Food: Wurst for Wares

I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener. That is what I'd truly like to be. 'Cause if I were an Oscar Mayer wiener, Everyone would be in love with me.

Musically accompanied by 101 pieces of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, that jingle is now appearing on U.S. television. It is making a pitch for an old, redolent, profitable—and fascinating—company.

In the 1880s, in the back room of their neighborhood meat market on Chicago's North Side, the Bavarian Mayer brothers—Oscar, Gottfried and Max—worked hard stuffing sausages. Oscar's wife Louise helped, and their son Oscar G. stood on a butter tub behind the counter to take orders. Weisswurst, Bockwurst, Leberwurst were packed into wicker baskets and piled on horse-drawn wagons to make the rounds. They sold well—enough to send Oscar G. to Harvard, which he left with a Phi Beta Kappa key and ambitions to expand the family business.

Today, on the same spot where the immigrant Mayers lived and labored stands one of the main plants of Wisconsin's Oscar Mayer & Co., the U.S.'s seventh largest meat packer, with sales last year in excess of $400 million. Headed now by the co-founder's grandson Oscar G. Mayer Jr., 54, as chairman of the board, and P. Goff Beach as president, the company is still largely family owned (79%) and has nine other members on the payroll.

Automatic Strippers. Besides fresh meat, Oscar Mayer & Co. offers under its brand name 135 varieties of sausages and some 70 other processed-meat products, notably bland luncheon cuts and wieners (Mayer & Co. will accept the word frankfurter—but hot dog is taboo). Since 1954, in an industry traditionally plagued by meager returns, it has also squeezed out more profit than any other leading meat packer: 2.38% of sales in 1967, v. an industry-wide average of 1.01%.

Emphasis on processed-meat products (over 60% of total sales last year), which carry greater potential profit margins than fresh meat, partly explains the company's high earnings. But a series of ingenious inventions and industry firsts kept Oscar Mayer in the forefront of the meat-packing industry for decades. In 1929 it was first to break the traditional anonymity of most producers by banding its wieners like cigars with a yellow paper ring. Then it developed an automatic banding machine, automatic linkers and strippers, and in 1950 hit on the idea for vacuum packaging in plastic, which quadrupled the shell life of what were once highly perishable products.

Computer Directed. Today, all five of Oscar Mayer's processing plants across the U.S. have two-story contraptions where uninterrupted battalions of 36,000 wieners an hour glide toward their destination, untouched by human hands. Computers print out the best formulas for the next day's sausage production by comparing current market prices of meat cuts with the various recipes that may be used.

The money Oscar Mayer & Co. has spent on research, at an annual rate of $2.2 million recently, seems to have paid off. The company is also devoting some $4.5 million to advertising, so that everyone will really love an Oscar Mayer wiener.