Sandwiches also proved a steady seller, both to individual families and to convenience stores and bars. Supplying these stores with ready-to-eat food was becoming a big business. In , the company entered into what would become its signature product: pizza. A local route manager in north-central Wisconsin, Ted Versluys, found he was having a hard time keeping drivers. Some of his drivers were being lured away to take delivery routes run by a local pizza company, Roma, distributing its products to bars and stores.
Versluys was certain that pizza would sell well and convinced Marvin Schwan to let him go ahead. Marvin and Alfred decided that the company needed to control its own pizza production. The culture of the emerging company was shaped by Marvin, his values, and the people he hired.
Until the early s, there was little in the way of a formal human resources staff. Word of mouth and personal introductions from friends or family were the quickest ways to get hired.
Many employees were related or had grown up together. Lack of formal education was no barrier to advancement if a new hire was keen for the job and could work hard. Schwan preferred to hire employees from a rural Midwestern background similar to his own. These areas had a surplus of young people in the baby boom years following World War II who were used to working long hours on farms.
Promoting strong family values was always important to Marvin and his company, but he also realized that his best drivers were often those whose wives helped out with the business.
In addition to hiring from within a network of family and friends, the company promoted from within. The company developed a system of job bidding in which employees could apply for open positions within the company, with hiring based on previous performance. According to an employee handbook:. When a job vacancy occurs within a department, the department can promote from within the department.
Employees with at least six 6 months of seniority in their present job have the opportunity to bid for jobs. Job bid forms are available from your Supervisor. This was reinforced by the fact that the company remained privately held and even appears to have limited its involvement with large public banks and financial institutions.
Employees that sought to organize unions or initiate work place protests were fired. The employee handbook noted:.
The Company feels that by remaining union-free, the atmosphere between fellow employees and management will remain open and honest. Finally, the company was highly paternalistic. Employees were given Christmas bonuses as well as free hams or turkeys. There were lavish Christmas parties and picnics every year, as well as health insurance, profit sharing, paid vacations, a credit union, retirement plan, and funeral and education benefits.
Merit pay was available to high-performing employees. Even as the company grew larger and larger, he made every effort to appear at nearly all Christmas parties held by various divisions of his company. As a businessman, Marvin Schwan was extremely cautious in his new ventures.
A great deal of thinking and research went into every new product or change. He usually preferred to add on to existing facilities instead of build new ones. This proved a significant weakness in the early years of the company.
The Marshall ice cream plant was repeatedly remodeled and expanded in a somewhat haphazard fashion to minimize costs. In one case a trailer house was placed on the roof of the plant to provide additional office space.
By the s and s most large companies in America and Europe were becoming more bureaucratic and hierarchical, as managers became more and more specialized and distant from the employees they managed, and marketing and handling public relations became increasingly important. Most of its top executives and managers had worked their way up from entry level positions and it did not develop a large corporate staff.
His early experience with government regulators and large banks helped shape his outlook. Luckily, the employees who had been near the refrigeration unit minutes before had just walked outside when the explosion occurred. When firemen arrived the fire was intense but appeared localized. However, as fire crews worked to contain the blaze, it continued to spread and grow. As word spread, employees began grabbing company files and office equipment and dragging them outside into the subzero temperatures and loading them onto a truck.
Other employees assisted the hard-pressed firemen. As the flames grew, fire companies from five neighboring towns were called in. After hours of battling the flames, the exhausted fire fighters finally had to pull back and let the fire burn. By evening, the entire plant was a charred ruin. Marvin Schwan arrived back in Marshall by 9 p. He drove to the plant and after talking quietly with a few employees, he reportedly sat in his car alone outside the smoldering plant, tears running down his cheeks.
Despite the seriousness of the fire, there had been no major injuries and no deaths. Other records were found largely intact in fireproof cabinets in the ruins of the plant. By the next day, temporary office space had been located nearby. Employees divided into work groups and began working twelve-to-fourteen-hour days, often working extra time without pay to get operations running again.
