A grill that cooked both sides at once.

The grill that carries George Foreman’s name began with a product designer rather than a boxer. In November 2000 the business channel CNNfn profiled Michael Boehm, an independent designer who worked from rooms full of drafting tables, workbenches and spare parts in his home in Batavia, Illinois. The report said Boehm had studied design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, had worked as an industrial designer for large American companies while developing his own products on the side, and had picked up the habit as a child from his father, an automotive designer at the Studebaker design studios.

According to that profile, the idea came on one of Boehm’s regular visits to retail shops. Looking at the indoor grills on the shelves, he could not see why none of them cooked food on both sides at once. CNNfn quoted him on the result: “It was different, it had some magic and it fulfilled a need.” The report named Salton Inc. as the company with which Boehm eventually teamed up to manufacture and market the grill.

The patent record fills in the paperwork. United States patent 5,606,905, titled “Device for cooking foodstuffs,” was filed on 11 January 1995 and granted on 4 March 1997, according to the record published by Google Patents. It lists Michael W. Boehm and Robert W. Johnson by name and gives Tsann Kuen USA Inc. as the original assignee.

English Wikipedia, in its article on the grill, says Johnson carried out the engineering work and that the pair presented a bright yellow sample to Salton at its office in Mount Prospect, Illinois, under the name “The Fajita Express,” with a video showing the grill at work. The same article says Salton changed parts of the design, removing risers and a tray meant for taco shells, and that the grill went on sale in 1994, promoted in television infomercials featuring George Foreman, the heavyweight boxer.

A clamshell, a slope and a tray.

The grill’s look follows from its mechanism. English Wikipedia describes a clamshell design in which a heated lid and a heated base close over the food together, so it does not need turning. Each plate is grooved and coated, and the lower plate is set at an angle so that juices run down the grooves into a removable drip tray at the front. The same article credits Boehm with a floating hinge, which lets the lid sit level over pieces of different thickness.

Those three parts — the hinged lid, the sloping plate and the tray — gave the product a silhouette that later versions kept while changing the details. English Wikipedia records a “Next Grilleration” model in 2006 with plates that could be taken out for washing, and an “Evolve” grill in 2014 with interchangeable plates for waffles, a bake dish, small burgers, a flat griddle and a muffin pan. In October 2026 the brand’s US website grouped its range under the headings Smokeless Grills, Advanced Grills, Basic Grills, Indoor/Outdoor Grills and Beyond Grills.

The name came separately. English Wikipedia says Boehm was not involved in pairing the grill with Foreman: after a year of trade shows, Salton sent samples to people around the boxer, who passed one on to him to try. The grill then became known by his name, and the same article says that in 1999 Salton bought out the right to use that name outright, replacing an arrangement under which he had been paid a share of each grill sold.

For a brand, that history splits the roles three ways. The design is recorded in a trade-press profile of an independent designer and in a patent assigned to Tsann Kuen USA; the manufacturing and marketing are recorded as Salton’s; and the public face was a sportsman whose name became the product’s name.

Boxes, badges and flatware cases.

Small kitchen appliances and tableware reach people through a few repeated surfaces. An appliance is usually first met as a printed box on a shop shelf, with a photograph of the product, a name in large type and a short line about what it does. Once the box is opened, the name moves to a smaller badge: a moulded or printed mark on a lid, a hinge, a front panel or a control dial, sitting beside the switches and settings the owner will use every day.

Tableware works differently. Cutlery and flatware are often sold in a fitted box or a presentation case, with a pattern name printed on the lid or a card, while the maker’s mark is stamped small on the back of a handle. Plates and glasses may carry a backstamp or an etched mark that most people never look at.

Because of that, a name in this trade can travel a long way from the company that first used it. Each guide here sets out what can be checked about who started a brand, who owns it now and where its products are made, and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Salton to Spectrum Brands.

The company behind the name has changed since the 1990s. In February 2010 The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, reported that Spectrum Brands, the Atlanta-based consumer products company with major operations in Madison, had acquired Russell Hobbs Inc., a Florida firm whose small-appliance brands included George Foreman and Black & Decker. English Wikipedia dates the completion of that merger to 16 June 2010, and its article on Spectrum Brands lists George Foreman among the company’s home-appliance names alongside Remington, Black+Decker and Russell Hobbs.

The brand’s own websites show how that ownership is presented today. In October 2026 the UK site, georgeforeman.co.uk, carried a copyright line in the name of Spectrum Brands, Inc., while the US site, georgeforemancooking.com, carried one in the name of Empower Brands, LLC and linked to Spectrum Brands under a “Corporate” heading in its footer. Both sites lead with the George Foreman name and treat the grill as a family of products rather than a single model, with recipes, a grill guide and support pages alongside the product range.

Spectrum Brands has owned the George Foreman name since 2010, and the brand has kept its link to a single person throughout: the boxer’s name, not the designer’s or the manufacturer’s, is the brand name. Boehm’s part is recorded in the 2000 CNNfn profile and in the patent, and Johnson’s in the patent and in English Wikipedia’s account of the engineering.

For a design guide, George Foreman shows how a personal name can become the whole identity of a kitchen appliance, while the design work behind it sits in a patent and a trade-press profile. Compare Russell Hobbs, the small-appliance name of the firm Spectrum Brands bought in 2010, and Hamilton Beach, another American kitchen-appliance name. For this guide we use grill-plate black and an ember red with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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