Inventors Digest in a 2015 interview, and he eventually struck a deal for one of his creations, a steam grill acquired by Hamilton Beach.
That product launched in 1991, but sales were merely OK. Salton and others took to marketing panini, taco, bagel and fajita makers, which also didn't hit paydirt.
After Boehm worked up a prototype for a subsequent, fat-reducing grill, nine companies passed, he said, including Salton on its first look.
"There's not one person that I can think of [who] had any enthusiasm for it," Boehm told Inventors Digest.
Salton reconsidered in 1994; a modification that slanted the clamshell device to let grease slide down into a drip tray was considered key.
Salton needed a spokesperson, and they eventually landed on Foreman. Not in a position of strength relative to a proven marketing force, the deal saw Salton agree to 40 per cent of any profits, with 45 per cent going to Foreman, and the rest taken by the agents who got the two sides together.
Foreman the Dad emerges victorious
Foreman hawked the product at influential industry trade shows, while Salton also created the George Foreman Grilling Show, a 30-minute infomercial that featured clips they had purchased the rights for, and which played on Foreman's prowess in the boxing ring.
Sales into 1996 were respectable, but not earth-shattering. But market research was telling its own tale, according to Cesari.
"After the first test, we discovered that between 60 and 70 per cent of our target audience were females who lived in households earning $55,000 a year and were college educated," he wrote in the 2011 book Buy Now: Creative Marketing That Gets Customers to Respond to You and Your Product. "Not exactly the crowd known to take an interest in boxing."
The infomercial was retooled to include less pugilism, and more shots of Foreman as an everyman who could be your neighbour, grilling and interacting amiably with several members of his brood. (He was father to 12 kids in all.)
"The best spokesperson for a product is one who has used the product and genuinely believes that consumers can benefit by using it, too," wrote Cesari. "The magic is getting the spokesperson to convey the 'believability' to an audience, be it online, on television or radio, or in print."
That magic, according to Leon Dreimann, Salton's CEO at the time, first occurred when Foreman appeared on the QVC shopping channel in 1996. During a rare moment of idle time in the 30-minute demonstration, Dreimann told Fortune in 2003, Foreman "patted his belly, took a roll, grabbed a burger, and he started eating." QVC was soon flooded with calls.
"It was so spontaneous," said Dreimann. "It was a real reaction. People saw that he eats what he sells."
Launch of a grilling empire
The product achieved liftoff, but QVC didn't reach all audiences. Former Salton executive Barb Westfield would tell Cesari for his book that another impactful moment came when the New York Times printed a favourable review of the grill on Dec. 31, 1997, in time for "all of those people who were going to take the plunge on their [New Year's] resolutions," she said.
The product was reasonably priced, with $30 and $60 versions, and easy to use for the vast majority of real-life kitchen dwellers. (In an episode of The Office, Dunder-Mifflin leader Michael Scott burns his foot on a Foreman grill, having kept the appliance next to his bed.)
Salton was formed in 1947 to make hot plates and heated serving trays, and endured more than a few periods of peril in the late 1980s and early 1990s, according to a 1999 Forbes magazine article.
Foreman grill sales soared from $5 million in 1996 to $400 million in 2002, and he would ultimately lend his name to six grilling books. Related products were also manufactured, including the George Foreman Rotisserie, and he didn't balk when actor Jackie Chan was signed by Salton to help push the grill in some Asian markets.
But while a public figure can attempt to remake their image, a corporation operates in an arguably even more unforgiving world. Grill sales were accounting for between 40 and 50 per cent of Salton's revenues, but through a series of transactions, it effectively no longer existed by 2010. (A Quebec company that began as Toastess Inc. in the 1940s retains the Salton name, after once having an affiliation with the company.)