The first part of the Claus Spreckels story sounds like the quintessential American immigrant success story. He spent his entire career in foodways. In the 1840s, still a teenager, he left his family's poor farm in what is now northern Germany during the European Potato Failure.

Scraping together a passage in steerage, he emigrated to the USA, and landed with no money and no ability to speak English. Within a few short years, he successively ran his own grocery in Charlottesville, and then ran a grocery wholesale business in New York City.

In 1866, he, like so many young Americans, listened to the siren call of the West. He set up an innovative (and highly successful) brewery in San Francisco, and then challenged a monopolistic, poorly run West Coast sugar refinery.

A natural brilliance in operational efficiency and systems engineering, an intuition for growth markets, and a big appetite for risk allowed him to shoot to the top in whatever endeavor he tried. If his career were to have ended here, he would have died a wealthy businessman. But there's far more to his food disruption story, some of which leaves a bad taste.

In Claus Spreckels Part 1, we get the sugary setup for how this one man's determination to control a major food commodity continues to ripple in our foodways. His influence spreads as well to encompass profound cultural change, a recurring theme in stories of foodways disruption, which we'll explore further next week in Claus Spreckels Part 2.