LIBBY'S

BRAND NAME COOKING WITH LIBBY'S

Company Websites:

Libby's Canned Meats
Libby's Canned Vegetables
Libby's Pumpkin

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 Convenience Foods Story

"Three men with an idea and $1,000 between them learned how to cure beef in warm weather as well as cold and helped to change America's eating habits--nearly one hundred years ago.

Take three men with an unbounded faith in themselves. Add a consuming curiosity mixed with a generous portion of creative ability. Top it all off with a durability that takes in stride the stresses and strains that so often accompany the process of building a great business from a struggling and unpromising beginning. There you have the basic ingredients for the three men who founded Libby McNeill & Libby ninety-one years ago.

The three of them--Arthur A. Libby, his brother Charles P., both of Portland, Maine, and Archibald McNeill of Chicago--were working at Hancock's slaughter house in Chicago when they decided to go into business for themselves.

They pooled their resources and found they had $1,000 with which to begin their adventure. They paid the first few months rent on a building at 16th and State streets and had enough left over to purchase cattle on the hoof and provide wages for the three or four men they hired. As to regular pay for the three founders--well, they would have to wait and see. But they knew there would be a period where there would be little income. It would be mostly outgo for a time.

They had just one product--corned beef in barrels. Every morning before sunrise Arthur Libby would hurry down to the South Water street market to buy six head of cattle and herd them to the plant through downtown Chicago.

To Arthur A. Libby belongs the credit for originating the process of curing beef by the use of ice. Up to this time meats were cured only during cold weather. The Libby brothers and McNeill must also be credited with the practice of shipping fresh meats in refrigerated containers, a practice that was survived up to the present day.

Their venture was modestly successful. Then the big idea dawned, nurtured by a fortuitous circumstance. In 1875, seven years after Libby, McNeill & Libby was founded, they acquired the rights to a process for preserving meat in a rectangular-shaped tin and promptly set about the task of putting up canned meats. They foresaw a great market for canned food--foods that need only be taken from the can and promptly served, foods that would not only be easy to prepare but would answer the homemaker's needs for table-ready meals that would be economical as well as wholesome.

The three founders, though they were not aware of it, were among the forerunners of the great present-day era of convenience foods, which have become so much a part of our everyday eating habits. They were innovators in an industry that today turns out more than 600 million cases of canned foods annually, spanning a vast array of products.

The convenience foods that were being put up by Libby, McNeill & Libby and other canners were as easy to prepare, just as economical and wholesome as today's canned foods. All that was lacking was variety. But the idea of making canned foods a prominent part of everyday meals had to be promoted. It is not easy to change eating habits. Homemakers were still following the pioneer tradition of self-sufficiency characterized by long hours of cooking, roasting and baking in the home. Libby advertising helped to overcome this ingrained tradition. Libby began to advertise its products on a national scale. It played an important role in changing America's food tastes. Per capita consumption of canned foods was less than five pounds in the late 1870's; today per capita consumption stands at 127 pounds--and still moving up.

The consumer's wish for new things and the striving on the part of industry to supply them are as common to our way of life as pumpkin pie. This fact has sparked much of our progress in processed foods. There appears to be no ceiling on the resourcefulness of the food industry to supply the homemaker's changing wants. It is this resourcefulness and the American penchant for new things that have achieved a brilliant record for canned and frozen foods in the past and indicate a promising future for them.

Libby's corned beef in tapered tins was the beginning of Libby's famous line of canned foods. Canned corned beef along with other canned meats established "Libby's" as a household word not only throughout the nation but in all corners of the world as well. The company soon became as well known in Singapore as in San Francisco, in Manila as in Minneapolis. Libby methods and Libby techniques have helped to shape the canning processes widely used throughout the industry.

As more and more homemakers turned to canned foods, Libby ventured into new fields. It branched out into pickles and olives, and a year or two later moved into canned fruit operations in California (1907), canned vegetables (1907), Hawaiian pineapple (1910), Alaskan salmon (1912), canned juices (1923) and baby foods (1934). Starting from scratch, in 1946, it became important part of an entirely new industry--frozen foods--using the know-how it had gained from many years as one of America's leading canners.

Today the company is nine great lines. In a real sense it is nine related businesses in one. Each business has its own pattern of operations, its own production and marketing programs. Each business represents an industry which has undergone healthy expansions.

It packs over 250 products in canned and frozen foods in 35 production units in Continental United States, Hawaii, Canada, England and West Germany.

It employs 21,000 people, 6,000 year-round and 15,000 seasonally.

It takes over 8,000 growers to produce the fruits and vegetables needed for Libby's annual pack, produced from 160,000 acres of orchards and farmlands.

The company is owned by 32,000 stockholders with a total investment of $76,000,000.

Its annual sales are around $300,000,000.

The company is the world's most diversified packer of canned and frozen foods. The company's products are found in the corner grocery and the big supermarket, in remote villages and big metropolitan centers.

The founders have long since vanished from the scene but they left behind them a legacy that still endures; make a better product today and improve it tomorrow."