As a result, not a single paycheck or payment to a supplier was issued late. The fire confronted Marvin Schwan with a crucial decision: should the company remain in Marshall? South Dakota, a mere fifty miles from Marshall, had lower taxes, a state government friendly to business, and was a right to work state.
Marvin already lived in Sioux Falls. Schwan and other company leaders were wooed with slick presentations and offers of land and infrastructure improvements if they would move out of Marshall. In the end, Schwan decided to remain in Marshall. Schwan was no sentimentalist and could easily have pulled the plug on operations in his own hometown. However, such a decision would have been out of character.
Schwan had spent considerable amount of time and effort hiring, training and cultivating his employees. Selecting the right people for the right jobs had always been a priority for him.
That had been repaid by the loyalty and dedication of his Marshall employees who had gone above and beyond to help the company rebound from the fire and many of those employees would have been lost had the company moved elsewhere.
The Salina facility continued to grow and new plants were built in Marshall, though this time separate buildings were erected for the various production lines to ensure that any future fire would not destroy operations so completely.
Although intensely conservative in personal beliefs, Marvin Schwan was always willing to adopt new ideas and technologies if they would help his company grow. Although initially costly, it yielded millions of dollars in savings as gas prices rose.
By the mid to late s, the frozen food business, and specifically pizza making, was growing and maturing. These changes also moved beyond frozen pizza parlors, bars, and convenience stores as grocery store sales became an increasingly important market.
So, too, were schools and universities who added pizza to their menus. In the mids, the company also purchased two smaller competitors, Sabatasso Foods and Better Baked Pizza. The company also branched out into leasing business equipment through a subsidiary company, Business Credit Leasing later renamed Lyon Financial Services.
The company is one of the largest franchisors of branded food concepts in the U. As pizza moved beyond being merely an Italian-American food, the company struggled to come up with a brand and marketing concept that would appeal to more consumers.
One company executive hit on the name Red Baron. Marvin Schwan, always conscious of his German heritage, immediately liked the idea.
The Red Baron image the company promoted, however, was not that of the steely Prussian aristocrat, but a romantic, mysterious dark-haired figure. The company successfully promoted the brand through clever marketing, including a squadron of precision acrobatic biplanes that flew at airshows and promotional events around the country. The late s and early s were a time of tremendous expansion for the company as it continually sought new brands and marketing venues, penetrating new areas both in North America and beyond.
In , the company began operations in the United Kingdom. We must develop new products and enter them into existing markets through existing channels of distribution. He believes in his idea so much that he invests a substantial amount of capital in that idea. And when that idea succeeds, he does not stay put, content with a small victory.
He builds, and he builds, and he builds. In the decades since, the unpretentious company has nonetheless become a global force to be reckoned with, powerful in diverse markets. The factory churns out tens of millions of frozen pizzas a year. Innovative frozen-food companies have sprung up, such as Daily Harvest, a fruit-and-vegetable smoothie delivery company with investors including Gwyneth Paltrow and Serena Williams. Case in point is Blue Apron, the flagship meal-kit delivery service.
It was the worst-performing major public IPO of , its valuation dipping nearly 70 percent after its initial offering. As for the frozen-food company that Marvin started in small-town Minnesota nearly three-quarters of a century ago? Even as meal-kit delivery services attract Wall Street attention in the quest for the next industry disruptor, traditional frozen food has kept growing. And two factors have fueled this growth: convenience and value.
Fresh food spoils. And from-scratch meals take time. Literally: On average, we shop there every other week. That report was sourced anonymously because the selling process is considered confidential. Drive out of the Twin Cities and go west.
Pass the glitzy shores of Lake Minnetonka. Rise and fall on the hills of Highway 7. At the age of 14, Marvin accepted a milk delivery route and supplemented his income on weekends by packaging ice cream bars, fudgesicles, and popsicles. Realizing that he could boost his productivity by 25 percent, Marvin purchased a bag-opening machine with his own funds; his father recognized both the advancement in productivity and Marvin's initiative and reimbursed his son for the capital expenditure.
By the business, which both supported local dairy farmers and provided a valuable service to households, was well known and respected. With the help of Marvin's own investment, Paul bought out his partner, renamed the business Schwan's Dairy, and opened a new plant in town.
