Corporations: Nabisco’s Rising Dough

Take two carloads of flour, sift, add 2,750 gallons of shortening, 3½ tons of salt, 190,000 packets of yeast. Mix well. Let stand and rise for 19 hours. Mix again. Let stand another four hours. Roll into thin sheet and cut into small squares. Place in 300-ft.-long oven for three minutes at temperatures ranging from 560° to 620°. Yield: 28,280,000 saltine crackers.

That would be enough to keep 100 families in crackers for a lifetime, but it is scarcely a third of the daily output of one of the 74 plants of the National Biscuit Co. The world’s biggest baker of cookies, as well as a pantryful of other goods from arrowroot biscuits to zwieback, Nabisco has increased its sales 27% in the past five years, to $526 million in 1962, and white-thatched President Lee Smith Bickmore, 55, has reported that sales for 1963’s first three quarters are a cracking good 7% ahead of last year’s. Bickmore’s sales recipe:

“We are in impulse merchandising. The package has to say ‘Buy me!’ “

Out of the Barrel. Packaging made Nabisco. The company began 65 years ago as an amalgamation of regional cracker bakers, quickly dominated the industry by taking the cracker out of the barrel and putting it into a box as the original Uneeda Biscuit. Nabisco now sells its 139 kinds of cookies and crackers in 307 different packages. Raymond Loewy designs them, and they are carefully test-marketed to gauge the lure of their colors, shapes and such gimmicks as “reclosable linings.”

Nabisco’s 3,500 salesmen prowl groceries two or three times each week, checking coded numbers on packages to see how they are selling, and moving older shipments to the front so that shoppers will take them first. If a product spends too much time on the shelf, Nabisco buys it back from the store and grinds it into pig feed. Among the recent failures that went to the hogs were Sesame Thins and Celery Thins. When one shareholder asked at the annual meeting why Sesame Thins had been dropped, Vice President Nile Cave answered: “This happens to be an item I personally like, but unhappily other people don’t seem to.”

At a New Jersey plant, a panel of “schooled and trained” tasters snap, bite and nibble the 700 to 800 new products that the company whips up yearly on its research budget of $3,500,000. Only six or eight of a year’s budget of products ever get to the shelves. Currently Nabisco is test-marketing “Team Flakes,” a four-grain cereal of wheat, rice, oats and corn.

Into Foreign Markets. Nabisco’s top seller is still its Premium Saltine, which reinforces the company’s principle that most Americans prefer plain foods. President Bickmore himself is a plain-food man. A tithing Mormon from Paradise, Utah, he began in 1933 as a Nabisco salesman in Pocatello, Idaho, but was laid off in a Depression cutback, and started again as a porter in a company warehouse. As he worked up the line, Bickmore took some studies on the side from both Dale Carnegie and Harvard Business School. Since becoming chief executive three years ago, he has bought out Cream of Wheat and the James O. Welch candy company* of Cambridge, Mass., as well as biscuit bakers in Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, England and France. A notebook in his uncluttered desk holds his secret expansion plans for the company. All Bickmore will say is that within the next five years he intends to spread more products abroad, push sales close to $800 million, and lift profits 50% above last year’s record $30 million. Helping out the cause, Bickmore loyally begins each day with a bowl of Nabisco Shredded Wheat.

* Owned previously by the brother of John Birch Society Founder Robert Welch, who was himself advertising director of the candy company until 1957.