Duncan Hines (35 page)

During the course of the trial Milliken, acting on Hines's behalf, repeatedly tried to demonstrate the things that Molesworth had not
done well.
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Milliken contended that Molesworth had methodically changed the structure of Hines's office to the point that it was unrecognizable to his employer. All Hines wanted in an office manager was someone to maintain the structure he had created—and make it run smoothly; he did not need to employ someone who was anxious to tear it apart, even if it was at times inefficient.
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Sara Meeks, like the other employees who had worked under Molesworth, had to testify against him. “I was supposed to testify that this man did not do a good job…and I remember that when I came off the stand, Mr. Hines looked at me,” nodded his head approvingly, and said softly ‘good job.' “He was happy with what I had said.”
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The definitive moment during the day-long trial came when Hines's own accountant, Cecil “Hoot” Holland, took the witness stand and testified that, based on the company's bookkeeping, Hines's business had prospered during Molesworth's tenure.
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Toward the end of the day the jury returned their verdict in favor of Molesworth. To put the contentious proceedings to rest, an order of satisfaction was filed in court six days later by both parties on 19 November 1952. In the end, Hines was ordered to pay Molesworth (who, by the time of the trial, had moved to Westminster, Maryland)
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a sum of $8,850,
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a considerable figure by 1952 standards. Despite his financial loss, Hines was glad the trial was over. Said Meeks, “He was so happy to get rid of [Molesworth] that he didn't care what he had to pay him.”
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Thanks to Edith Wilson's inauguration of a sensible work arrangement for Hines's operation in the mid-1940s, by 1950 there were four employees working for Hines at all times, although sometimes their duties would overlap. Their desks were arranged in a circle in the middle of the office. Since the area where they worked was not large enough for Hines to have his own office, he spent much of his time in the building's adjacent living quarters. There he worked through the morning, ate his noonday meal in the kitchen, took his ritual afternoon nap, which lasted until about 2:00
P.M.
, and worked some more until 5:00
P.M.
, when everyone went home.
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Although his employees worked hard for Hines and were not disloyal to him, they did draw the line in one respect. Hines revered the cooking skills of his black maid, Myrtle Potter, and so gave her free rein in their kitchen. Each day Mrs. Potter ensconced herself in their kitchen, preparing new concoctions for the noonday meal. More often than not his employees were the beneficiaries of these sumptuous, sometimes spectacular meals, usually compliments of Clara. Unfortunately, their palates were used to plain, home-cooked country food. The culinary gifts Clara proffered were sometimes so rich they could not finish them—and sometimes could not swallow them. As a result, they stealthily flushed many a meal down the toilet. They did not want to hurt the Hines's feelings, so they always said they immensely enjoyed the food. “They liked different foods than we did,” said Sara Meeks. “They were used to these gourmet foods, and we were used to country cooking, like peach cobbler and chocolate cake, but when it came to all these tortes and things like that, we didn't know what to think of it.”
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Mary Herndon, who also did her share of flushing, added that “they used a lot of liquor in some of the recipes… and neither Sara Jane nor I were not very fond of that taste. So I guess we told a few white lies from time to time. If we didn't have time to flush it down the toilet, [the food] got shoved into our desk drawers real quickly, and we hoped that Mr. Hines wouldn't have us get something out while he was standing over our shoulder.” Sometimes, “as soon as we'd taste it in front of him, we'd race each other to the toilet as soon as he went out the door. We'd enjoy some of it, too,” but some of their samples, particularly the desserts, were so laden with alcohol they dared not strike a match in the bathroom for fear the toilet bowl would burst into flames.
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One of the many companies licensed to sell Duncan Hines products was Nebraska Consolidated Mills, Inc. The company was primarily a flour milling operation with little experience in consumer marketing. That quickly changed. Under the able leadership of Allan Mactier, the company's ambitious 32-year-old president,
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Nebraska Consolidated worked out a satisfactory franchise agreement with Roy Park to sell flour-based products. A few months after the contract was signed, the small milling company began producing sixteen different kinds of cake and specialty mixes.
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Headquartered in Omaha, the company operated mills in four Nebraska cities, and one in Decatur, Alabama. After more than a year of laboratory and consumer testing, they introduced the Duncan Hines Cake Mixes in Nebraska and Iowa on 26 June 1951. In the winter of 1952 Nebraska Consolidated launched Duncan Hines Buttermilk Pancake Mix; in April 1953 it was followed with Duncan Hines Blueberry Muffin Mix. “All mix recipes were developed in Nebraska Consolidated's kitchens, with the help and supervision of Duncan Hines and his staff.”
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While other mixes had been marketed as “just add water or milk” convenience items, the new company altered the formula: they left in the dried milk and disposed with the dehydrated eggs.
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Using
Hines's name proved a boon to the new enterprise: three weeks after the Duncan Hines cake mixes were introduced in supermarkets in Omaha, Nebraska, the product captured 48 percent of the cake mix market.
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If Roy Park ever worried about his company's future, his thoughts of failure vanished after this success. From that point forward, Hines-Park Foods, to use Park's apt word, “snowballed.”
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Products from Hines-Park were not at first widely available; initially, they were found only in supermarkets in selected cities. But once the company managed to firmly ensconce its products on supermarket shelves in targeted markets, it expanded to other geographical sections. For a variety of reasons, Park believed it the wiser strategy to infiltrate the nation's supermarkets methodically rather than blanket the country with its products. His strategy proved sound, for in time most of them, particularly the cake mixes, began to catch on with the public through the best advertisement of all: word-of-mouth.

