FOOD: Tin Can King

For years the main plants of the California Conserving Co., Inc., and Hunt Foods, Inc., have faced each other across the street in Hayward, Calif. As two of the oldest and biggest food-packing companies on the Pacific coast, they were naturally competitors, yet they acted more like pals. If a Hunt machine broke down, Conserving helped make Hunt products; if Conserving had too many peaches on hand, Hunt canned them for Conserving.

Last week this beautiful friendship ripened into marriage. For some $3,000,000 in its own stock, Hunt bought out California Conserving. This deal, Hunt’s fourth and biggest packing company purchase in three years, made it the West Coast’s biggest food-processing company. It has 16 canning plants (employing some 10,000 packers at peak season), about 70 products (including tomato sauce, canned fruits, vegetables and jellies, frozen foods), expects to gross at least $35,000,000 a year.

The man responsible for Hunt’s spectacular leap into the big time is its unspectacular owner and president: black-haired, aggressive Norton Simon, 38. When he bought control of Hunt in 1942, many housewives had never heard of Hunt Products. Simon told them by billboard, newspaper and radio so loudly and effectively that “Hunt for the Best” became a household slogan. One result: the West Coast, all but drinking Hunt’s tomato sauce like milk, now buys almost half of the 100 million cans a year they sell (nearly five cans per capita).

Norton Simon climbed to his tin can throne by a simple formula: don’t start a business yourself; buy up those already started and run them better. The son of a dry-goods merchant, Simon enrolled at the University of California when he was 17. He quit a few weeks later because he was making too much money—selling paper products and from investments in a small theater where he had put his profits—to waste his time in school. He went to work for a steel-products firm, quit to buy his first business, a steel jobbing plant. By the time he was 23 he had made $35.000.

In quick succession he bought up several small orange-juice companies, started the California Seafood Co. (and put his father in as president), became principal owner of the Atlas Imperial Diesel Engine Co. When he got Hunt, he immediately expanded it by adding the dozen small food-packing plants he had cautiously bought up over a ten-year period. In this way he got expansion without the risk of launching new products.

Although this policy has piled up a fortune of several millions for Norton Simon, he still lives cautiously. He drives medium-priced cars, wears conservative, ready-made clothes, lives in an inexpensive old house. As yet Simon has only a taste of the food industry’s wares; some day he hopes to control a food-processing empire comparable to Standard Brands.