Business: MARGARET RUDKIN

Champion of the Old-Fashioned

IN the folklore of the U.S. food industry, mouths water and registers jingle when any product—from maple syrup to dog biscuits—is endowed with the nostalgic aura of the “old-fashioned.” No one has better succeeded in transforming that folklore into fact than trim, green-eyed Margaret Rudkin, 62, founder and president of Pepperidge Farm Inc., the largest U.S. independent baking company. Maggie Rudkin—as she is styled in her company’s homey TV ads—brought old-fashioned bread back to U.S. dinner tables in mass-production fashion, thereby baked her way into a $40-million-a-year business, which turns out 57 bakery products, employs 1,500 people in six plants. This week Mrs. Rudkin, a frequent guest lecturer at the Harvard Business School, is in France to tell students at the European Institute of Business Administration how to be successful while breaking all the rules.

Maggie Rudkin speaks from experience. The attractive, red-haired wife of Henry Rudkin, a prosperous Wall Street broker, she lived a life of ease and social grace on their Pepperidge Farm (named after pepperidge, or black gum, trees on the property) near Fairfield, Conn. Then in the mid-1930s, the youngest of her three sons became ill with asthma. An admitted “nut on proper food for children,” Mrs. Rudkin knew that asthma is an allergy, was nonetheless convinced that she could help her son by building him up. She dug out a whole-wheat-bread recipe left by her Irish grandmother, packed her baking pan with its old-fashioned ingredients—stone-milled flour (to save the vitamins lost in modern milling), honey, molasses, natural-sugar syrup, rich milk, cream and butter.

THE first few loaves were as heavy as lead, but Maggie soon got the knack. The bread seemed to help Mark’s health, and his allergist asked her to make some for other patients. Mrs. Rudkin began making batches in her kitchen with the help of a servant, then set up a small bakery in the farm’s abandoned stable, added white bread made from unbleached flour for patients who could not take much roughage in their diet.

The fame of both breads spread by word of mouth, and orders poured in from doctors and from neighbors who preferred its taste and texture to that of the day’s spongy, artificially fortified bread. Then Maggie Rudkin made a fateful decision. She had no manufacturing training or experience, no capital, and a product that sold for 25¢, v. only 10¢ for a loaf of regular bread. “Fortunately,” she says, “I was too ignorant to know about these matters.” She put a loaf of bread and some butter in a package, took a train to Manhattan and walked into Charles & Co., specialty grocers. There, she generously buttered a slice, thrust it at the manager. He ordered 24 loaves a day. Mrs. Rudkin had her husband tote them on the train daily into Grand Central, where he paid a redcap to deliver them to Charles & Co.

SOON other stores were clamoring for the bread. Maggie Rudkin lined up distributors, borrowed $15,000 capital, later rented two Norwalk, Conn, buildings for a bakery. With the help of husband Henry, she kept the business under family control by financing growth out of earnings, which will reach an estimated $1,250,000 this year. In 1947 they built a modern bakery in Norwalk, floated $450,000 worth of preferred stock (since retired) to get the cash. Maggie Rudkin shrewdly sent representatives to medical conventions, played up her bread’s healthful qualities.

Today, Pepperidge Farm delivers 1,200,000 loaves of bread a week through 500 distributors and some 50,000 stores. Mrs. Rudkin still controls the bread as carefully as if it were baked in her own kitchen. A benevolent perfectionist, she has restored four old gristmills to get the stone-ground flour she favors. When she was faced with the problem of what to do with bread returned after two days in the store (the maximum allowed by the company), she used a typical housewife’s solution: she made it into poultry stuffing, is now one of the biggest stuffing makers. Mrs. Rudkin has also branched out into cookies, brown-and-serve rolls (which she at first opposed as too much bother), and a new line of frozen pastries.

Decisions are made by a family council consisting of Mrs. Rudkin, her husband, and sons Henry Jr., 36, and William, 34, both vice presidents. Henry Rudkin became company chairman, gradually retired from Wall Street; when people ask him if he is still in the Street, he likes to quip: “No, I’m in the dough.” Mrs. Rudkin is just as enthusiastic about baking today as when she started in her own kitchen. She is full of plans for expanding her products, would even like to move into Europe “to show them how to make good bread.”