BEATRICE FOODS

BRAND NAME COOKING WITH BEATRICE FOODS

The official company website:  Beatrice

HISTORY

The following is an excerpt from the book Ideas that Became Big Business by Clinton Woods. Published by Founders, Inc. Baltimore, MD, 1959, 414 pages.

Buy this book: Ideas That Became Big Business

The Beatrice Foods Story

"When the first transcontinental railroad spanned the Missouri River it opened up a vast new food processing area to world markets. George E. Haskell sensed the new opportunities, pioneered the dairy industry in the West and established Beatrice Foods Co.  George E. Haskell, at 22 had been persuaded to go "west" from his birthplace of Osage, Iowa, to Fremont, one of the first creamery towns in Nebraska, to take a position as bookkeeper for the Fremont Butter and Eggs Company. That was in 1886, the year the firm was founded.

Dairying was a sideline to farming then, for this was grain country. The average in Nebraska was one cow for each 61 acres. A large number of small, local creameries--perhaps more than 600--were founded in the area. Most of them failed in the face of tremendous obstacles, particularly the handicaps of poor transportation facilities.

Even the better roads were primitive in most sections; muddy bogs when wet, almost impassable in winter. Coupled with these limitations of transportation and supply was the extreme seasonal variations in production, with 50 percent of the butter being made in the three flush months and the balance in the other nine. Further, it virtually was impossible to have cream pick-ups made at the height of the wheat season. Harvesting took every man, horse and transient hand.

Haskell's only previous experience in the dairy business had been in the milk shed. One of five children left fatherless when he was four, he, his older brother, John Franklin, who subsequently joined George in building Beatrice Foods, and his sister were placed in the Soldiers Orphan Home in Cedar Falls, Iowa, where they received their secondary education.

George graduated in 1884 from Cedar Valley Seminary, a combination high school and junior college (which also produced Hamlin Garland). For two years he worked as a clerk before striking out for Fremont. In 1889, Haskell, by then secretary of the Fremont Butter and Egg firm, opened a branch in Beatrice, Nebraska, where a predecessor, the Beatrice Creamery Company, launched in 1882, had failed.

However, two years later the Fremont firm also went out of business. But not only did Haskell have the perseverance of a pioneer, he had several ideas. Undaunted by the panic of 1893, he founded the partnership of Haskell and Bosworth with William W. Bosworth, an employee of the Beatrice branch, and set up business in 1894 in the Beatrice Plant to deal in poultry, eggs, butter and produce.

Butter then was made primarily by the farmer's wife, who exchanged it in the grocery stores for other food products. Butter was selling for seven to ten cents a pound, eggs netted as little as five cents a dozen at the farm. Each farmer's wife was her own butter expert and the product varied accordingly.

Haskell and Bosworth began buying this farm butter. The better butter was graded, sorted and packed for sale and was known as ladles. The lower grades were packed in butter stands, barrels and boxes and shipped to processors to be remade. The firm also bought butter from small creameries and shipped it with eggs and dressed poultry.

Late in 1894, the partners began churning their own butter at Beatrice and distributing packaged creamery butter to grocery stores, restaurants and hotels with their own delivery equipment.

Subsequently, skimming stations to which the farmers delivered their milk daily to have the cream separated from whole milk were established. They then would take the skim milk back to the farm for feed for livestock. Since the milk was warmed to separate the cream, often the skim milk was too sour to use for feed by the time it was returned to the farm.

Appreciating the importance of providing farmers with hand cream separators so they could separate the milk on the farm, thereby saving daily trips to town and having the skim milk immediately available as feed, the company began financing the purchase of separators by farmers. Actually, the proceeds from the cream checks paid for the separators.

In a few years, the company sold more than 50,000 cream separators to farmers in Nebraska and Kansas.

Recognizing the need for more efficient methods, the partners, who had incorporated as the Beatrice Creamery Company in 1898, next consolidated churning operations into one large central creamery at Lincoln, Nebraska, where railroad facilities were more extensive.

