Step 1 : Introduction to the question "Which of these company figureheads was a real person?"
Chef Boyardee was indeed a real person. Ettore Boiardi was an Italian-American immigrant who came to America at the age of 16 and took the name “Hector Boiardi” as he passed through Ellis Island. He worked at a variety of high end restaurants in New York as a cook, eventually working his way up to Chef. At the age of 24, he moved to Cleveland and opened a restaurant with his wife. He came up with the now famous brand name “Chef Boyardee”, changing the spelling of his name to be phonetically correct to help Americans pronounce his name correctly.