Champion of the Old-Fashioned
IN the folklore of the U.S. food industry, mouths water and registers jingle when any product—from maple syrup to dog biscuits—is endowed with the nostalgic aura of the "old-fashioned." No one has better succeeded in transforming that folklore into fact than trim, green-eyed Margaret Rudkin, 62, founder and president of Pepperidge Farm Inc., the largest U.S. independent baking company. Maggie Rudkin—as she is styled in her company's homey TV ads—brought old-fashioned bread back to U.S. dinner tables in mass-production fashion, thereby baked her way into a $40-million-a-year business, which turns out 57 bakery products, employs 1,500 people in six plants. This week Mrs. Rudkin, a frequent guest lecturer at the Harvard Business School, is in France to tell students at the European Institute of Business Administration how to be successful while breaking all the rules.
Maggie Rudkin speaks from experience. The attractive, red-haired wife of Henry Rudkin, a prosperous Wall Street broker, she lived a life of ease and social grace on their Pepperidge Farm (named after pepperidge, or black gum, trees on the property) near Fairfield, Conn. Then in the mid-1930s, the youngest of her three sons became ill with asthma. An admitted "nut on proper food for children," Mrs. Rudkin knew that asthma is an allergy, was nonetheless convinced that she could help her son by building him up. She dug out a whole-wheat-bread recipe left by her Irish grandmother, packed her baking pan with its old-fashioned ingredients—stone-milled flour (to save the vitamins lost in modern milling), honey, molasses, natural-sugar syrup, rich milk, cream and butter.
THE first few loaves were as heavy as lead, but Maggie soon got the knack. The bread seemed to help Mark's health, and his allergist asked her to make some for other patients. Mrs. Rudkin began making batches in her kitchen with the help of a servant, then set up a small bakery in the farm's abandoned stable, added white bread made from unbleached flour for patients who could not take much roughage in their diet.
The fame of both breads spread by word of mouth, and orders poured in from doctors and from neighbors who preferred its taste and texture to that of the day's spongy, artificially fortified bread. Then Maggie Rudkin made a fateful decision. She had no manufacturing training or experience, no capital, and a product that sold for 25¢, v. only 10¢ for a loaf of regular bread. "Fortunately," she says, "I was too ignorant to know about these matters." She put a loaf of bread and some butter in a package, took a train to Manhattan and walked into Charles & Co., specialty grocers. There, she generously buttered a slice, thrust it at the manager. He ordered 24 loaves a day. Mrs. Rudkin had her husband tote them on the train daily into Grand Central, where he paid a redcap to deliver them to Charles & Co.