Chili: Chili Products

The commercial development of chili powder spice mixtures made chili easier to prepare and helped spread the popularity of this dish to other parts of America, particularly to those regions where dried red peppers (whole or powdered) were not as commonly available as in the Southwest. The first commercial chili powders were manufactured and marketed in Texas. DeWitt Clinton Pendery, a grocer in Forth Worth, Texas, since the 1870s, established the Mexican Chilley Supply Company there in the early 1890s and began selling his brand of “Chiltomaline” powder to cafés and hotels in the state, while also touting the healthful properties of his product. At about the same time, William Gebhardt of New Braunfels, Texas, began packaging and selling his own chili spice mixture, and in 1896 he built a factory in San Antonio to produce “Gebhardt’s Eagle Chili Powder.” Both the Pendery and Gebhardt chili powders were still being sold at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century.