The best test of the public's approval of the cake mixes was at the cash register. In mid-1952 Nebraska Consolidated Mills reported on its sales in Iowa and Nebraska: “All the Hinky-Dinky Stores ran out…. Safeway ran out during the afternoon, too, so we set out with two five-ton trucks and delivered 389 cases directly to the seventeen Safeway Stores in Omaha and Council Bluffs.” Within the next few months the plant delivered to supermarkets in these two states over 10,000 cases of Duncan Hines cake mix. That spring Hines-Park arranged to make their products available in the South. As in other states, housewives rushed to the supermarket to buy them. The cake mixes out-performed all other products. For example, on the first day that they were available in Bowling Green, Kentucky, one store's entire supply of 1,400 packages was exhausted in just a few hours. The same phenomenon was replicated in grocery stores across the country. Everyone, it seemed, had to sample the latest Duncan Hines product.

Meanwhile, sales for Duncan Hines Ice Cream were going through the roof. By December 1951 ninety-five plants in locations from Los Angeles to Boston churned out nearly 3 million cartons
of the expensive dessert each month, and there seemed to be no end to the public's appetite for it.
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By early 1952 the rich, flavorful dairy product was available in 39 states.
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The company's fortunes were further sweetened in July 1952 when the Duncan Hines ice cream bar was made available.
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By the end of 1951 Hines-Park had approved 165 different products from 120 food producers. The array of food Hines endorsed included twenty jams and jellies, eighteen jars of pickles, three types of mushrooms, and eleven ice cream toppings.
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The company's product line-up also included fruit sherbet, salad dressing, ketchup, steak sauce, Worcester sauce, chili sauce, and sea food sauce. There was also a Duncan Hines Bread, which first appeared on supermarket shelves on 6 May 1952. Each loaf sold for about 25 cents, and it soon became one of the company's better sellers; much credit to its success was due in part to its recipe of unbleached flour, honey (instead of sugar), and plenty of milk.
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Hines said that if a list could be compiled of his three-year-old company's products it would become dated before the print was dry. In a short time the firm's strategic and organizational efforts in placing and marketing its merchandise were successful enough to make the rest of the food industry take notice.
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When a grocery store customer bought a box or can from Hines-Park's product line-up, his decision was often influenced by Ag Research, Hines-Park's advertising arm. In 1949 Ag Research's advertising budget was only $10,000; by 1952 that figure had climbed to over $1,000,000.
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But advertising alone could not account for the firms's spectacular sales. This was proved when L. W. Hitchcock of the James H. Black Co. reported to Hines-Park executives of an experiment he conducted in Chicago. With the cooperation of a Chicago food distributor and several grocery stores it supplied, Hitchcock put Duncan Hines salad dressing on supermarket shelves to see if anyone would buy it based on the strength of Hines's name. For five weeks there was “no advertising, store signs, no promotion of any kind.” The results were phenomenal. No matter where the salad dressing was displayed, supermarkets quickly sold all available stock. When it was later
advertised in Chicago, Milwaukee and Minneapolis, supermarkets sold almost 9,000 cases in a few days.
