The History of Reddi-Wip
Aaron “Bunny” Lapin was not a chemist or an engineer but a dairy salesman from St. Louis whose last name means rabbit in French, and he is the reason you have been squirting whipped cream directly into your mouth from a can since before you were old enough to know it wasn’t socially acceptable, which most people learn and then quietly continue doing anyway. That Reddi-Wip exists at all is the result of wartime rationing, a well-timed pivot, and a business network that included, at one point, a Chicago mobster, which is not a detail that tends to come up at Thanksgiving but probably should.
The underlying technology actually predates Lapin by about fifteen years. In the early 1930s, a chemistry graduate student named Charles Getz at the University of Illinois discovered that milk would foam under pressurized gas, which is the kind of finding that emerges when you give a graduate student a laboratory and enough unstructured time to get curious about dairy physics. Carbon dioxide worked mechanically but altered the taste of the cream. Nitrous oxide worked and didn’t alter anything except, eventually, the judgment of the man arrested in 1986 for huffing five cans of Reddi-Wip in a store and refusing to pay for them. Getz’s adviser, Professor G. Frederick Smith, commercialized the nitrous oxide method as Instantwhip Foods. The technology was established. The mass-market consumer product was not.
Lapin came at the problem from an entirely different angle. During World War II, with real dairy cream rationed, he had been selling Sta-Whip, a vegetable oil substitute that he supplied to bakers through a refillable aerating device called the Fount-Wip. When rationing ended and cream became available again, he understood something his competitors had not fully acted on: the postwar American consumer wanted the result of whipped cream without the effort of making it, which was a reasonable thing to want and a commercially significant one. In 1948, working with Aaron Block and engineering a new tilt-to-open valve that preserved the nitrous oxide propellant across multiple uses, Lapin put real whipped cream into a seamless lined spray can and announced to a room of skeptical manufacturers that they were witnessing the beginning of pressure-propelled packaging. Most of them appear to have been skeptical. The market was not.
St. Louis milkmen began delivering Reddi-Wip door to door in 1948, and the product moved fast enough that by 1951 annual sales had topped seven million dollars, at which point Lapin was thirty-seven years old and reportedly running his offices at 3938 Lindell Boulevard from a deep leather swivel chair with his nickname stitched in red letters on his shirts, which is either extremely charming or extremely a lot depending on your tolerance for that kind of thing. National distribution followed in 1954. Promotions began running in national magazines shortly after, offering tiny plastic Dolls of the World in exchange for pull tabs and a modest cash contribution, which worked well enough that the brand’s reputation eventually crossed the Atlantic. A German newspaper reviewed Reddi-Wip as a culinary heavy-crime and a true party for windbags while simultaneously defending it on the grounds that whipped cream need not always be beaten freshly when it could instead be pressed as gekringelte sausage from the can, which is an accurate description filtered through Google Translate and also the most honest product review the brand has ever received.
Lapin sold the company in 1963, and Hunt-Wesson acquired it in 1968 from Marcus Lipsky, his brother-in-law, who happened to be an associate of Chicago mobster Ross Prio. Reddi-Wip’s ownership chain moves from a St. Louis salesman named after a rabbit through a mob-adjacent Chicago transaction to Hunt-Wesson to Beatrice Foods to Conagra Brands, which is not the kind of lineage that gets featured in the brand’s current marketing but does suggest that the mid-century whipped cream industry was considerably more textured than its domestic image implied. Hunt-Wesson briefly introduced amaretto and butterscotch flavors in 1983, neither of which survived, which is probably the correct outcome. Conagra took full ownership in 1990 and has since expanded the line into Extra Creamy, Fat Free, Zero Sugar, Barista, and two plant-based varieties made with coconut and almond cream, because no consumer product is permitted to remain a single thing anymore.
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Reddi-Wip is currently the second most consumed whipped topping brand in the United States, behind Cool Whip, which is not actually whipped cream but a hydrogenated oil emulsion that Reddi-Wip’s own marketing materials are visibly irritated about. Bunny Lapin made Time’s list of Business Geniuses of the Century in 1998 and died the following year at eighty-five. His obituary ran with a photo of the can. He reportedly wanted to foam up ketchup and mustard at some point, a dream he never fulfilled, which is the one instance where his judgment clearly failed him and the world is better for it.
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