Ann Taylor Cook dies at 95 on Friday

The original Gerber baby, whose face has been on the jar for almost 90 years, died on Friday at the age of 95, according to the business.

The firm expressed its sorrow over Ann Turner Cook’s death and expressed condolences to her family.

Cook, who was born in 1926, spent only a few months of her life as the famous face of one of the most well-known American infant brands.

Dorothy Hope Smith, a neighbor, drew the tiny child with charcoal and placed it into a Gerber baby food commercial campaign in 1928. The company wants to switch from ABC blocks to a real baby’s face on its package.

Smith told the firm that if she won, she would finish the sketch and turn it into an oil painting, but they liked the original sketch so much that they opted to keep it.

‘Many years before becoming an extraordinary mother, teacher and writer, her smile and expressive curiosity captured hearts everywhere and will continue to live on as a symbol for all babies,’ Gerber wrote in an Instagram tribute.

‘I was probably about 3 years old when mother pointed at a baby food jar and said that was my picture,’ she said in an interview with CBS Sunday Mornings in 2013. ‘I thought it was quite a lovely thing.’

The teacher and writer recalls her own children walking through a grocery store and pointing to the Gerber baby food and saying to passers-by, “That’s my mother’s picture.”

‘I didn’t know whether to stop and explain, because it’s kind of a complicated story or just kind of grin and go on,’ she said in 2013.