Word: generalities
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Mortimer wants products with the widest popular appeal, shies away from the specialized or offbeat food. At General Foods, this policy has resulted in a pretax profit of 10? on sales v. 6.8? for the No. 3 processor, Standard Brands (Chase & Sanborn, Royal desserts, etc.), but well below the 14.8? of Campbell Soup, the No. 2 company. Overall, General Foods profits have risen from $28 million in 1954, when Mortimer took over, to an estimated $60 million this year. But Mortimer is still not satisfied with some of his products, notably the Gourmet line, intends to make some changes. Says...
Keen Smell. To find the products that General Foods should sell, the company runs the biggest private food-research laboratory in the U.S. on a 55-acre site at Tarrytown, N.Y., also keeps 155 women busy in a mammoth test kitchen in suburban White Plains. The kitchens are run by Vice President Ellen-Ann Dunham, a bright and forceful woman of 47, who likes to cook from scratch. Both lab and kitchen are filled with people who have been selected for their keen sense of taste and smell, and-more important-their ability to describe differences...
Since Mortimer took over the company, General Foods has plunged more deeply into research. It used to spend .5% of its sales dollar on research, this year will spend 1.3%. Its laboratories are equipped with 19 storage rooms that simulate desert, winter, tropic and arctic climates to test how long products will stand up in each. They have a texturometer that can gauge the chewiness of everything from beefsteak to whipped cream, automatic analyzers that can tell how much gelatin is in a batch of JellO, or what kind of protein is in a piece of meat. The laboratories produced...
Creative Urge. General Foods is not above jumping into a new product that has already won medals on the consumer battlefield-even if a competitor holds the medals. When Swanson's originated the TV Dinner, and began plugging the new convenience, General Foods followed it into the frozen-dinner field. Swanson, now owned by Campbell Soup Co., has sold a quarter of a billion TV Dinners...
Unlike Campbell, General Foods has never had any strong consumer identification as a company, keeps its name in small print on packages. "We felt too much close association would be bad," says Mortimer. "A woman may use Swans Down cake mix but think Calumet baking powder is for the birds." On the other hand, the company yearns for the sort of public image built up by competitor General Mills, is now trying to create that image by publicizing the General Foods Kitchens...