In the booming frozen orange juice business, no one had squeezed himself a bigger glass than husky, 37-year-old John Irving Moone, president of Manhattan's Snow Crop Marketers, Inc. Last week Moone, who claims first place among U.S. orange concentrate producers, squeezed harder. For about $1,000,000, he bought 1,100 acres of Sarasota citrus groves, to boost Snow Crop's total Florida groves to about 17,000 acres. From its own groves and from purchases from independent Towers this year, Snow Crop will can almost 10 million gallons of fresh orange concentrate, putting it ahead of Bing Crosby's Minute Maid (TIME, Oct. 18, 1948).
Beating the big-timers comes easily to brisk Jack Moone. In 1945, he quit his job as frozen-foods sales manager of General Foods' Birds Eye Snider Division. With two other General Foods executives, Nathaniel B. Barclay and Martin Matthews, who quit at the same time, he Bounded Snow Crop. With only $35,000 in capital, the three lined up 13 packers of frozen foods and vegetables, were the first to sell frozen orange concentrate on a national scale. Their orange juice supplier: Vacuum Foods Corp., which later produced juice under its own Minute Maid label. Snow Crop's fast move into he frozen-food market paid off: by the end of 1946 it was grossing $3,200,000 year.
But when the frozen-food market collapsed that year, in a glut of low-grade products, the three partners did not have enough capital to weather the disastrous drop in prices. For $250,000 they sold Snow Crop's name and good will to Clinton Foods Inc., third largest U.S. producer of corn products, took jobs as heads of the corporation's new frozen-foods division. Moone promptly sank $15 million of Clinton's money into groves and four packing plants, contracted to take the entire output of 39 more plants. Pushed along by a big advertising campaign ($2,000,000 this year), sales boomed to $26 million in 1949 (net profit: $1,300,000),put Snow Crop in second place (next to Birds Eye) in all U.S. frozen foods.