Humble beginnings: This photo showing the early days of making potato salad at Reser's Fine Foods may be found on the company's website: www.resers.com.
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The same booklet is full of photos of company picnics, community softball tournaments sponsored by Reser's, donations to the Oregon Food Bank. There's even one of Al Reser, the company chairman, carrying the torch for the 1996 Summer Olympics; Al now spends most of his time in a wheelchair.
Fifty-six years later, Reser's is actually a pretty big ($500 million) maker of refrigerated salads, much of them copacked. The product line has expanded to include frozen burritos and taquitos, salsas and dips, tortillas and starch side dishes.
And the plant is no small potato. It's a greenfield, $36 million plant, Reser's third in Topeka, a total of 200,000 sq. ft., that will make side dishes, especially with potatoes, pasta and rice, including some of the new Shedd's Country Crock side dishes from Unilever. Its designed capacity is 1 million lbs. of product per day and it will employ 300. The mayor and the president of the chamber of commerce turned out for the ribbon cutting.
Last month, our opening news page was full of asset-swapping in the food business. This month it's about astronomical executive salaries. Sure, they're both facts of business life in the food industry. But they sometimes distract us from the simple but real business of making good food.
Many food companies had humble beginnings. J. L. Kraft started out by selling cheese out of a horse-drawn wagon in Chicago. An earlier John Tyson drove truckloads of Arkansas chickens to cities in the upper Midwest. The Kellogg brothers stumbled on the process behind flaked cereal while trying to feed patients in the Battle Creek, Mich., sanitarium.
I have no big message here. None of my usual desk-pounding. Just an acknowledgement that there are many Resers out there, although they go by names like Ruiz Food Products, Herr Foods, Hirzel Canning and Original Juan's. These are companies that were not assembled by Wall Street investors using tired, old assets and brand names or laser-focused market research reports. These are companies that dream big dreams based on a really good family recipe, build plants in communities that need them, create the first jobs for many immigrants, the sons and daughters of whom hopefully will go to college and make an even bigger contribution to this country.
This is what America is all about. All that and making a really good potato salad.
