Herman Lay

Lay was born in Charlotte, North Carolina on December 6 1909.^[1][2] 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.^[1] By 1920, they moved to Greenville, South Carolina.^[1] In 1922 his mother died of cancer and his father remarried.^[1] He then attended Furman University on an athletic scholarship for two years, but did not graduate.^[1][2]

He began his career at Sunshine Biscuits and was laid off because of the Great Depression.^[3][4] 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.^[5] His territory eventually expanded and his profits began to grow. In 1932, he borrowed US$100 and founded the H.W. Lay Distributing Company based in Atlanta, Georgia, a distributor for the Barrett Food Products Company, and began to hire employees.^[6][7][8] He peddled potato chips from Atlanta to Nashville, Tennessee.^[2][9] By 1937, he had 25 employees, and had begun producing his own line of snack foods.

The H.W. 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.^[1][2][10] In 1965, Herman W. 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 PepsiCo, Inc.^[11]

A philanthropist, he helped found the Association of Private Enterprise Education (APEE).^[3]

Lay married Sarah Amelia "Mimi" Harper^[12] and had four children.^[1] He died at the age of 73 on December 6, 1982.^[1] His late son, Herman Warden Lay Jr., was a Dallas-based co-founder of a bottling company in Mexico for Pepsi and 7 Up.^[13]