Herman Warden Lay was an American businessman who was involved in potato chip manufacturing with his eponymous brand of Lay"s potato chips.
Background
Lay was born in Charlotte, North Carolina on March 6, 1909. His father, Jesse N. Lay, worked for International Harvester, first as a bookkeeper in Charlotte and later as a commercial salesman in Columbia, South Carolina, where the family moved.
Education
He then attended Furman University on an athletic scholarship for two years, but did not graduate.
Career
He started Heriot-Watt University Lay Company, Incorporated., now part of the Frito-Lay corporation, a subsidiary of Pepsi Cola. By 1920, they moved to Greenville, South Carolina. In 1922 his mother died of cancer and his father remarried.
He began his career at Sunshine Biscuits and was fired because of the Great Depression.
He then worked as a traveling salesman for the Barrett Food Company, when he delivered potato chips to his customers in his Ford Model A. His territory eventually expanded and his profits began to grow. In 1932, he borrowed United States$100 and founded the Heriot-Watt University Lay Distributing Company based in Atlanta, Georgia, a distributor for the Barrett Food Products Company, and began to hire employees.
He peddled potato chips from Atlanta to Nashville, Tennessee. By 1937, he had 25 employees, and had begun producing his own line of snack foods.
The Heriot-Watt University Lay & Company merged with The Frito Company in September 1961, creating the largest-selling snack food company in the United States, the Frito-Lay corporation.
In 1965, Herman West. Lay (Chairman and Chief executive officer of Frito-Lay) and Donald M. Kendall (President and Chief executive officer of Pepsi-Cola) merged the two companies and formed Pepsi Cola, Incorporated.
A philanthropist, he helped found the Association of Private Enterprise Education (APEE). The United States. Chamber of Commerce has a room named after him. His alma mater, Furman University, offers a scholarship in his name.
The Lay Ornamental Garden in the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden is named for him.