Tillie Ehrlich Lewis, later known as the 'Tomato Queen,' was born in Brooklyn, New York.
Tillie Ehrlich was born on June 13, 1896, in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish immigrant family. She grew up in modest circumstances and showed early entrepreneurial ambition, working in the garment and produce trades before eventually moving west to California.
Her early exposure to sales and business, combined with her tenacity in a era when women had few professional opportunities, set the stage for her extraordinary rise. She would go on to found Flotill Products, one of the largest fruit and vegetable canning operations in the United States, and later became a pioneer in the diet food industry with the Tillie Lewis Foods brand.
Her birth in a working-class immigrant household makes her later achievements as a self-made industrialist and one of the wealthiest women in America all the more historically remarkable, especially given the significant gender and ethnic barriers of the early 20th century business world.