World Trade: A Taste for Yankee Food

Who would have thought that canned minestrone could be sold to the Italians, instant tortilla meal to the Guatemalans, ready-to-serve treacle pudding to the British, or any culinary quickie to the French? The Americans, naturally—and U.S. food processors have done all that with remarkable success. Around the world, but especially in Western Europe, they are finding a ready market for foods processed the American way, whether they be canned, concentrated, dehydrated, frozen, precooked or ready-mixed. Last year U.S. food companies did a $3.7 billion business in foods processed abroad, and this year they are investing about $154 million more in foreign plants.

Nearly every major U.S. food company has taken a bite. Since 1958, Campbell Soup has laid out about $50 million to start operations in Britain, Italy, Belgium, France, Mexico and Australia. Beatrice Foods, strictly domestic only three years ago, now has plants, joint ventures and franchise agreements to turn out dairy products, candies and snacks in 17 countries. Corn Products has built up an extensive world empire of 63 plants in 27 countries; Borden has 30 overseas plants, General Foods 23, Kellogg 19 and General Mills five. H. J. Heinz, General Foods and Kellogg have all opened plants in Japan. Green Giant is building a vegetable canning plant near Milan, and Libby, McNeill & Libby in July opened a new cannery at Vauvert in southern France. This week, to the distress of French poultrymen, a company jointly owned by Ralston Purina and France’s Duquesne opens a large poultry processing plant in Brittany.

Beans and Biscuits. The reasons for success abroad are the same ones that made convenience foods popular in the U.S.: growing incomes, less domestic help, more women away at work, changing tastes. Many foreigners, of course, do not take to such American gastronomic institutions as peanut butter and TV dinners, and some are still wary of canned goods. But American-type fruit juice, instant desserts, frozen chicken, ketchup, canned and packaged soups and precooked rice have won a prominent place on foreign shelves.

Kellogg and Quaker Oats have seized 73% of the growing market for breakfast cereals in Britain, Heinz 63% of that country’s $70 million-a-year baked-bean market and 61% of its canned-soup bowl. Led by General Mills, National Biscuit and Pillsbury, U.S. companies now control half of the French biscuit business. A Carnation subsidiary produces 85% of all the evaporated milk sold in France, and Corn Products’ Knorr soups have half the German market. In Germany, a Kraft Foods subsidiary sells a line of 100 products, including cheeses and complete packaged spaghetti or rice dinners.

More Supermarkets. Many native dishes have also been given the American treatment. In Brazil, International Packers of Chicago cans and sells feijoada, the country’s traditional black bean, rice and pork dish. When Quaker Oats moved into Italy, it found a winning product in precooked two-minute polenta, the cornmeal mush without which no meal in rural northern Italy is complete. Last week in Mexico, where the hot dog is becoming nearly as popular as the hot tamale, General Foods began selling jars of the fiery chocolate sauce called mole. Though the French have remained staunchly traditionalist in the foods they eat, they have developed a liking for modern baby foods. Reason: by introducing such baby foods as smoked ham, filet of sole and cream of bananas to please the parents’ palates, Gerbers appealed to the buyers rather than the consumers, who have little choice in the matter.