Abbey Fleck
Encyclopedia
Minnesota
Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...
invented the Makin' Bacon microwave
Microwave
Microwaves, a subset of radio waves, have wavelengths ranging from as long as one meter to as short as one millimeter, or equivalently, with frequencies between 300 MHz and 300 GHz. This broad definition includes both UHF and EHF , and various sources use different boundaries...
oven bacon
Bacon
Bacon is a cured meat prepared from a pig. It is first cured using large quantities of salt, either in a brine or in a dry packing; the result is fresh bacon . Fresh bacon may then be further dried for weeks or months in cold air, boiled, or smoked. Fresh and dried bacon must be cooked before eating...
cooker in 1991 when she was 8 years old. Abbey and her father Jonathan Fleck founded the A. de F. Ltd. company, filed for a patent and started to sell the Makin' Bacon dish. In 1996 their "microwave cooking vessel" was granted a U.S. Patent. Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. , branded as Walmart since 2008 and Wal-Mart before then, is an American public multinational corporation that runs chains of large discount department stores and warehouse stores. The company is the world's 18th largest public corporation, according to the Forbes Global 2000...
required an initial order of 100,000 cookers, so her grandfather obtained start-up loan for manufacturing.
The successful promotion of her product included Abbey appearing as a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Late Night with David Letterman, two features on Dateline NBC and many others.
Abbey is now married and lives in southern California.