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To promote the introduction of the company's cake mixes, Roy Park put his best salesperson to work. Duncan Hines, with Clara at his side, journeyed across America on a public relations campaign to let the American public know what was waiting for them on supermarket shelves. As a pure public relations ploy, Park arranged for several cities and small towns to celebrate “Duncan Hines Day” or “Duncan Hines Week,” each of which was highlighted by an appearance by his famous partner.
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These promotional appearances were punctuated by scores of color newspaper advertisements as well as Hines's appearances on radio and television. Throughout the promotional tour, when he was not entertaining a bevy of reporters, Duncan Hines was being hailed as a ceremonial guest of honor in dozens of cities across the country. During these public tributes to his integrity and character, Hines was often given the key to the city or an equivalent honor as he stood in front of a supermarket where his company's cake mixes were on sale.
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He was on the road nearly every day, or so it seemed. His schedule would have exhausted most men his age, but Hines never complained; he was the center of attention and reveled in it.

By 1953 three flavors from the Duncan Hines line-up—white, yellow and devil's food—had captured ten percent of the national cake mix market. Earlier that year Hines-Park Foods had “brought out other Duncan Hines mixes—for pancakes and waffles, gingerbread and muffins.” All sold very well. One year later, in the summer of 1954, according to a survey taken in the Southern states for
Progressive Farmer
magazine, “the Duncan Hines cake mixes ranked fourth behind Aunt Jemima, Pillsbury and Swansdown, and the pancake mix was fourth behind Aunt Jemima, Pillsbury and Ballard's. In the Spokane market, Duncan Hines cake mixes were now “third behind Betty Crocker and Pillsbury, while the muffin mix” was first. A Fort Wayne, Indiana, market survey, released in October 1954, revealed the Duncan Hines cake mixes to be “ahead of all other brands.” When the cake mixes were introduced in Des
Moines, Iowa in 1951, within months they had garnered 26% of the market; by 1954 they had snared 41% of it.

The Duncan Hines brand changed the way housewives perceived cake mix preparation, and its introduction stirred up the industry. “When they originally appeared on the market,” reported
Advertising Age
in an article reviewing the brand name's spreading popularity, cake “mixes were promoted mainly as a convenience product.” Housewives who bought a box were expected to follow the printed instructions: “Just add water and pop in the oven…. The Duncan Hines mix turned the tables on the established brands by telling the housewife to add two fresh eggs as well as water.” Adding authority to the product, the cake mix package carried a picture of Duncan Hines next to his statement: “I have found that strictly fresh eggs mean a bigger, better cake…in appearance, flavor and freshness.” This approach to manufacturing cake mixes attracted an increasing number of consumers and was soon copied by other food production firms.

By the mid-1950s the objective that Roy Park had originally set out to accomplish—to create a product people would respect and enthusiastically purchase regardless of its price—had largely been met. When asked about his success, Park explained that marketing “quality” was a sound selling approach, “because it recognizes the desire and ambition of every American to move up toward a higher standard of living. It's not enough…to stress nutritional values. Food has tremendous possibilities for glamorizing, and we should sell all the joys that go with good eating.”
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