Word: paulucci
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Pint-sized Jeno Paulucci is a blend of tough tycoon and softhearted humanitarian. Twice in the past 25 years he has built multimillion-dollar enterprises in the turbulent food-packaging business. At the same time he has taken pride in hiring and training the handicapped and others usually considered unemployable, many of them eligible for welfare payments. More than half of Paulucci's employees in Duluth, Minn., are missing fingers, must wear neck or leg braces, or are deaf mutes, mentally retarded, partially blind, alcoholics or ex-prisoners. As a result, the President's Committee on Employment...
Such purposeful foolery, cooked up by Freberg in cooperation with the Manhattan ad agency he whimsically refers to as Batten, Barton, Durstine & Yangpoo, have helped make a flamboyant. 43-year-old businessman named Jeno Paulucci (pronounced Puh-loo-chee) the nation's most successful manufacturer of Chinese food. Barely 15 years old, Paulucci's Duluth-based Chun King Corp. now rings up more than half of all U.S. sales of packaged Chinese food. Chun King's gross climbed 15% to $30 million last year, and Paulucci-who owns the whole company-expects a still fatter gain this...
...Good Earth. Puckish, pint-sized (5 ft. 5 in.) Jeno Paulucci, an Italian immigrant's son from the Minnesota iron range, started in the food business helping his mother sell home-canned pasta in her living room, later worked as a sidewalk vegetable barker and roaming grocery salesman. Just after World War II, he bought a Chinese food cannery in Duluth, and in 1947 began to turn out a spicy chow mein derived from recipes that he whipped up himself on his mother's stove. "It's not so bland as Chinese chow mein." he explains...
...constructing his food empire, which now stretches from frozen egg foo yung to a fruit pie-filling firm called Northland Foods. Paulucci adhered to a two-point credo: "Cut out the middleman" and "Take advantage of waste." Shopping for bargains around the world, Chun King buys beef from Australia and shrimp from Ecuador, contracts directly with Chippewa Indians for wild rice and with Oklahoma and Texas farmers for mung beans, from which bean sprouts are grown. The simpler ingredients, such as celery and mushrooms, Chun King produces for itself-and here the profiting from waste enters. When Paulucci found...
Slippery Sauce. Oddly enough, the only time Paulucci ran into trouble was in selling Italian food. Four years ago, he decided to market his mother's version of tomato sauce and other Italian delicacies under the trade name Jeno, and put on a noisy sales campaign with company executives dashing around garbed in the Jeno symbol, a wide Italian hat. "Trouble was," says Paulucci. "we were selling a symbol, not a product. It was an utter failure." He lost $200,000, now sells only spaghetti sauce and pizza...