"He was so delighted," continues Glassner, "he offered me a share, but I had other things on my mind, like paying for an office. So I asked for a retainer from Henri's instead, and that gave me just enough income to get started on my own. We go back a long, long way."
So does his client, Henri's Foods. Back to 1935, when sisters-in-law Henrietta R. Mahler and Helen Mahler Brachman borrowed $25 and a friend's French-dressing recipe and set up shop in an apartment kitchen. Mrs. M. made the dressing; Mrs. B. delivered it. In the depths of the Great Depression, of course, even small dreams were hard to realize. For 12 years, the two women faithfully churned out their bottled dressings, selling them mostly to retail grocers over on Milwaukee's east side. Today there are scrapbooks full of brittle clippings describing the early days of gas burners and sterilized washtubs, of onions peeled by hand and fingers blistered raw from screwing on bottle caps. Three sons grew up in the company family. When they took over, all would remember the tough years as vividly as they remembered the good ones.
"When I joined the company, in 1947," says Mahler, "my mother and Mrs. Brachman had expanded the business and moved it to an east side storefront. But they still had only four other women working for them, making the dressings by hand. Their first big success was with something called Tas-Tee dressing. I began marketing it in Madison, Green Bay, Minneapolis. As you can imagine, we faced some stiff competition, including Kraft."
Kraft offered stiff competition to virtually anyone in the retail food business. By 1933 -- at the ripe old age of 10 -- National Dairy Products Corp., Kraft's predecessor, had grown from J. L. Kraft's little cheese-wagon distributorship into the country's largest dairy processing company. Much of this growth came from the acquisition of hundreds of smaller companies operating in markets National Dairy coveted, like mayonnaise. Seeking broad economies of scale, the company bought up a number of local mayonnaise businesses in the late 1920s. Then, thinking equally big, the newly named Kraft turned the mayonnaise market into the launching pad for one of its best-selling food products of all time: Miracle Whip.
When Miracle Whip made its debut, in 1933, the Depression had already changed American food-buying habits significantly. Mayonnaise, once a popular kitchen staple, was suddenly a luxury item for all but the well-to-do. Miracle Whip, a foamy blend of oil, egg yolks, starch paste, and spices, proved to be a cheap and tasty substitute. Kraft named the dressing after the new Miracle Whip machine used to produce it, and rolled it out with a campaign worthy of Darryl F. Zanuck, including a two-hour, prime-time radio variety show (the forebear of the famous "Kraft Music Hall"), featuring Al Jolson and Paul Whiteman, and a special exhibition at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. Twenty-two weeks later, Miracle Whip was the country's leading spreadable dressing, all mayonnaises included. "Thousands prefer it to mayonnaise -- yet it costs 1/3 less," read the ad copy reproduced in hundreds of American newspapers.
The same campaign that made Miracle Whip an American institution made salad dressing a generic grocery product, eventually leading the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to establish separate standards of identity for it. From the early 1930s onward, the production and consumption of spoonable dressings accounted for about half the market of all salad toppings; and by 1947, Miracle Whip's share of the spoonable market had hit 63%. Although its sales percentages varied from one region of the country to another, Miracle Whip would continue to grow in consumer popularity over the next three decades, reaching national market shares in the late 1970s of 75% and more. By 1980, over 6 billion units of Miracle Whip had been sold, supported by at least $70 million worth of advertising. No other competing brand claimed even 10% of that same market. Willard F. Mueller, a food-market expert and academic consultant to Henri's during the legal controversy, observed in his analysis of Kraft's marketing strategy that "by the late 1970s, Kraft's Miracle Whip held a larger share of its market than nearly any other grocery product brand with which I am familiar."
With consumer support unflagging, Kraft took pains to make sure that grocers not only stocked the product, but featured it as well. Walter Newhauser, who spent 38 years in merchandising for Kohl's Food Stores, a Milwaukee-based supermarket chain, remembers the pressure retailers felt to carry Miracle Whip and other Kraft items in abundance. "Their advertising was so heavy," he explains, "and their ads and coupon deals so frequent, that customers were upset if they came into your stores and couldn't find Kraft products. Meanwhile, Kraft was selling to us by combined carload -- I think there were 1,100 cases of Miracle Whip per carload -- and at that quantity, you had to feature it to keep it moving."
Newhauser adds that although Miracle Whip was a low-profit-margin commodity, "That's part of the business. With something like Miracle Whip, it's the volume that produces the profit." Today, Miracle Whip is widely identified within the food industry as a "loss leader"; that is, an item regularly sold below retailers' cost in order to lure shoppers into the aisles.
Leslie O'Rourke is no longer with Henri's Foods. He and Bob Brachman "parted ways" in 1981, after five years' litigation had siphoned off too many of the resources O'Rourke wanted for his own end of the business -- marketing and sales. He is now president and chief executive officer of Hudson Industries Inc., in Troy, Ala., a maker of dressings and other condiments for food service companies. In 1974, Les O'Rourke was the one who suggested to Henri's new-products division that it experiment with a line of yogurt dressings.
"It's no mystery, really," says O'Rourke of the products' origins. "My two teenage daughters were bringing yogurt into my own home, so I got interested. At the same time, I was aware of growing concerns about eating healthier foods, reduced-calorie products, and so on. I could see a relationship between these concerns and some possible products. So we did the pourables first, and our of that came my observation that the 'spoonable' category offered very little choice for the consumer. All spoonable dressings were essentially the same. Why not, I thought, a mayonnaise or salad dressing that also used yogurt?"
