Enoch Luther (E.L.) Griffith graduated from Soule College in Dodge City, Kansas, in 1888. Before he moved to Chicago, he taught school for a term and then sold supplies and maps to schools for a short time.
Always an entrepreneur E.L. bought pickles from C.F. Claussen & Sons and resold them to Chicago housewives door-to-door off of a horse drawn carriage. It was a profitable business, to everyone's surprise — until the day before Thanksgiving in 1895. While making a late delivery E.L. dozed off. When he woke up, he had a broken arm and leg, a dead horse, and found that his buggy and products had been scattered everywhere by a collision with a fast freight train.
The pickle business behind him, he became the financial backer for a man the family called "a crazy chemist." E.L. and the chemist had an idea — to create nitrates from the air, which was considered lunacy at the time. Although E.L. was unable to fund the scientist properly and the idea failed, German chemists later succeeded. They invented what is now called the nitrogen fixation processes, the most famous of which is the Haber-Bosch process.
Next, E.L. purchased a defunct gold mine. He cleaned up the mine and was ready to begin operations when the previous owners found a flaw in the sales contract. They took back the gold mine and E.L.'s entire investment was lost.
However, at just about that time, a friend and family neighbor offered E.L.'s son, Carroll Ladd Griffith, an opportunity. How would he like to take over a small pharmacy that served doctors as they made their rounds?
Seeing a golden opportunity, C.L. Griffith changed his plans. He had expected to attend the University of Illinois to earn a degree in agriculture. Instead, he enrolled in the Northwestern University School of Pharmacy.
Once he graduated, C.L. ran the pharmacy (which the family referred to as The Laboratory) until World War I when he entered the service. E.L. operated "The Laboratory" and a corn flour processing business while his son served his country.
When the war was over and his son had returned home safely, E.L. talked with him about his vision — to start a new company that would take science to the food industry.
E.L. believed that the food industry was stuck in a serious rut. The industry was using the same processes it had used for generations — but which had little or no scientific or technical foundation.
E.L. knew his son's scientific background and his own connections in the food industry would make them a great team to start this new company. Griffith Laboratories was born. From the beginning, the company's vision has been to bring reliable science to the food industry to make better products more quickly and less expensively using the latest technology.