You don’t generally think of any company spokesperson as someone who can’t actually speak. But in the case of Gerber, an exception is really the rule.
A 7-month-old baby from East Petersburg, Penn., was selected as the 5th annual Gerber Be Our Baby Photo Search winner. Plucked from an adorably large field of 180,000 other cuties, Baby Grace will receive a $50,000 prize, a year’s supply of baby food, and appear in a future Gerber advertisement.
“The photo that won was taken only 5 photos from when I started taking pictures of her that day,” Grace’s mom said of the winning snapshot. “She must have taken her hands out of her mouth and posed them like that for a split second because I didn’t even realize how cute she was posing until after I was completely done taking pictures and looking back at what I had just taken!”
The very first Gerber baby was anointed in 1928 when an artist named Dorothy Hope Smith submitted a charcoal sketch of her neighbors’ baby — the lovely and lively Ann Turner Cook. Nearly 90 years later, Ann’s face is still the image most closely associated with the brand.
While there is no doubt that Grace is a doll, and Ann is a cherub, I’d be biased if I didn’t say my daughters, now ages 3 and 6, could have easily won the contest back in the day. And while I don’t have that much of an ego, I still think I was a pretty cute kid, too (don’t ask; I don’t know what’s happened since). The only issue would have been my girls sitting still and ceasing their whining long enough to look precious for more than 4 seconds. Frankly, I probably would have whined, too. Still, weren’t we cute?
Fortunately for the severely biased parents among us, Gerber admits that “every baby entered is a Gerber baby.” It’s just that Grace’s “captivating charm stole the judges’ hearts,” according to a Gerber marketing specialist.
Top photo credit: Gerber
Bottom photo credit: Meredith Carroll