MODERN LIVING: Just Heat & Serve

(See Cover)

Mrs. Judah Holstein, 32, of Los Angeles, last week faced the harrowing test that comes to almost every young working wife: her first big dinner party. A top Hollywood secretary (to Producer Stanley Kramer), Selma Holstein had to grapple with phones, mountains of paper, and hubbubing actors and directors all day, rush off at 6 p.m. to prepare a dinner for 14. To complicate matters, she had to go through her paces at her sister’s house because her own apartment has no dining room, only a small kitchenette.

By the time dinner was served, Hostess Holstein had lost all her anxiety, was as calm and unhurried as if a horde of servants had prepared the meal. That, in fact, was just what had happened. Except for the cooking water and seasoning, almost every bite of the appetizing meal she placed before her guests had been washed, cut, peeled, shelled, precooked, mixed and apportioned by “factory maids” long before it reached her hands. After cocktails and hors d’oeuvres (frozen), Mrs. Holstein began her meal with shrimp (frozen) in cocktail sauce (prepared), a green salad (fresh) with Swiss dressing (from a bottle).

With her main course of lobster Newburgh (frozen) she served asparagus tips in Hollandaise sauce (frozen), quick rice with mushrooms (canned) and hot rolls (heat and serve).

Coffee (instant) and a white cake (made from ready-mix) and ice cream topped off the meal. Mrs, Holstein’s harvest from husband and guests: a burst of praise (spontaneous) for her “home-cooked” meal. Such jiffy cooking would have made Grandma shudder, but today it brings smiles of delight to millions of U.S. housewives. The remarkable rise of “conven-ience” or processed foods—heralded by the slogans “instant,” “ready to cook” and “heat and serve”—has set off a revolution in U.S. eating habits, brought a bit of magic into the U.S. kitchen. It has freed the housewife from long hours at the stove, made her more conscious of sound nutrition, provided her with a happily bewildering variety of foods and delicacies. A few years ago it took the housewife 5½ hours to prepare daily meals for a family of four; today she can do it in 90 minutes or less—and still produce meals fit for a king or a finicky husband.

Such a time cut was forced by the changing role of U.S. women. Today’s housewife not only runs her kitchen, but takes the children to school, picks up her husband at the train, belongs to the P.T.A. and a host of other organizations, reads the latest bestsellers, takes a voice in community affairs. Even more important, more than 20 million U.S. women hold jobs outside the home; they do not want to come home to overtime hours in the kitchen, so need foods that can be prepared quickly and without fuss. For such women processed foods are indispensable; there is no other way.

Food is the biggest industry in the U.S., but with all the $80 billion in sales it generates, the more than 1,000,000 it employs and the 373,000 retail stores it serves, the industry has changed itself completely to lead, cheer and consolidate the revolution. Canned goods are still the old and tested convenience foods, but such startling gains have been made by mixes, frozen food and instant drinks that one in every three of the time-and labor-saving products was unheard of only ten years ago.

Tested Ingredients. No company has done more to revolutionize U.S. cooking than General Foods Corp., the world’s biggest food processor. It sparked the revolution with its line of Birds Eye frozen foods, still the biggest-selling brand. Last year it put its 250 products (including different flavors and varieties) into 4.5 billion packages that the housewife took home for $1.1 billion. On pantry shelves and in refrigerators from Maine to Florida, its products are household words —Jell-O, Maxwell House coffee. Post cereals, Swans Down cake mix, Sanka, Minute Rice, Gaines dog food, etc.

Running this cook’s colossus is a job for a man with tried and tested ingredients. The man: Charles Greenough Mortimer, 59, the solidly packaged (5 ft. 10 in., 195 lbs.) chairman and chief executive officer of General Foods. The ingredients: a mind as restless as a bubbling stew, a big pinch of Madison Avenue savvy, a full measure of shrewd selling experience. All this is mixed with an insatiable curiosity about the U.S. woman—what food she buys, what she would like to buy, and how it can be made easier to serve.

“Have you ever looked at Fannie Farmer’s Cook Book,” asks Mortimer, “to see what was mapped out for a young bride who wanted to serve fish? ‘To clean fish: Remove scales that have not been taken off. This is done by drawing a knife over fish, beginning at tail and working towards head. Incline knife slightly towards you to prevent scales from flying . . . Wipe fish thoroughly inside and out with a cloth wrung out of cold water, removing any clotted blood which may be found adhering to the backbone. To skin fish: with sharp knife remove skin along the back and cut off a narrow strip of skin the entire length of back. Loosen skin on one side from bony part of gills … if fish is soft, work slowly and carefully . . .’ And so on through all the other gruesome procedures before the housewife could start to burn her fingers in the hot grease or fill her kitchen with clouds of fish-laden smoke.

