• U.S.

FOOD: The Duke of Groceries

3 minute read
TIME

A powerful newcomer has arisen in the U.S. wholesale grocery business. Under the very noses of the alpaca-sleeved grocer barons, dapper, cold-eyed Nathan Cummings, 47, has fashioned himself a duchy. Cummings, boss of Chicago and Baltimore’s Sprague Warner-Kenny Corp., wound up in twelve hours of feverish trading a deal that made him a real power in the business.

For about $1,500,000 Grocer Cummings bought up some 85% of the stock of Western Grocer Co. of Marshalltown, Iowa, one of the biggest wholesale grocers between the Mississippi and the Rockies. By this stroke, he mushroomed his interests over three-quarters of the U.S., acquiring ten canneries and one packaging plant, along with Western’s subsidiary, Marshall Canning Co.

Rubber and Candy. Until four years ago, Cummings was doing well as a candy and biscuit maker. Born in St. John, N.B., he went to work at 14. Later, he became his father’s partner in a shoe store, branched out into shoe wholesaling, added a sideline of rubber importing.

In 1934, he sold out his rubber and shoe interests and bought control of McCormick’s, Ltd., a candy and biscuit maker of London, Ont. Within three years he was fighting British-controlled George Weston, Ltd. for the Canadian market. Upshot: Weston bought McCormick’s, Ltd. but kept Cummings to run it.

He did such a job that in 1939 “friends in Dun & Bradstreet” asked him to run Baltimore’s 72-year-old and-limping C. D. Kenny Co., wholesale grocers. He soon controlled the company. In 1942 he bought into Chicago’s Sprague, Warner Co., the Midwest’s biggest wholesale grocer, and merged it with Kenny.

His business formula: “Acquire control of good, old, large companies and apply streamlining.”

Labels and Ratholes. Cummings’ streamlining is fast and ruthless. He shocks fuddy-duddies in the trade. When he took over Sprague, Warner he found that it was staggering along with some 50,000 descriptive labels because of the traditional practice of buying up trade names when wholesale grocers go out of business, and keeping the names. He dumped all but some 5,000 fast-moving items. Other profit-losing ratholes were plugged, and Sprague, Warner-Kenny made $311,465 in profits last year on its gross of $32,000,000, a good return for the low-profit but quick-turnover wholesale grocery business. This year, Cummings expects his merged companies to gross $50,000,000 while supplying 60,000 grocers, restaurants, etc. from the Atlantic seaboard to the Rockies.

Although the bulk of his business has moved west, Cummings still makes his home in Baltimore, but spends half his time in Chicago. Because of his Baltimore connections, some gossips say that Cummings is only a “front man” for Baltimore’s wealthy Commercial Credit Co.

Cummings readily admits that Commercial Credit helped to finance his rise. But it has no strings on him.

Recently he borrowed $3,250,000 from Cleveland, Chicago and Manhattan banks. Part of it he used to buy Western, the rest to pay off Commercial Credit.

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