The company prospered. It developed a clientele among both re­tailers and wholesalers. The major Italian middlemen who worked the Northeastern market bought large orders of Uddo-Taormina toma­toes. “We were playing both ends of the stick,” Frank Uddo, who was now working with the company, said.

World War II boosted sales. “During the war you could pack any­thing and sell it,” Frank said. The company had to increase domestic production because “they couldn’t import any product,” John Taormina, Vincent’s son, recalled. In 1942 they bought an old factory in Vineland, New Jersey.

The southern Jersey plant was in the heartland of Italian farmers. Settlers from southern Italy got their start as strawberry and raspberry pickers or as railroad or brick workers in the late nineteenth century and soon saved enough to buy their own land. The rugged pinelands soil was soon producing a bounty of melons, pumpkins, tomatoes, eggplants, and other fruits and vegetables. The farmers grew grapes and made wine. Emily Meade, the sociologist and daughter of Mar­garet Mead, visited nearby Hammonton in 1907 and marveled at the Italian innovations: “Italians have popularized the sweet pepper and introduced. . . a peculiarly shaped squash, .okra, Italian greens, and various kinds of mint.”

The Vineland plant, Frank Uddo said, had the “largest smokestack on the East Coast.” Workers canned and bottled roasted red peppers, sweet fried peppers, pepper salad, hot cherry peppers, tomato sauce, crushed tomatoes, tomato puree, and other products. Flo Alvino, who was hired to do the payroll for farmer suppliers, fondly remembers her early, exciting years with the company: “Farmers’ trucks were lined up on the boulevard. You could smell tomatoes all over Vineland.” Inside the plant, “women were cutting peppers by the handful.” Others “lined up on both sides of the conveyor belt looking for blemishes.”

Since farm vegetables were seasonal, the company started looking for a year-round product. Soups were the answer. From family recipes, it produced hearty, fibrous minestrone, thick with vegetables, beans, and pasta, and lentil soup, made from a bean beloved by the Romans. They developed a version of pasta e fagioli (pasta fazool), a mixture of broken-up pasta and beans in a tomato and salt-pork sauce that Italian immigrants subsisted on. Flo Alvino called it “mac and bean.” After the war, the Vineland plant started turning out the country’s earliest ready-to-serve soups: This ‘was the beginning of Progresso soups. “The sideline became our major line,” John Taormina pointed out.

From soups, they moved to beans, another peasant mainstay. A novelty for many Americans, they were a meal to the Italians. Fava beans, another favorite of the ancient Romans, became a filling dish after being mashed, mixed with greens, and dressed with olive oil. The Vineland business marketed cannellini, pinto, chickpeas, and black beans and changed the American diet.

Shoppers were now less fearful of ethnic products. Returning GIs “had been exposed to Italian food,” said John Taormina. More and more consumers in postwar America, including many from immigrant backgrounds, were now doing their buying at the supermarket. By marketing primarily to small grocery stores, however, Progresso was losing business. The company, plant manager Vincent Taormina ar­gued to his colleagues, had to crack the chains. Other officials coun­tered that this would mean losing older customers who could not compete with lower prices in the supermarkets. “You’d lose the foothold in the Italian deli,” John Taormina summed up their views.

Vincent Taormina carried the day. Progresso “made the leap into the supermarkets” in the late forties, John Taormina said. In the New York area, Acme was their first customer, and other chains followed. Frank Taormina went on the road, calling on stores in the South. He made a pitch to the Winn-Dixie chain. “I talked them into opening an Italian section in all their stores.” This became the Progresso for­mula-displaying its array of products in one space-and the example encouraged other immigrant enterprises. “This was the whole start of the ethnic foods that you see today,” John Taormina observed

A new brand name began appearing on the company’s products. The Progresso label was based on a pastel painting Giuseppe Uddo had bought for $150 many years before at the Progress Grocery in the French Market. Drawn by one of the brothers who owned the shop, it portrayed “progress” through the rise of new forms of transportation. The symbol of improvement appealed to new and older Americans alike. Having the same name as the most popular Italian-American newspaper, II Progresso, also made it attractive to ethnics.

Progresso advertised on radio and television. It hired an advertising agency that sent a soundtruck through Italian villages during World War II to record “letters” from family members to their American rel­atives. The Grande Famille, the radio program Progresso sponsored, broadcast these messages on Northeastern radio stations in the late forties. The company also sponsored Bishop Fulton Sheen’s television sermons during the fifties.

Once unusual, the products Progresso unveiled in the supermarkets have become commonplace. Its canned tuna in olive oil was a Sicilian favorite that gained a wider following. An early twentieth-century Si­cilian entrepreneur, Ignacio Florio, who was the first to manufacture the canned fish, made it an everyday item on the island. Tonno, the is­land’s favorite fish, enriched pasta, rice, and bean dishes.

Pine nuts, minced clams, capers, artichokes, and other specialty products also grew into household staples. Bread crumbs, both plain and Italian-style seasoned with fennel, garlic, and other spices, became one of the company’s largest sellers. Olive oil and bread crumbs, which “were big in the Italian community in New Orleans,” Frank Uddo said, gained national popularity.

The Uddo and Taormina clans fought over the control of Progresso after the death of Giuseppe Uddo in 1957. The founding father, a rock of stability, had kept the two sides at peace. When animosities threat­ened the survival of the business, the owners agreed to sell the firm to Imperial Tobacco, a Canadian corporation, in 1969. Pillsbury, which owns the company today, acquired it in 1995.

Michael Uddo, Frank’s son, is carrying on the Progresso tradition at the G and E Courtyard restaurant in New Orleans, located right around the corner from Giuseppe’s old headquarters. [The eatery is now closed.] He has vivid memories of growing up in the import business. “Something was al­ways coming in,” he recalled. He filled containers with olive oil and packed Greek olives, sometimes gorging on them until he was sick.

“Everything was done through the family,” Michael said. “We were required to be at meetings because we had stock.” The clan gathered for lunches of braised veal tongue, roast chicken with garlic and rose­mary, and other dishes prepared by his grandmother, Eleanora. Michael models his restaurant on Sicilian traditions. “It’s based on the same principles-rustic Italian food.

Today, Progresso, is a brand of General Mills, an American food company that produces canned soups, canned beans, broths, chili, and other food products.