Word: tomatoes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Hundreds of huge, two-trailered trucks chugged last week along the roads of Southern California, where from now until November they will shuttle constantly between ripened fields of tomatoes and bustling canneries. By season's peak, an awesome Niagara of tomatoes amounting to about 80 million lbs. weekly will be picked, stemmed, stewed and squashed, processed into juice, sauces, catsup and paste. What ever the style, most of them will bear the bright red label of Hunt Foods & Industries, Inc., the world's largest packer and distributor of tomato products and the corporate creation of a remarkable...
Writing the Book. Running a tomato empire may seem a somewhat unusual occupation for a man who prides himself on being an intellectual, a patron of the arts and an enemy of orthodoxy in business. But Norton Simon, 56, the boss of Hunt Foods, is all of these. A well-groomed, soft-spoken man who is impatient with chitchat, Simon makes friends more quickly with ideas than with fellow businessmen, relentlessly questions the obvious, and declines to go by the book-he likes to write it himself. With a sort of business existentialism, he lives by what he calls...
...whatever name it is called, Norton Simon's drive is impressive. Though tomatoes still account for nearly 25% of Hunt's sales, Simon has relentlessly expanded the company's horizons over the past decade, raised its sales from $82 million to $400 million. Hunt is now the largest refiner of cottonseed oil in the U.S. (Wesson Oil), the nation's second-biggest matchmaker (Ohio Match), the largest paint manufacturer and distributor in the West (W. P. Fuller), and the' West's second-largest maker of glass containers. It also owns important interests in areas...
...grocery chains by stopping Hunt's longtime private-label canning for them to push products under Hunt's own name. After the war, he decided that the best way to make Hunt known Nationally was to concentrate his advertising and promotion on a single item. He chose tomato sauce, and launched a major campaign that eventually captured half of the U.S. market for Hunt...
Since Hunt had distributed millions of tomato-sauce recipes printed on paper matchbooks, it seemed only natural to Simon to buy up the company that made the matches: Ohio Match. That led him into lumber investments, and at roughly the same time he logically acquired companies that could make his cans and bottles, lithograph his labels and use his tomatoes for catsup. His biggest merger came in 1960 with Wesson Oil & Snowdrift Co., and last year Simon took over W. P. Fuller. While studying rotogravure printing for Ohio Match, Simon got interested in McCall Corp., bought a 36% interest...