A skilled baker, Mabel Holmes used a twin-oven stove in the 1940s. During that time, she served as president of Chelsea Milling Co. following the death of her husband, Howard S. Holmes, in 1936.
A lunch date with a schoolmate, arranged by twin brothers Howard and Dudley Holmes at their Chelsea home in April 1930, provided the catalyst for a new industry in Michigan — and the world — that continues to flourish today.
Although the twins’ mother, Mabel White Holmes, had prepared a meal for the boys, their friend’s father, a single parent, packed a lunch for his son.
While the boys were outside, Holmes peeked inside the visitor’s lunch. At the top of the bag was a flat, unappetizing-looking biscuit that she later described as resembling a hockey puck. In that moment, she realized just how difficult it must have been for that father to make a baked treat from scratch.
Inspired by the dad’s hard biscuit, she decided she would invent a prepared baking mix that would be so easy to make that, as she said, “even a man could use it.”
Howard S. Holmes, who operated Chelsea Milling Co., shared his wife’s enthusiasm for the project and encouraged her as she experimented with various ingredients and measurements in the kitchen. It helped that her family also had owned a mill, so she was knowledgeable about flour and baking products.
Mabel White Holmes envisioned a mix that included most of the necessary ingredients
inside a box. The package would contain just enough mix to produce baked treats for one family meal, keeping waste to a minimum. After much trial and error, she came up with a product that required only the addition of milk and an egg to make perfect biscuits every time.
The couple now needed a name for their new retail offering. It came soon after, as the pair was driving home through heavy rainfall from a business trip to Chicago. As she rode in the car, Mabel White Holmes had a “eureka moment.”
Reminiscing about her childhood, she recalled her father’s fondness for hot biscuits, and remembered the family cook announcing at lunchtime that the biscuits she was making would be “ready in a jiffy.”
“That’s it!” she exclaimed. “That’s what we’ll call it.”
As America’s first prepared baking mix, Jiffy quickly gained the attention of consumers when one of the country’s largest grocery chains, C.F. Smith, which had 600 stores, began stocking the new Jiffy mix. It was also significant that the product, which cost less than $1, was introduced during the Great Depression, making it a budget-friendly staple for family meals.
Today, Howard “Howdy” Holmes, Mabel’s grandson, is CEO and chairman of the board of Jiffy’s parent company, Chelsea Milling Co. He relates how his grandparents brought out their baking mix product just ahead of the competition.
“As it turns out, there was a General Mills sales guy who was in Detroit checking on things and he happened to see this box of Jiffy all-purpose baking mix,” Holmes says. “Of course he couldn’t get back to Minneapolis (General Mills’ headquarters) fast enough; I believe he took the train. He told his people what he saw in a Smith store and, of course, they followed suit and developed their mix, Bisquick, which came out nine months later in 1931.”
Mabel White Holmes was born in 1890. She graduated from Chelsea High School and Eastern Michigan University, which was known then as Ypsilanti Normal College. Her father owned White Milling Co. in Chelsea, which was later purchased by Harmon Samuel Holmes, a prominent local businessman and mill owner. Harmon Holmes would later turn his milling business over to his son, Howard Sumner Holmes, Mabel’s husband. The name of the combined businesses was changed to Chelsea Milling Co. in 1923.
After Mabel White Holmes’ ready-made mix hit the market, it changed the focus of Chelsea
Milling from producing flour for households to creating Jiffy baking mixes. In 1936, the Holmes family was devastated when Howard Holmes, then age 50, fell 90 feet to his death in one of the company’s grain silos.
Mabel White Holmes succeeded him as president of the company. Her twin sons, Dudley and Howard Jr., then 23 and recent graduates of the University of Michigan, joined her. The transition she and the twins made running the company wasn’t always smooth, Howdy Holmes says.
“My grandmother thought up this idea: One year Dudley would be president and my father, Howard, would be vice president, and then they would trade off every year,” Holmes says, chuckling. “They tried it for a while but that didn’t work out very well.”
As president of the company, Mabel White Holmes solidified the Jiffy brand as the top player in the prepared mix market in the United States. In 1940, she stepped down as president while remaining active with the company for decades on the board of directors.
She died in November 1977, a month shy of her 87th birthday. She was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame in 2015.
Howard Holmes succeeded his mother as president and ran the company for the next 50 years, while Dudley became secretary and treasurer.
When America entered World War II, Dudley Holmes enlisted in the U.S. Navy and saw combat in the Pacific theater. After the war ended, he worked briefly as a commodities broker in Chicago and Detroit before returning to the company.
The brothers are credited with modernizing the Chelsea operation and keeping it ahead of their rivals. Dudley, who oversaw plant operations, designed an advanced test kitchen in the plant.
“The scales we used were so sensitive they could detect the difference between two and three grains of sugar,” he said. “The mixes had to be done exactly.”
Howard Holmes, who had earned an engineering degree at U-M, introduced computer-controlled warehousing in the plant. He also designed a conveyance system and instituted Jiffy’s policy of shunning advertising, coupons, and giveaways of Jiffy products, which remains in effect today. The distinct blue-topped Jiffy boxes on shelves were advertising enough, he said.
“The reason we don’t advertise is it costs money,” Howdy Homes says. “In business, you want to develop an unfair advantage that your competition can’t duplicate. Everybody else thinks advertising is the right thing to do. I wouldn’t agree or disagree with that. But by not doing it, we’ve passed those savings on to the consumer.”
Although Holmes began working part time in the Chelsea mill as a teenager, he took a different lane to the top job.
He left Jiffy in 1968 and spent 20 years as a race car driver. After winning the open-wheel racing Formula Atlantic Championship, Holmes moved up to the Indy car circuit, where he became a fan favorite. He competed six times in the Indianapolis 500, driving the Jiffy mix-sponsored Armstrong Wildcat. He was named Rookie of the Year in 1979 and qualified second on the starting grid, in the middle of the front row, for the 1984 Indianapolis 500 race.
Returning to Jiffy and Chelsea in 1988, Holmes brought along his hard-charging racing style and related business experience to Jiffy management. He hired professional managers and introduced business systems that made Team Jiffy, as he dubbed the company, more efficient while remaining true to the company’s distinct family values.
Those efforts vertically integrated all Jiffy functions, making the company more competitive.
“We print our own boxes,” Holmes says. “We store our own wheat. We mill our own flour. Our packaging we do ourselves, so we can control quality and cost better.”
Despite competition from industry giants like Pillsbury and General Foods, Jiffy’s 14 different mixes, varying from biscuits and muffins to pizza and pie crusts, remain leaders in the field.
“Not only is our corn muffin the largest-selling dry grocery item in the United States, our honey corn muffins are at No. 3 in muffins. So we’ve got two of the top three units in dry grocery in the United States,” Holmes says.
The company produces 1.6 million boxes of the top-selling corn muffin mix daily, which Holmes says represents a healthy percentage of the company’s retail profits.
In turn, Jiffy shipped 216 million boxes of mix to retail stores nationwide last year, while the food service division accounted for 101 million pounds of mix, Holmes says.
Jiffy owes its success to his grandmother, Mabel White Holmes, Holmes acknowledges. “To her credit, she invented the first all-purpose baking mix ever and, in essence, she started an industry.”