“What does it say on a package of frozen fish sticks? ‘Heat and serve.’ ”

Tomato to Wonton. In tribute to the ease of “heat and serve,” hungry Americans last year ate more than $500 million worth of frozen prepared dishes, mostly in convenient, built-in containers that went from oven to table to trash can. The number of frozen-food packers has grown from 750 in 1949 to 1,100; the dollar value of frozen foods has jumped more than 2,700% to $2.7 billion. Almost one in every three cups of coffee is now made with instant coffee. Postwar sales of prepared baby foods have grown some 230% to a quarter-billion-dollar industry, and sales of cake mixes and other prepared mixes have more than doubled to $253 million.

The average new supermarket now devotes 80 ft. of space to frozen foods, carries as many as 100 different cake, cookie and biscuit mixes, about 50 kinds of baby food, shelf after shelf of quick rice, instant salad dressing and other jiffy goods. The housewife can buy her frozen potatoes whipped, French fried, crinkle cut, hashed, creamed, diced, stuffed baked, escalloped, puffed, pattied, rissoléd—and home fried. She can pick up scores of different frozen complete meals, buy dozens of frozen vegetables from peas (the favorite) to chives, soups that run from tomato to wonton.

Cornish Hen Perigourdine. All this,added to the return of veterans from posts abroad and the great increase in travel, has upgraded and greatly widened U.S. food tastes, whetted appetites for exotic new dishes. Many Americans who only ten years ago thought that an artichoke was part of an automobile now serve it regularly at table; Artichoke Industries of Castroville, Calif, froze 2.9 million artichoke hearts this year. Sales of such fancy foods in the U.S. have more than doubled since 1954, last year passed the $100 million mark. Charlie Mortimer put General Foods into the field in 1957 for prestige purposes, now puts out 60 gourmet items from green turtle soup with Madeira wine to Rock Cornish game hen stuffed with wheat pilaf and roasted in savory sauce.

Many famed restaurants have joined the march to the freezer. Manhattan’s gilt-edged Chambord puts out a full French line, including bouillabaisse à la Marseillaise, soufflé Grand Marnier, and Cornish Hen Perigourdine with sherry, truffles, foie gras, wild rice and brandy. Schrafft’s has put on sale beef Burgundy with noodles, and chicken and mushroom pie with cheese crust. Other processors are selling kangaroo-tail soup, frozen bagels, sukiyaki, enchiladas, shish kebab and frozen chicken curry.

Cooked-ln Religion. The revolution toward convenience wins a new battle—and explodes into new products—almost every week. General Foods’ Mortimer chafes at the fact that there are just so many vegetables, so he has put his company to work creating “new” vegetables. General Foods separately purees two vegetables (e.g., carrots and peas), joins them together in frozen sticks called Rolletes, which are now being test-marketed. It is working on the first frozen mixed-green salad, is test-marketing a new line of baby foods, which are partially dehydrated, then frozen; the baby foods come to the mother in flake form in envelopes, need only be stirred into hot water. Says Mortimer: “The nutrition is as perfect as can be. And the peas are so green that we have to explain to the mothers that we haven’t added dye.” As part of its new Horizon line, General Foods is testing a partially dehydrated spaghetti casserole that can be eaten on Friday by Catholics because its “meat” is actually made of soybeans. “It has everything,” beams Mortimer, “including religion.”

Chicago’s Reese Finer Foods puts out garlic juice and barbecue smoke in roll-on bottles, horseradish whip and garlic whip in Aerosol cans. Libby, McNeill & Libby is experimenting with Aerosol cans of mayonnaise and cake frosting. Oscar Mayer has just put on sale a complete pizza mix in a tube; National Dairy this fall began selling liquid instant coffee in an Aerosol can. Seabrook Farms and others put out casserole dishes in plastic bags that can be tossed whole into a pot of water, cooked and served. Before long, Tropicana will introduce concentrated orange drink in an Aerosol can that automatically dispenses a teaspoon at a time for mixing.

How much does the new convenience cost the U.S. housewife? Couples and small families agree that the price is right, but large families often find prepared food portions too small, priced too high to buy in quantity. Gourmet foods are almost uniformly expensive. Yet a U.S. Department of Agriculture study showed that if a typical consumer bought $100 worth of regular foods, they would cost him only 61¢ less than if he had bought the serviced equivalent. The food industry points out that the extra costs of “conveniencing” foods can be considered the expense of maid service. Says Charlie Mortimer: “If you compute the relative costs of the two types of meals versus the time spent by the housewife, the housewife is getting the services of a maid for 45¢ an hour. My sons pay teen-age baby sitters more than that.”

