One morning in 1993 an 8-year-old girl named Abbey Fleck and her dad were cooking bacon for breakfast. as she saw her dad’s struggle with all the bacon fat juice and cleaning it up with paper toils, she thought of an idea. What if there was a way to cook the bacon hanging as a dish of some sort collects the fat? That’s when Abbey and her father began to design what would eventually become the Makin’ Bacon dish. It’s a square, inch-deep skillet made of microwave-safe plastic. It has 3 T-shaped supports rising up from its center. The bacon cooks while draped over the crossbars of the central supports and the fat drips down into the dish.
Abbey’s solution and invention were not only an easier and healthier way to cook the bacon but it was also an inexpensive way. The dish itself only cost 7$. Knowing they had an amazing product Abbey and her father founded the company, A. de F. Ltd., and began selling Makin Bacon the next year. (1994) Since then the product has gotten tons of promotion from “Good Housekeeping” and they even negotiated a deal with Amour for the Makin Bacons packaging in the same year of release. Abbey even made a personal appearance on “The Late Night Show with David Letterman” and on “The Oprah Winfrey Show”.
Abbey has gained a lot of entrepreneurial experience since then. She settled a patent infringement suit against a company in Pennsylvania that had begun to sell a similar product of hers. She acquired a patent for her “microwave cooking machine” in 1996. Still only 11 years old at this point.
Today the Abbey Fleck’s Makin Bacon is available on Amazon and at Walmart. She got the offer from Wallmart to distribute her product fairly soon after her release.
She is an inspiration to fathers and daughters out there that can work together to create something great. Even at that young age to she had a natural knack for business and entrepreneurship. Thanks to her bacon is better!
This is definitely a cleaning problem, and she saw the need to make it better. I understand why people would want healthier and easier to clean options, and she did an amazing job recognizing that at a young age. However, in my personal opinion, cooking bacon in the fat and grease makes it taste so much better.