He sold his shares of La Choy around 1930. (The company was previously located in the Detroit Harbor Terminal building.) By that time, New had moved on from La Choy in 1926, he moved back to Korea and started a pharmaceutical company, Yuhan Corp. La Choy also printed recipe pamphlets by the millions to promote its products, helping to encourage American home cooks to experiment with Chinese cuisine.īusiness was good, and La Choy built a new office and factory at 8100 Schoolcraft Road in 1937. The company at one point was the largest user of Michigan-grown celery in the nation, processing 5,000 tons of it annually. It offered fermented soy sauce imported from China as early as the 1920s and later offered its own hydrolized vegetable protein soy sauce in the 1960s. In short order, La Choy's business line expanded to offer a variety of packaged Asian foods including chow mein noodles, sauces and a variety of preserved specialty vegetables. Their packaged goods company, La Choy Food Products Inc., was incorporated in Detroit in 1922. The pair learned that fresh mung bean sprouts don't have a very long shelf life, so the two men preserved and sold them in glass jars. So Smith called up his old friend New, who grew an experimental first crop of sprouts in bathtubs in his basement. The native of Evart, in Michigan's northern Lower Peninsula, wanted to meet his restaurant customers' demand for mung bean sprouts, a key ingredient in chop suey. Meanwhile, Wallace Smith, one of New's classmates at U-M, was running a corner grocery store in Detroit. He started the company with his college friend Wallace Smith, whom he met while studying at the University of Michigan. After college, he worked for Michigan Central Railroad in Detroit and spent some time at General Electric in New York before returning to Detroit. He left Nebraska to attend the University of Michigan, paying his way through school with a job at a Detroit Edison substation. He played football and was on his high school debate team. New was born in Pyongyang, in what is now North Korea, and immigrated to Hastings, Neb., when he was 9 years old in 1904. La Choy is known around the country for its line of Asian food products, but what is not as widely known is that the company was founded in Detroit.ĭespite starting out offering a line of Chinese cuisine, it was acutally founded by a Korean immigrant, Ilhan New.
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