Word: curtisses
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...when he was 24, Schnering started a candy business with the help of four friends, a kitchen stove and a five-gallon kettle. He gave the business his mother's maiden name, Curtiss. It sputtered at the start for lack of capital; in 1920 it was caught with high-priced inventories amidst falling sugar prices; and in 1929 the crash nearly blew it apart-but each time Schnering kept it stuck together...
Profits & Pensions. Because stale stock ruined many a candymaker, Schnering sidestepped jobbers outside metropolitan centers, and developed a system whereby hundreds of truck-driving salesmen supplied Curtiss dealers. He spurred sales with profit & pension plans, and his 7,000 employees have never shown much interest in unionism...
Looking for other foods to fill his salesmen's trucks, Schnering was soon selling marshmallows, cookies, popcorn, soup mixes and some 80 other items. Now Curtiss sells $1.1 million in candy a week. The fact that Schnering was a big user of milk and other farm products helped start him looking around for a farm of his own. He wanted to show his suppliers how to produce high quality foodstuffs...
Mink & Trout. Last year Curtiss farms, stocked with 900 dairy cows, 9,000 hens (output: 2.5 million eggs annually), 8,000 turkeys, 200 beef cattle and 6,000 purebred hogs, rang up some $1,750,000 in sales. Schnering went into the risky business of raising broilers and, after experimenting with the chicks' diet, cut the growing time from twelve weeks to eleven weeks. He grossed $785,000 on 550,000 broilers...
...Curtiss farms, like the candy factory, are spick & span. The glass brick and tile barn for prize calves is air-conditioned, has electrically-charged screens to kill flies. There are calving and isolation wards. Explains Schnering: "Calf mortality on the average farm runs 25% to 40%. That's plain bad business. Our average is just about zero." Signs in the cow barns read: "Every cow on this farm is a lady and should be treated as such...