Answer from a Fish. The chief credit for triggering the great change in U.S. eating habits belongs to a man named Clarence Birdseye, a fur trader, biologist and Yankee tinkerer from Gloucester, Mass. On a trip to Labrador some 40 years ago, Birdseye began to wonder why fish and meat that he froze quickly in the —50° temperature tasted just as good and fresh when he cooked them six months later, while food frozen by the old, slow method lost much of its quality and flavor. Birdseye persisted until he found out why: quick freezing prevents formation of large cell-destroying ice crystals. He went back home to Gloucester, worked out a commercial quick-freeze process, set up the business that became the foundation of the frozen-foods industry. In 1929 he sold his 168 patents to the Postum Co.

Postum was founded in 1895 by a health-food fan named Charles William Post, who invented Postum and Grape Nuts, one of the first cold cereals, built a thriving business in Battle Creek, Mich, before he died in 1914. Later, under President Colby Chester and Chairman E. F. Hutton (who married Post’s daughter Marjorie), the company diversified so fast by buying up other companies that the big shopping bag was renamed General Foods. As it continued to grow under Austin Igleheart, who had joined Postum in 1926 when it purchased his family-run company (Swans Down cake flour), and Clarence Francis, the emphasis in the food business moved more and more from manufacturing to marketing. Thus, when Francis moved up to chairman in 1954, the presidency went to Marketing Expert Mortimer.

All Rogues. Charles Greenough Mortimer was born in Brooklyn, the son of a brilliant but unbusinesslike inventor father and a sensible, businesslike mother, who is still alive at 86. A stout boy who learned to fight early because his playmates called him “Fatty,” he was an only child and one of a long string of Charles Greenough Mortimers. “I made the mistake once,” he says, “of tracing the Mortimers back to England. I got as far as the one who seduced the wife of Edward II and I stopped. They were all rogues.”

Mortimer went to Stevens Institute, but left before graduation. He became a baking-powder salesman for R. B. Davis Co., was made head of sales at 22. His next stop was the Madison Avenue advertising agency of George Batten Co., where he worked on the Sanka account, pulled his weight alongside such later advertising stars as Ted Bates, William Benton (former Senator from Connecticut) and Chester Bowles. When Batten was sold to the agency that later became Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne, Mortimer went over to Postum, got a job as an assistant ad manager for Sanka and Calumet. Not long after, he confided to a friend: “I want to spend the rest of my life here. And some day I’d like to be president.”

Scramble for the Top. Mortimer took the advertising and marketing route upward at General Foods. He became vice president in charge of advertising in 1939, vice president in charge of marketing in 1947. One of the company’s postwar problems was frozen foods. General Foods had carried the burden of the industry for years without making a penny of profit, but World War II shot the industry’s business up to 1 billion Ibs. in 1945. Suddenly the get-rich attractions were so strong that fly-by-night outfits rushed out poor-quality products, gave frozen foods a bad name with the public. Result: the “Great Blood Bath,” in which dozens of companies folded. General Foods confidently rode out the storm, turned the profit corner for good as the public regained confidence in the industry.

Mortimer moved on the board in 1950, jumped to executive vice president in 1952. The top job was now in view, but Mortimer got hot competition from two company rivals. Chairman Francis was behind Mortimer, recognized that the company needed a strong merchandising man to lead General Foods into the future. When Mortimer became president and chief executive officer, his two rivals left the company.

A Thousand Yards from Work. To be closer to his work, Mortimer built a nine-room house about a thousand yards from the company building in White Plains, N.Y., dubbed it “Done Commuting.” He is devoted to his family, seldom brings his briefcase home or does business entertaining there. He and his wife Elizabeth (everybody calls her “Jerry”) were married 32 years ago (his first wife died in childbirth), have a married daughter Mary and three sons: Charles Greenough, 33, and John, 30, both married and working in advertising, and Lee, 19, a sophomore at Denison University.

Mortimer will make $261,000 in 1959 in salary and bonuses, owns 20,000 shares of General Foods stock, now selling at about $100, has options on another 10,000 shares. He and his wife own a 400-acre farm in Montague, N.J., where they spend weekends. Mortimer works at farming, has a herd of 100 prize Holstein-Frisian cows, also likes to ride on his ten miles of bridle path, fish for bass and trout in his own ponds. He belongs to the Union League and the prestigious Links Club (but to no church), is a director of Manhattan’s First National City Bank and a member of the board of Smith College (alma mater of both his wife and daughter), in 1957 headed the United Community Fund. He likes to say: “The way a man with an active mind rests his mind is to use another part of it.”