Convenience of rail facilities dictated the choice of locations for the 11 branches established by this time. The procurement territory was widened to increase the supply of cream, most of which was shipped by rail. However, the Lincoln plant burned down a month after it was opened, delaying the operation by almost a year.

These progressive ideas of pioneering the system of farm cream separators in the Prairie States, organizing cream collection, utilizing rail transportation and centralizing quality controlled churning formed the foundation of the Beatrice Foods Co., as it is know today, with its diversity of products and nationwide distribution.

The company created a firm market for cream produced by farmers in the Plains States. As a result of this new source of steady income at a period in the country's history when farmer finances were at a critically low ebb from time to time, the milk cow was referred to as "The Mortgage Lifter of the West." Further, the creamery industry is credited with helping to develop many communities west of the Missouri River.

From this depression-ridden beginning to the present, the company ahs continued to pioneer and grow steadily. A cold storage business was a natural early development since refrigeration plants are necessary to the production of butter. The first Beatrice ice cream plant began operation in Topeka, Kansas, in 1907 and the first fluid milk plant was opened in Denver in 1923.

On November 12, 1901, the United States Patent Office granted the trademark "Meadow Gold", a name chosen by the employees, for butter, making "Meadow Gold" one of the first trademarked brands for butter.

Meadow Gold was one of the first to package butter in cartons, first to sell butter in a sealed package and one of the first to pasteurize churning cream on a large scale operation. Meadow Gold was first to advertise butter in a national magazine and fist to establish a nationally-advertised brand of ice cream. Meadow Gold also pioneered the use of aluminum foil for making caps to cover the pouring surface of milk bottles, and introduced homogenized milk in 1930. The firm was among the first to adopt quick-freezing methods for making ice cream, installing such equipment in all its ice cream plants in 1931.

As part of the firm's plans for diversification into other food lines, La Choy Food Products, major producer of canned American-Chinese foods, was merged with Beatrice Foods on November 1, 1943. Since that time, the Grocery Products Division of Beatrice Foods has expanded to included such well-known products as Clark candies, Richardson's Mints, Bond Pickles, "Ma Brown", Rainbo, American, Delta and L&S pickles and "Ma Brown" and L&S preserves, Mario's olives, Shedd-Bartush margarines, prune juice, peanut butter and salad dressings, Louis Sherry ice cream and sherbets and Dannon's Yogurt.

Beatrice Foods Co. is one of America's major firms with more than 300 plants and branches located in 39 states including Hawaii. The company processes and distributes more than 100 food items including milk, cream in all forms, ice cream, sherbet, cottage cheese, eggs, candy, American-Chinese foods, pickles, olives, preserves, jellies, poultry, margarine, cheese, peanut butter, prune juice, salad dressings, yogurt, a powdered vegetable shortening (Beatreme) and a powdered butter shortening (Beacreme). Total volume in 1958 was more than $385 million. The company's employee family now numbers more than 13,000."

Further Reading

Beatrice:  From Buildup to Breakup is an interesting book that gives the history of a very successful worldwide company and the reasons for its demise to its present day state.

The author, Neil Gazel, was associated with Beatrice from 1956 through 1978, some of that time as a vice president and director of public relations, and was very familiar with it's inner workings.

Somewhat of an added bonus is that the story of Beatrice Foods also gives a glimpse into the evolution of the dairy industry over a one hundred year period.

Historic Beatrice Logos

As a collector, you might be interested in the old Beatrice logos which can be used to date an item of interest.

The Beatrice Foods Memorial, which was "created as a memorial to the people, history, innovation and dedication of what was known as Beatrice Foods, and later Beatrice Companies, prior to April 1986" is an informative website which gives many details about the company history that might have been otherwise lost or unavailable to the general public.

You can find illustrations of the Beatrice historic logos here.