Utopia Inc.

Tweet

With these guidelines, Kantor went off to find a factory for Ma'agan Michael. The research took him and a few fellow members about a year and a half. Almost from the start, he realized that whatever they made, it would have to be for export. Israel's internal markets were too small to sustain the kind of growth that Ma'agan Michael expected. Export meant the possibility of government loans, but it also meant mass production, and as Kantor searched around Israel he discovered that the Israelis' mass production of sophisticated industrial goods was at least 10 years behind the times. In Europe, however, he found what he was looking for -- injection molding machinery for plastics.

So Itzik Kantor, former mechanic, came home to propose that Ma'agan Michael set up a plastics factory. With this proposal, the "horizontal decision making" process went into action. In fact, several recognized institutional bodies were already involved: the kibbutz Secretariat, for example, whose two officers are elected on alternate years, and an Economic Resources Committee, composed of the elected managers of the money-making kibbutz enterprises, at that time fishing and agriculture. The final decision, however, rested with the General Assembly, which is composed of all members of the kibbutz, 550 of them today, 350 when Kantor proposed his factory, who meet every Saturday evening to debate, often with classic Israeli vehemence, everything from kibbutz morals and direction to the triumphs and travails of individual members.

It was an extraordinary decision that Kantor put before them. Used to thinking of themselves as sitting in a political assembly, or even as a court of law, here they were being approached as investors: to put up some portion of their community's wealth to establish a company and compete for profits in the capitalist world. And they were being asked to commit more than money. The investors in this business would also be its board of directors, its labor union, its stockholders, and its sole source of manpower.After hearing the recommendations of the kibbutz committees, the General Assembly told Kantor to go ahead: They would take the risk.

The degree of risk may be imagined from the fact that Kantor was for some time unclear about what products they would make with their injection molding machines once they got them. "I knew we'd have to make something of higher quality than was being made in Israel at that time," he recalls, "and most importantly it would have to be something new." The machinery would take care of the "higher quality"; it would be state-of-the-art. But what about the "something new"?

To answer that, Kantor looked to his own and his comrades' experience. "We could draw on the expertise available on the kibbutz," he says. "Something that we, as farmers, would be able to come up with that other farmers worldwide would be able to use, would find necessary, or at least better than anything else on the market." The practical as well as the philosophical underpinnings of the new enterprise would remain in the soil.

A new design for chicken cages was what they came up with first. The kibbutz's experience with chicken cages was the same as that of poultrymen all over the world. They were either made of wood, in which case they didn't last long, or they were made of metal, which made them heavy. Plasson's first product was plastic poultry cages, which were durable and light. A bit later they went into toilet reservoirs, the first sophisticated ("and aesthetic," Kantor insists) ones on the Israeli market. Neither product was what one would call an instant success; nobody remembers what the revenues for Plasson's first year of business amounted to. The break-through chicken cages moved slower than the toilet reservoirs. On shipment of cages sat on the Amsterdam docks for three years before anyone bought them.In Israel, distributors stubbornly clung to iron cages -- until they were forced over to the plastic by porters, the men who actually schlepp the birds to market. Plasson had little difficulty persuading the porters of the merits of the plastic cages.

The chicken cages were Plasson's first international success. Then, in the late 1960s, the company began coming out with a line of products that has made Plasson a byword for excellence throughout the multibillion-dollar poultry industry, especially in America.

The line was designed around a new invention for an old necessity -- watering chickens. Plasson's drinker is a bell-shaped plastic device, colored a distinctive bright red, that is hooked up to a water source by valved tubing. The valves keepo the water level constant, while the bell keeps it free of mash and other impurities. Nothing so effective had ever before been made for the purpose. But because it was novel, and because it cost more than rival products, Plasson's bell encountered heavy going.

By the mid-'70s, however, the kibbutz's American distributor, Diversified Imports, was reporting that Plasson had 35% of the American market for broilers and 90% of the breeder market. (Poulterers have a much bigger investment in breeders and so can more easily justify the greater cost of the Plasson bell.) Then in January 1978, at an Atlanta trade fair, Diversified Imports introduced Plasson's turkey drinker. "It was wild," says Dubrovsky. "Plasson's factory couldn't even begin to keep up with orders that came in. In one year, we had 80% of the turkey market."

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5  NEXT