Today’s the day. The fireworks are in place, the blueberry pies are getting pulled out of the oven, and yes, the hot dogs are flowing, especially on Coney Island, where over 400,000 people will gather to watch them literally flow into the gullets of competitive eating legends outside Nathan’s Hot Dogs, a legendary enterprise that has been hosting these hot dog eating competitions on this very day for decades! But how exactly does something like that even begin? Well, one would have to trace their way back to the start, back to Ellis Island in 1916.

It was somewhere around here that a Polish immigrant by the name of Nathan Handwerker made his way into the port city and, filled with dreams and many an idea, began a life. When Handwerker was 23, he started working at a fancy hot dog stand, Feltman’s, on Coney Island, where they sold hot dogs for 10 cents apiece, which was pricey at the time. Handwerker, catching onto this quick, decided he’d save up and start a competing business that sold hot dogs just down the road at half the price.

So, he did it; he spent years working at Feltman’s trying to save up some money, and eventually when he had $300, he started his own hotdog stand just down the street, seeing how much of a hit this food was and possibly predicting the hotdog’s place in history as a Coney Island staple. There was just one problem, though: business didn’t take off immediately because customers were wary of buying cheap meat, and with Feltman’s across the corner selling hotdogs at 10 cents apiece, the 5-cent dogs at Nathan’s seemed a little suspect. That is, until Handwerker, the visionary, had one of the best marketing ideas of all time!

Nathan Handwerker hired actors to play doctors and eat hot dogs outside his stall! Thinking, surely, if people see doctors eating these hot dogs, they’ll trust them to be healthy, and guess what? It worked. The crowds started pouring in for the cheaper hot dogs, and in just a few decades, Nathan’s Hot Dogs was everywhere, from grocery stores to stadiums to airports. But the folklore behind this empire doesn’t end there; there is then the Fourth of July competition, which was a whole other moment of business genius.

The backstory of the 4th of July Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest

Nathan Handwerker, whose mind was wired for business, came up with a very inspiring story and patriotic tale that had people feeling the feels come Independence Day. Handwerker coined up the tale that on the 4th of July 1916, 4 immigrants had a contest to see who was the most patriotic by eating hot dogs outside Nathan’s stall. Later on this was proved to be a myth, but in the 1970s it was the business’s origin story, and it turned into its own competition.

By the 90s it was such a huge event that ESPN started to broadcast the contest to millions nationwide. That, plus the hundreds of thousands of people that turned up to the stands, was a huge business success for Nathan’s and has now amounted to a billion-dollar company that sells over 150 million hot dogs on the Fourth of July weekend and that is the biggest hot dog brand in the world.

As Nathan’s, and the fans, gear up for the 52nd year of the contest tomorrow, Pat Bertoletti, the defending champion, will be competing against Joey Chestnut, the sixteen-time champion, for the $10,000 prize money, and Miki Sudo, who claimed her championship title for the tenth time last year, will be defending it on the women’s side. And to think, all this from one man with a vision and some tongue-in-cheek marketing ideas!