1955 - Imagine a company founded in 1955 on the innovative concept of serving the infant food-service industry with products designed to take work out of the kitchen by eliminating labor intensive food preparation and supplying restaurants with flash frozen, fry and serve hand-breaded onion rings! That's us! The year was 1955, Sam Quigley began the process of perfecting his recipes for hand cut and hand breaded onion rings and quietly sold a limited number of them out of his Nebraska storefront.

1959 - The response to Sam's "ready to serve" onion rings grew, and grew some more. A manufacturing location was secured and a plant was built. Taking a lesson from Henry Ford, new mechanized methods were introduced to the extremely labor intensive process of making onion rings. It can now be said that doing business as Sam's Onions, we began the first commercial manufacture of Natural, Raw, Breaded Onion Rings.

1961 - On March 15, 1961, Sam's Onions became Platte Valley Foods.

1962 - The product line was expanded to include a variety of breaded vegetable items. In 1962, the most popular of these was the mushroom.

1964 - All manufacturing operations were moved to Wahoo Nebraska. The Wahoo! Brand was first introduced.

1966 - Westin, Inc. purchased Platte Valley Foods, Wahoo, Nebraska.

1969 - What do you do for an encore when you already produce the best natural raw breaded onion rings and vegetables in the world? You build on your strengths and success. In 1969, we installed our first continuous frying process and added par-fried battered onion rings and vegetables to our growing selection of high quality products.

1973 - Wahoo! We began selling raw, breaded onion rings to International Dairy Queen. Twenty-seven years later we can proudly say that Dairy Queen is one of our oldest and best customers. Thank you Dairy Queen! It's been twenty-seven great years!

1990 - 1999 - Great American Appetizers developed an appetite for acquisitions purchasing. 1990 Diamond-E - Ohio 1992 Great American Breaded Vegetable Company - Rancho Dominges, Ca. 1994 Happy Valley Packers - Nampa, Idaho 1999 Phoenix Foods/Alternate Choice - Grand Island, Nebraska

1994 - New manufacturing facilities were built in Nampa, Idaho and all western operations were consolidated into this new facility.

1997 - Our name was changed to Great American Appetizers. www.appetizer.com was launched, and Great American Appetizers' newly re-launched Wahoo! brand appetizers lay claim to being the unofficial appetizer of the world wide web! Incredibly, we added thirty-two new products to our product offerings and gave our Wahoo! appetizers brand a fresh and fun look.

1998 - Our sales network was dramatically expanded to embrace markets from coast to coast. We welcomed many new customers and eighteen new brokers to our appetizer family.

1999 - An aggressive approach to the appetizer business coupled with embracing our customers allowed us to double our sales. A second fryer was added to our Nampa, Idaho facility.”

2000 - Wahoo! In the 60s the big thing was onion rings. In the 70s breaded vegetables were it. In the 80s cheese appetizers were hot, and in the 90s it was the stuffed jalapeno pepper (there are none better the ours, by the way). In 2000 look to Great American Appetizers for the BIG IDEA! Let's get to work and have some fun! ©2001