Read on to see some fascinating photos that captured the beginning of these future giants.

America's largest supermarket chain grew from just one tiny grocery store. In 1883, its eponymous founder Barney Kroger used his entire life savings of $372, which is $9,755 in today's money, to open a small grocery store on Pearl Street in downtown Cincinnati. Kroger was very picky about the products he stocked and sold bread and other baked goods, which differentiated his store from the competition and cemented its success. 

America's number-one pharmacy came into being in 1901 as a diminutive neighborhood drugstore measuring just 50 feet by 20 feet. The pharmacy, located on the corner of Bowen and Cottage Grove Avenues in Chicago, was opened by Charles R Walgreen, who launched 19 stores by 1920. 

Swedish immigrant John W Nordstrom lucked out in the Klondike Gold Rush, cashing in to the tune of $13,000, around $96,000 in today's money. The plucky entrepreneur made a beeline for Seattle in 1901 and invested the money in a shoe store called Wallin & Nordstrom. The company expanded in the 1950s but didn't become a fully fledged department store chain until the 1960s.

Iconic American motorcycle manufacturer Harley-Davidson actually started out in a backyard shed. Company founders William S Harley and Arthur Davidson assembled the first real Harley-Davidson motorcycle in 1904 in a 10x15-foot shed located in the Davidson family's backyard in Milwaukee. The shed was preserved for posterity at the firm's Juneau Avenue factory but was accidentally destroyed in the early 1970s.

Back in 1923, Walt Disney created his first Hollywood cartoon film Alice's Wonderland in a small garage behind his uncle Robert's home at 4406 Kingswell Avenue in Loz Feliz, Los Angeles.

The world's largest chain of convenience stores originated in 1927 when Southland Ice Company employee John Jefferson Green began selling basics like eggs and bread on a stand in front of one of the firm's ice houses in Dallas. Company chairman Joe C Thompson loved the concept and opened several locations in Texas. The chain's name was changed to Tot'em Stores then 7-Eleven in 1946 to reflect its long opening hours.

KFC started mega-small in 1930 when its famous founder Colonel Harland Sanders snapped up a Shell service station on Route 25 just outside North Corbin and began selling fried chicken and other diner staples such as country ham and steaks to hungry travelers.

Like so many other super-successful firms it preceded, Hewlett-Packard was started in a garage. Back in 1939, Stanford University grads Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard launched their tech company in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California and produced their first successful product there, a precision audio oscillator. The garage, which has since been converted into a museum, is widely regarded as the birthplace of Silicon Valley.

After relocating to Hollywood from New Hampshire, the McDonald brothers opened a food stand called the Airdrome on Route 66 adjacent to LA County's Monrovia Airport in 1937. The compact stand started off selling hot dogs – hamburgers were added later along with all-you-can-drink orange juice. The octagonal stand was moved to San Bernardino in 1940 and the family started franchising the concept in 1955.

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Entrepreneur Sam Walton made his first foray into retail in 1945 when he paid $25,000, which is $351,000 in today's money, to franchise a Ben Franklin five and dime store in Newport, Arkansas. Buoyed on by the store's success, Walton opened the tiny Eagle department store and then a five and dime in Bentonville, Arkansas before lauching the very first Walmart location in Rogers, Arkansas in 1962.

Another hugely successful business that started out in a garage, Mattel, which has grown to become one of the world's biggest toy companies, was launched in 1945 out of a garage in Hawthorne, California by married couple Ruth and Elliot Handler and Harold “Matt” Matson. The firm first produced picture frames and then doll's house furniture upcycled from the picture frame scraps.

Dunkin', formerly Dunkin' Donuts, started in 1948 as a single doughnut store in Quincy, Massachusetts that sold the sweet treats along with cups of coffee. Founder William Rosenberg called it Open Kettle, then in 1950 changed the name to Dunkin' Donuts as suggested by an architect working for the firm, who enjoying dipping the store's doughnuts in the coffee.

Other major international companies started out modestly enough with a small shop or garage, but Nike trumps them all. The sportswear leviathan was founded in 1964 by college runner Phil Knight and his track coach Bill Bowerman in Eugene, Oregon with just $500, and operated out of the trunk of a Plymouth Valiant, from which Knight distributed Japanese Onitsuka Tiger running shoes.

These days Subway has tens of thousands of locations in over 100 countries but the chain started extremely small in 1965 with just one sandwich shop in Bridgeport, Connecticut called Pete's Super Submarines. The shop was initially named after co-founder and nuclear physicist's Dr Peter Buck's words to student Fred Deluca: "Let's open a submarine sandwich shop." It did a roaring trade, selling an average of 312 sandwiches a day, and owners Buck and Deluca franchised the concept not long after.

The very first Starbucks was opened at No 1912 Pike Place, Seattle on 31 March 1971 by three University of San Francisco grads (pictured) and only sold coffee beans. The company stayed super-small until entrepreneur Howard Schultz bought it out in 1987 and embarked on an ambitious expansion plan.

Whole Foods Market co-founders John Mackey and Renee Lawson borrowed money from friends and family in 1975 to set up their first business, a vegetarian natural foods store in Austin, Texas called SaferWay, and were forced to live in it for a time after they were evicted from their apartment. Two years later, the store merged with Clarksville Natural Grocery and Whole Foods Market was born.

Another incredibly successful company that was born in a garage is Microsoft. Originally named Micro-Soft, it was founded by childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen in a garage in Albuquerque, New Mexico on 4 April 1975. The fledgling computer firm started out developing software for the Altair 8800, the game-changing device that sparked the PC revolution.

Apple was born in 1976 in the garage of Steve Jobs' parents in Los Altos, California, where Steve Wozniak worked on the the company's first prototype computer, which Jobs funded by selling his hippie van – so the story goes. Wozniak has admitted that the bulk of the work on the Apple I was done elsewhere and the garage thing is "a bit of a myth." Still, the tech firm did start out very small. 

Now a subsidiary of Unilver, ice cream company Ben & Jerry's started out in May 1978 as an ice cream parlor in a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vermont. Founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield invested $12,000 to open the store. 

Founder Jeff Bezos, now one of the world's richest people, created the game-changing e-commerce site Amazon in 1994 in the garage of his three-bedroom rented home in the Seattle suburb of West Bellevue. Incidentally, the house (pictured) sold for just over $1.5 million in 2019.

Online shopping and auctions giant eBay was created by programmer Pierre Omidyar in September 1998 as the AuctionWeb, a hobby project that was part of his larger personal website. Omidyar wrote the code for the site at home in suburban San Jose, California over Labor Day weekend. The first product listed was a broken laser pointer.

Like Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, Google operated out of a garage during its early days. The search engine's founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page rented a garage in Menlo Park, California from September 1998 for $1,700 a month courtesy of their friend and future colleague Susan Wojcicki, who was struggling to meet her mortgage repayments.

Business networking service LinkedIn is an indispensable tool these days for professionals the world over and boasts over 740 million registered users but the firm began in 2002 in co-founder Reid Hoffman's living room in Mountain View, California (pictured).

Facebook has achieved bona fide global domination, but it actually started out in a dorm room at Harvard University. Mark Zuckerberg created the first version of the social media network in his residence halls at the Ivy League institution and launched the site from his dorm room back in 2004 during his sophomore year.

Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim came up with the idea for a video-sharing site after finding it hard to share video shot at a dinner party, and founded YouTube on Valentine's Day 2005. The original HQ was a small office in San Mateo, California conveniently situated above a pizzeria and a Japanese restaurant.

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Now take a look at some of America's oldest companies