Paul's wife, Alma, assisted in the daily operations by running the Schwan's Dairy Store, a small restaurant that offered homecooked meals and Schwan's dairy products. Marvin left Marshall at this time to attend a two-year college, but returned on weekends to assist with the business. His father, meanwhile, had begun experimenting with surplus cream and perfected his own recipes for chocolate and vanilla ice cream, which he soon began manufacturing in 2 -gallon containers.
Marvin's decision to return full-time to the business in was perhaps the single greatest reason for the modest dairy's development into a national concern. After barely weathering a retail price freeze on milk during , Schwan's swiftly rebounded when Marvin discovered that he could undercut the comparatively higher ice cream prices of neighboring towns.
Experienced in home delivery and alert to the current rise in freezer purchases by rural families, he had only to purchase a truck and establish a route. Within a year, he added a second truck to his delivery operation and quickly began to promote the Schwan's name as synonymous with the best ice cream--now available in a dozen flavors--in southern Minnesota.
Distinctive yellow trucks, the simple cursive logo, the round returnable ice cream containers, and the courteous assistance of the drivers helped attract a remarkably loyal and longstanding customer base.
By the mids Schwan, faced with the realities of high overhead for his growing fleet and sales force, positioned the company for greater profits and a greatly expanded market by adding first a depot in the southeast portion of the state and then a freezer-warehouse in the central portion.
Schwan's faced its second major crisis in when the Redwood River reached flood stage in Marshall, severely damaging equipment in the central plant and halting operations for four days. A federal disaster loan allowed the business to recover, which it did rapidly under Marvin, who had effectively become the company's general manager. The company met the challenge of another crisis in , that of a nearby fire which threatened to destroy the plant's north wall and with it a ton condenser, and redoubled its efforts to grow into a stable, thriving company.
The site of the auto dealership that was destroyed by the fire was soon purchased by Schwan's to allow for an expanded headquarters and by , round-the-clock operations were initiated, elevating ice cream production to some 11, gallons daily.
Aside from marking the 15th anniversary of the business as a solely owned family enterprise, was the year in which Marvin adopted a long-term acquisition policy to ensure that the company could experience aggressive growth while remaining profitable.
Among the first acquisitions were a prepared sandwich company and a condensed fruit juice company, both of which were incorporated under the new holding name of Schwan's Sales Enterprises, Inc. Two years later, Schwan discovered that one of his Wisconsin salesmen had begun carrying Roma brand frozen pizzas on his route.
With the rising popularity of prepared pizza, the small label promised additional diversity and sales for the delivery company and so Schwan signed a contract to market the pizzas in a four-state region. By the year of Paul Schwan's death--pizza sales were approaching those of ice cream and, consequently, Schwan was eager to expand his territory.
Prevented from doing so by Roma, Schwan placed an ad in the Wall Street Journal disclosing his interest in purchasing a complete pizza manufacturing plant.
He received a response from Kansas-based Tony's Pizza. After determining that the Tony's pizza recipe required improvement, Schwan acquired the company in , made the necessary alterations, and then launched the division with a somewhat new marketing scheme: selling the pizzas via a special fleet of trucks directly to retail stores rather than chain warehouses.
As in his home delivery routes, the emphasis was on providing the customer with quality, freshness, and service. Each driver was given the latitude to enhance sales for his route and profits for each route were tallied daily, weekly, and monthly. The pizza acquisition proved a resounding success and fueled much of the company's growth during the s, despite heavy competition from Jeno's and Totino's. Another turning point for the company came in , in the wake of a devastating fire at the ice cream plant.
Schwan saw the tragedy as an opportunity to rebuild in a more suitable location and almost moved his business. Fortunately for the citizens of Marshall 25 percent of whom now work for him , Schwan decided to recommit himself to the community that had helped him to prosper.
By he had built his delivery system into a 1,truck fleet. Ever conscious of the bottom line, he converted the entire fleet to LP gas at this time to combat the rising costs for conventional fuel.
0コメント