Surviving on Chaos

A company turns itself around after its product is turned away by foreign buyers.

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What's it really like inside a company on the long road to quality

Mike Weaver thought a new machine would solve his quality problem overnight. Instead, he says, it set off a chain of events he couldn't plan, couldn't control, and couldn't have prepared for.

Here's a company that's not just talking about providing quality, but betting its future on figuring out how to do it. And it's difficult. Let's see how the process looks and feels from the inside. -- J.H.

Even on the big day -- down to the very last minute -- workers at Weaver Popcorn Co. rushed around pushing brooms, wiping down brand-new steel racks, adjusting and readjusting in-feed tubes. A group of men crouched in a corner, carefully measuring for the last time the size of the space they had cleared.

During those last jittery moments, the 58-year-old company might just as well have been a start-up restaurant awaiting review by the local health inspector. Even as employees heard vehicles roaring toward the building, "we really weren't any more than just ready," says processing superintendent Mel Ulrich.

The trucks were returning from Detroit, roughly 200 miles from Weaver's headquarters in tiny Van Buren, Ind. As planned, forklifts greeted the arrivals, scooping up four 500-pound crates and commandeering them toward the middle of the factory floor. With everyone gathered around, one worker pried a heavy cardboard panel off one of the crates. As he exposed part of the gleaming machine, "everybody just stood there and stared," recalls Ulrich.

With their 20/20 electronic eyes, the costly color-sorting machines were supposed to subject each of Weaver's popcorn kernels to merciless scrutiny. Foreign particles such as weed seeds, dirt clods, and soybeans (the darker ones, anyway) no longer stood much chance of parading by. From this moment on, all felt sure, Weaver Popcorn had taken its last bruising from a customer.

Just five months earlier, in November 1985, a Japanese customer had rejected 280,000 pounds of Weaver's finest, claiming it was rife with impurities. Outraged and ashamed, Mike Weaver, the company's president and chief executive officer, decided almost immediately to purchase the high-speed optical scanners, which would lead to barely measurable improvements. With a total price tag of more than $1 million, such glitzy machinery generally toiled among higher-margin crops like pistachios and peanuts. It would hardly touch such pedestrian fare as popcorn. But Weaver took the customer's complaint very seriously. "There was a quality problem," he says soberly. "We thought the machines would take care of it."

They didn't.

That bright spring day nearly four years ago -- when most of the folks at Weaver Popcorn earnestly believed that the new machines, with their fancy computerized controls, would rescue them from their quality qualms -- seems now like an almost laughably innocent age. "Buying the machine felt like a bold move then," says export manager James Labas. "But it is nothing compared with what has happened here since."

Time was when a company could choose the basis on which it wanted to compete. Some companies sought to be the cheapest, others the fastest. And a few staked out the challenge of becoming the best. But no matter what business you are in and whether you realize it yet, your options have narrowed. Unless you control a dominant share of the market and can't be budged -- and how many of us own utilities, anyway? -- you don't have much choice about quality anymore.

Not that you have to become the very best. But there's a minimum level of quality that has to be achieved, and it's higher than it used to be. "Quality has become the price of entry into most markets," says Martin Smith, president of Management Sciences International Inc., in Atlanta. "Marginal producers are finding it harder and harder to survive." As a result of the standards set by Japanese carmakers, consumers simply won't put up with a transmission that conks out after 1,000 miles -- or, for that matter, with a misplaced dashboard appliqué. Likewise, Korea has raised expectations in shipbuilding and Singapore in electronics.

To date, no foreign snack-food cartel is nibbling at Weaver Popcorn's market share. To Mike Weaver's way of thinking, that's all the more reason to take the high road now -- while he still has a choice. Back in the 1940s, the hottest popcorn company was an Iowa concern named Consolidated Popcorn. By mid-1988, the company was little more than a smorgasbord of rusting assets -- which Weaver snapped up. Before the arrival of microwave popcorn, less than a decade ago, nobody would have expected to find such integrated public powerhouses as Pillsbury, General Mills, or Nabisco in the puny popcorn business. Today these are just the type of well-heeled companies that Weaver supplies. "They could easily start up their own processing plants," says Ulrich. "We have to be better."

That's a more onerous task than it sounds. Turnaround tales of the formerly shoddy and inefficient -- companies like Motorola, Xerox, and Ford -- often seem to imply that glib gurus or snappy slogans can lighten the load. Maybe so, but boosting quality inevitably means taking a strenuous and grisly journey. "You have to find your own path," says Joseph Sargent, an executive at Milliken & Co., the $2-billion textile maker and winner of a prestigious 1989 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. "It's a slow process."

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