Corporations: Sweet Success, Chinese Style

For over a year, California Comic Stan Freberg has been delighting U.S. radio audiences with zany commercials featuring the so-called “Chun Kingston Trio” in such far-out “folk songs” as Oh, Handle Me Down My Walking Chow Mein. Last week, turning to television, Freberg outdid himself on an hour-long “Salute to the Chinese New Year.” In his shrewd parodies of familiar television fare, Freberg so amused the critics that they genially forgave him for turning the program into one long plug for Chinese chow, capped by the slogan: “Buy two cans of our chow mein: one for now and one for when you’re hungry an hour later.”

Such purposeful foolery, cooked up by Freberg in cooperation with the Manhattan ad agency he whimsically refers to as Batten, Barton, Durstine & Yangpoo, have helped make a flamboyant. 43-year-old businessman named Jeno Paulucci (pronounced Puh-loo-chee) the nation’s most successful manufacturer of Chinese food. Barely 15 years old, Paulucci’s Duluth-based Chun King Corp. now rings up more than half of all U.S. sales of packaged Chinese food. Chun King’s gross climbed 15% to $30 million last year, and Paulucci—who owns the whole company—expects a still fatter gain this year.

The Good Earth. Puckish, pint-sized (5 ft. 5 in.) Jeno Paulucci, an Italian immigrant’s son from the Minnesota iron range, started in the food business helping his mother sell home-canned pasta in her living room, later worked as a sidewalk vegetable barker and roaming grocery salesman. Just after World War II, he bought a Chinese food cannery in Duluth, and in 1947 began to turn out a spicy chow mein derived from recipes that he whipped up himself on his mother’s stove. “It’s not so bland as Chinese chow mein.” he explains.

In constructing his food empire, which now stretches from frozen egg foo yung to a fruit pie-filling firm called Northland Foods. Paulucci adhered to a two-point credo: “Cut out the middleman” and “Take advantage of waste.” Shopping for bargains around the world, Chun King buys beef from Australia and shrimp from Ecuador, contracts directly with Chippewa Indians for wild rice and with Oklahoma and Texas farmers for mung beans, from which bean sprouts are grown. The simpler ingredients, such as celery and mushrooms, Chun King produces for itself—and here the profiting from waste enters. When Paulucci found out that the dirt in which the mushrooms grew was good for only one crop yet still contained rich compost, he started a flourishing business selling it as potting soil.

Slippery Sauce. Oddly enough, the only time Paulucci ran into trouble was in selling Italian food. Four years ago, he decided to market his mother’s version of tomato sauce and other Italian delicacies under the trade name Jeno, and put on a noisy sales campaign with company executives dashing around garbed in the Jeno symbol, a wide Italian hat. “Trouble was,” says Paulucci. “we were selling a symbol, not a product. It was an utter failure.” He lost $200,000, now sells only spaghetti sauce and pizza mix.

Getting back to the mein line. Paulucci currently is forging a chain of pagoda-roofed Chinese drive-ins called Riksha Inns. No. 1 inn opened this week in Orlando, Fla.. and others are to open soon in Dallas. Houston and Seattle. As usual, the idea is a double entry. “We have found,” says Jeno Paulucci, “that wherever the most Chinese restaurants are located, we sell the most Chun King.”