The Gerber Baby Was a Real Person — and Her Name Was a Secret for 40 Years

That chubby-cheeked baby sketched on every Gerber jar? She was a real child, and for four decades nobody outside the company knew her name. The face belongs to Ann Turner Cook, who was about five months old in 1927 when her neighbor, artist Dorothy Hope Smith, made a simple charcoal sketch of her. When Gerber — then a young company processing baby food in Fremont, Michigan — held a 1928 contest for a face to front its national ad campaign, Smith submitted the unfinished sketch and noted she’d finish it if she won. The judges loved it exactly as it was and told her to leave it alone. It became the company trademark in 1931 and has been on the packaging ever since.

Here’s the fun part: Gerber kept the baby’s identity secret. For about 40 years, Americans guessed. Rumors swore it was Humphrey Bogart, or Elizabeth Taylor, or even Senator Bob Dole. The company finally revealed the truth in 1978. The mystery baby had grown up to become Ann Turner Cook, a retired English teacher and mystery novelist in Florida. She once said, “If you’re going to be a symbol for something, what could be more pleasant than a symbol for baby food?” She passed away in 2022 at age 95.

And Gerber really is a Michigan story. It started when Fremont mom Dorothy Gerber grew tired of hand-straining solid food for her baby and suggested the family’s canning company do it instead.