Comfort Food Staple ‘Jiffy Mix’ Is Pure Michigan and Run By a Former Indy 500 Driver

It's starting to get cold outside, which means it's time for the Comfort foods. Thick, hefty, hearty foods that stick to your ribs - it's seriously the best, and two of my favorites are Chili, and Beans and Cornbread.

Both of those aren't complete, though, without the namesake of the latter dish, and one of the biggest, and best manufacturers is right here in Michigan - Jiffy Mix.

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You can recognize the boxes from the end of the aisle at the grocery story. Jiffy Mix is iconic and classic, with its simple powder blue box, white background, and food item on the box. Even as I'm typing this out, I can see it in my head, and taste that cornbread, feel the fluffy/gritty texture on my tongue.

It's barely changed in my lifetime, or, in its entire (nearly) 100 year run as a company, but its roots date back even further in Michigan.

Originally, Jiffy Mix was a commercial operation that only sold to other businesses - Chelsea Milling Company, in Chelsea, Michigan. But in the 1930s, company owner Mabel White Holmes started making her own baking mixes for biscuits that were "so easy, even a man could do it."

Jiffy Mix was born.

From there, the company began producing all of the product for Jiffy Mix in house. This included grain storage, the grinding of the grains into flour, product mixing, and manufacturing their own packaging in Marshall. Even the equipment is maintained, machined, and manufactured by personnel at Jiffy Mix and the Chelsea Milling Company.

And to this day, a significant amount of the products they produce come from Michigan-sourced and raised crops, though some products are brought in regionally from Illinois and Indiana.

Chelsea Milling Company is still the parent company of Jiffy Mix to this day, and now, it's owned and managed by Holmes' grandson, Howdy Holmes, who is a former Indy 500 and CART driver.

To this day, they produce 1.6 million boxes of their products per day, meaning there's no shortage of cornbread and biscuit mix for my "homemade" Biscuits and Gravy, or Beans & Cornbread.

So easy, a 'MEATBALL' can make it.