FOOD: The Stouffer Boys

In 1924 old A. B. Stouffer (rhymes with “gopher”) sold his Cleveland creamery to enjoy the ease he had looked for all his life. The ease came hard. Affable, garrulous, he missed talking to people. There was nothing to do. Back to work went Father Stouffer, opened a tiny, stand-up dairy counter (milk & buttermilk) in Cleveland’s old Arcade Building. Fearful that her husband’s customers weren’t getting enough to eat, Mother Stouffer sent over one of the Dutch apple pies her friends had praised. It was a sensation.

Sensation or no, Stouffer Sons Vernon and Gordon wanted no part of their parents’ new occupation, bridled at having to spend their vacations lugging Dutch pies to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant. Five years later, when Vernon had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance & Commerce and Gordon had flunked out of his fourth prep school, the boys changed their minds. By then Father Stouffer had a fixed idea: light, tasty, weight-saving lunches for business men & women. With a $15,000 bank loan and Mother Stouffer running the kitchen the family opened its first Stouffer restaurant.

By 1935 Stouffer’s had solved the mystery of how to make money in the risky, $1,666,000,000-a-year U. S. restaurant business. Whereas a third of the 153,000 U. S. restaurants make no profit at all, the Stouffer chain (in Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia) netted $83,000 on yearly sales of $2,037,000. By end of 1936 Father Stouffer was dead, the boys were running the show. They invaded Manhattan; their technique worked like a charm. Last week Vernon, president & treasurer, 37, and Gordon, personnel head, 34, rolled out an income statement to turn the average restaurateur green. For fiscal 1940 (July 31) their twelve restaurants yielded $418,000 profits on $5,012,000 gross.

How they do it is less a mystery than a knack. Typical of Stouffer’s is its five-story restaurant on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue — dignified grey colonial brick front, tasteful Williamsburg interior decorations. Average lunch check is 60¢, dinner 91¢. Profit works out to 4.2¢ a meal. Food (all portions carefully measured) not only is good but looks good. The chain also goes in for comely waitresses — referred to only as “Stouffer girls.” Stouffer’s prefers them not too beautiful, with a touch of Bryn Mawr. Some of them have made as much as $75 a week with tips. Of 40 (male) restaurant managers, all are college graduates; twelve were trained in Cornell’s famed Hotel Administration course. The cooks are all women. Menus are uniform throughout the country, all stemming from the experimental kitchen in Cleve land where Mother Stouffer and the boys keep poking around.

Since Father Stouffer died, the boys and their mother have held 85% of the stock. Bankers have repeatedly urged the boys to sell part of their share holdings to the public. Real-estate men advised against their opening on Fifth Avenue, on Manhattan’s Pershing Square (where four restaurants, all of whose names began with S, had previously failed). Stouffer restaurants at both places are a success. In Cleveland, Vernon and Gordon’s intrepidity won them a name for gangbusting. When shakedown artists Campbell and McGee terrorized Cleveland businessmen (TIME, March 21, 1938), Safety Director Eliot Ness begged for cooperation. Of all the merchants in Cleveland, only the Stouffer boys came forward. Their testimony helped send Campbell & McGee to jail.