FOOD: The Most Important People

Michigan's dimpled, 52-year-old Daniel F. Gerber has a favorite slogan: "Babies are the most important people." He has good reason to think so; he claims to be the biggest U.S. manufacturer of baby foods.* His Gerber Products Co. last year grossed $42 million, netted $3,300,000. Babies are so important to President Gerber that he prints his annual report in pink & blue, with his own picture framed in a blue ribbon bow (see cut). Gerber follows the U.S. birthrate figures as eagerly as a Brooklyn fan scanning Dodger batting averages.

Back in 1926 Gerber got to brooding about the time his wife spent in the kitchen chopping and straining vegetables for their two young children. Since his family ran a small canning plant at Fremont, Mich., Gerber decided to try straining and canning baby foods. The first products (peas, prunes, spinach, carrots, vegetable soup) were a success, both with the children and with Gerber's wife. He felt sure that other mothers would like them too, but he had to find retail outlets.

To get them, he took small ads in national magazines offering housewives six cans of baby food for $1 and asking them to send in the names of their grocers. Hundreds of women wrote to Gerber, and within 90 days he had persuaded scores of grocers to stock his wares. In the first year he sold $22,000 worth of baby foods. As sales grew, so did Gerber's family (to five children), and as he added new products he tried them out on his own brood.

In 1939 Gerber introduced chopped "junior" foods (for older children), later teamed up with Armour & Co. to put out chopped meat for moppets—a product which, along with the rising birth rate, helped Gerber double his sales in the last three years alone. Last week, Dan Gerber was betting that the U.S. trend toward bigger families would continue. Having already spent $5,000,000 on expansion since the war, he announced plans to spend $3,000,000 more for new manufacturing space at Fremont, a new warehouse in Rochester, a cereal plant in Oakland, Calif, and a new affiliate which will sell Gerber products in Canada.