The story
Early history and founding
In 1924, Harry Hoenselaar created a bone-in spiral-slicer that smoked and cooked a ham. He said the idea for the spiral ham slicer "came to him in a dream". Hoenselaar built his prototype spiral slicer using "a tire jack, a pie tin, a washing machine motor, and a knife".
In the 1930s, Hoenselaar sold honey-glazed hams to drugstores in Detroit. Hoenselaar taught lunch counter clerks the proper procedure of slicing ham for sandwiches with a knife; he later bought that drugstore in Detroit from the widow of the previous owner for five hundred dollars. With Hoenselaar's commitment to his slicer, and residing in Detroit, Hoenselaar founded The HoneyBaked Ham Company and Café in 1957.
Expansion
When the company expanded nationally, he divided the country into four territories and assigned a territory to each of his four daughters.
The company is presently headed by Hoenselaar's granddaughter, Linda van Rees, who moved the headquarters to Alpharetta, Georgia in 2015.
The Honey Baked Ham Company, LLC has grown to over 200 company owned retail stores and 200 franchise locations across the United States, as well as an ecommerce business. As of May 2017, the company is headquartered in Alpharetta and privately owned by the Hoenselaar family. As of June 5, 2020, it had 492 outlets across the United States.
From Wikipedia’s article on The Honey Baked Ham Company, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5