The Whydontchas. At work, Mortimer’s mind gets little rest. With the pride and eclat of a grand chef, he presides over a decentralized operation with 21,500 employees, 54 factories, markets in 93 countries. “The first thing,” he says, “is knowing more about the total company than any other person around.” To keep abreast of things, he meets daily for an hour over coffee with President Wayne Marks (he takes tea), who in October was made president and chief operating officer, has some 50 executives send him confidential reports once a week on “whatever they damned well please.” Mortimer has a sharp sense for the specious argument and the error in judgment, can scribble a quick note in the margin that gets to the point like an arrow.

He is obsessed by time, has won the company nickname of “How Soon Mortimer” because of his prodding questions to his executives about how soon a job can be done. He sometimes goes to other executives’ offices so that he can better break off the conversation when it gets too windy for his taste, dislikes long, wordy meetings (“where you sit around and hear somebody admire himself verbally”), does not like to write long memos. He spends only half his time in his office (“I simply have to get out at times”), often goes barnstorming around to see customers in one of the company’s two private planes, or checks the shelves in a grocery store to find out how his products are faring with the housewife.

But perhaps Mortimer’s chief job at General Foods is saying no. The company receives a never-ending flow of letters suggesting new additions to its line, new gimmicks, variations of ingredients. Mortimer calls them the “whydontchas”: “Why don’t you put out rice in different colors?” “Why don’t you make a coffee that, when weak, would taste like tea?” “Why don’t you offer chopsticks with Minute Rice?” “Why don’t you pack coffee in a square can?” Such suggestions are not too difficult to resist, but Mortimer must also resist the temptation to jump into products that, while tantalizing, do not fit into General Foods’ mold. The company must also have the shrewd ness to seize on a good suggestion when it gets one. A housewife wrote in that she had made excellent lemon cheesecake using Jell-O lemon instant pudding. General Foods liked the recipe, adopted it for national distribution. Result: it sent the national Nielsen rating on Jell-O lemon instant pudding up 18%, sold 2,000,000 packages on the basis of one ad.

Mortimer wants products with the widest popular appeal, shies away from the specialized or offbeat food. At General Foods, this policy has resulted in a pretax profit of 10¢ on sales v. 6.8¢ for the No. 3 processor, Standard Brands (Chase & Sanborn, Royal desserts, etc.), but well below the 14.8¢ of Campbell Soup, the No. 2 company. Overall, General Foods profits have risen from $28 million in 1954, when Mortimer took over, to an estimated $60 million this year. But Mortimer is still not satisfied with some of his products, notably the Gourmet line, intends to make some changes. Says he: “At one of these business things I go to, the dowager wife of some fancy businessman sitting next to me said, ‘Oh, Mr. Mortimer, your gourmet foods are wonderful. We stock the yacht with them.’ And I thought to myself, ‘Yeah, that’s what’s wrong with that business—not enough yachts.’ ”

Keen Smell. To find the products that General Foods should sell, the company runs the biggest private food-research laboratory in the U.S. on a 55-acre site at Tarrytown, N.Y., also keeps 155 women busy in a mammoth test kitchen in suburban White Plains. The kitchens are run by Vice President Ellen-Ann Dunham, a bright and forceful woman of 47, who likes to cook from scratch. Both lab and kitchen are filled with people who have been selected for their keen sense of taste and smell, and—more important—their ability to describe differences.

Since Mortimer took over the company, General Foods has plunged more deeply into research. It used to spend .5% of its sales dollar on research, this year will spend 1.3%. Its laboratories are equipped with 19 storage rooms that simulate desert, winter, tropic and arctic climates to test how long products will stand up in each. They have a texturometer that can gauge the chewiness of everything from beefsteak to whipped cream, automatic analyzers that can tell how much gelatin is in a batch of JellO, or what kind of protein is in a piece of meat. The laboratories produced all of the seven new products produced in 1959: butterscotch chips, caramel chips, Buffay (a fortified rice), Instant Yuban (a high-grade coffee), Horizon’s Italian Casserole, frozen potato puffs, and Prime, a new dog food, which was carefully tested in the company’s own kennels.

Creative Urge. General Foods is not above jumping into a new product that has already won medals on the consumer battlefield—even if a competitor holds the medals. When Swanson’s originated the TV Dinner, and began plugging the new convenience, General Foods followed it into the frozen-dinner field. Swanson, now owned by Campbell Soup Co., has sold a quarter of a billion TV Dinners.

