This Week in the West: J.R. Simplot

This Week in the West · May 19, 2025 · 4m

🤠This Week in the West

🎙️ Episode 29: J.R. Simplot

📢 Episode Summary:

This week on This Week in The West, we go to high desert of southern Idaho to remember one of the American West’s most influential—and unlikely—business pioneers: J.R. Simplot, the self-taught farm boy who became the “Potato King.” On the anniversary of his death, we trace Simplot’s incredible rise from a 14-year-old school dropout experimenting with potato storage to a titan of agribusiness whose innovations helped define both wartime rations and the fast food era.

The episode explores how Simplot’s early experiments with…