Unlike Campbell, General Foods has never had any strong consumer identification as a company, keeps its name in small print on packages. “We felt too much close association would be bad,” says Mortimer. “A woman may use Swans Down cake mix but think Calumet baking powder is for the birds.” On the other hand, the company yearns for the sort of public image built up by competitor General Mills, is now trying to create that image by publicizing the General Foods Kitchens.

General Foods—and many another food manufacturer—has learned a lot of lessons about the housewife’s image of herself. They discovered that they could not take all the work out of convenience foods, because housewives would somehow feel that they were shirking their jobs. General Foods thus lets the housewife put the egg into almost all of its cake mixes, puts out “main-course” frozen entrees to which the housewife can contribute her own choice of vegetables.

The result is that many U.S. women now accept prepared foods as staples, just as they once accepted flour, use them as starting points for their own variations. This striving for the individual touch, added to the fact that most processed foods are kept bland to suit the widest taste, has made spices a big factor in the kitchen revolution. Before the war, garlic was hardly more than a joke; now it is the third largest seller of McCormick & Co., the world’s biggest spice producer.

Just Like Whisky. Once the labs and the kitchens are through, General Foods often turns over its product to professional testing companies, which try it out on panels of 200 to 500 people. Even though General Foods spent $12 million last year on market research, Charlie Mortimer keeps a close watch on every penny. He does not believe in the door-to-door survey, thinks that people usually say that they use the best—whether they really do or not. “Market research is like whisky,” says Mortimer. “It’s a great thing if you use it in moderation at the right time, and don’t become addicted so that it becomes a crutch. But it can be soporific, at times, to judgment.”

Mortimer also has some strong ideas about who initiates the whole process. “I think it’s a lot of malarkey,” says he, “that women demand things. To say that women demanded better soluble coffee, for instance, is crazy. We gave them one and said, ‘Come and get it.’ You don’t miss what you don’t know.”

But the wants of the public are not easy to measure—and General Foods sometimes errs in the process. “The money in research is made by quitting,” says Mortimer. “The trick is to know as soon as possible that you’ve got a dud.” The company was delighted when Birds Eye learned how to manufacture frozen tomato-juice concentrate after months of research. But the juice flopped, had to be withdrawn. Reasons: people were so used to drinking canned tomato juice that they did not like the fresher taste that was closer to the real thing. On the other hand, market research can induce the company to go into a product that even its own executives are not excited about. Such a product was Tang, an artificial orange breakfast drink, about which Mortimer had doubts on the size of the market. Once the laboratory managed to make Tang opaque, market research showed that Tang had a bang—and the company sent it to market. It has been a smash success.

Mortimer himself is a market tester every waking hour, often picks out a good product instinctively. He often tries out new products on his family. When he brought home a packa.ge of Minute Spanish rice, the family circle liked it so well that he had to go back for more. When he discovered that General Foods was market-testing the rice, “I thought to myself, now what the hell for? How scientific can you get?” Market testing stopped the next morning, and the product has gone on to become an excellent seller. “At General Foods,” says Mortimer, “we try to cultivate a healthy spirit of dissatisfaction with everything.”

Glatsky in the Future. What lies in the future for General Foods and the rest of the industry? One of the industry’s widely heralded ventures, frozen soups, which were pioneered by Campbell’s, are not going too well. Heinz dropped them after a brief try; General Foods so far has avoided the field. Dietetic foods have shown little growth, and General Foods has only one product in the dietetic line (D-Zerta), is considering plugging it among complexion-conscious teenagers. The industry agrees that geriatric foods are a promising and challenging field, but so far oldsters have not shown much stomach for foods that seem to set them apart, though they are often forced to eat baby foods. General Foods is looking over the geriatric field, may move in if it can figure out the right kind of food.

Charlie Mortimer believes that there is still a great future in convenience foods: “their growth is just beginning.” Better methods of packaging, freezing, mixing and cooking are on the way to tempt the housewife. She may soon be able to duplicate the cooking feats of big hotels and restaurants; many of them now move individual meals from freezer to plate in two minutes via an infra-red range. A new method of freeze drying may replace many of the present frozen foods with dehydrated foods that will not have to be kept in a freezer.

The revolution has already gone beyond the mere limits of natural food. General Foods’ Tang is a completely artificial product created in the laboratory. Scientists have already isolated 30 volatile elements in coffee, some day may be able to produce artificial coffee that tastes just as good as the real thing. Charlie Mortimer, a “show me” man, admits that there are some practical limits to the revolution in the kitchen. Says he: “You cannot sell me on some new food called ‘Glatsky’ that will have all the nutrients of a steak. I want my steak.” But if the public showed a need for Glatsky and a willingness to buy it, Charlie Mortimer would not hesitate to put a General Foods label on it. Then even he might learn to like it.