About four years later, Nabisco Brands merged with R. Philip Morris Companies, Inc. You must be logged in to post a comment. No related posts. In virtually every industry from thread to tin cans, Wall Street financiers and lawyers worked to create new companies that would dominate, if not monopolize, their industries. The idea was to buy up enough competitors to get control over pricing and end ruinous price wars. Hundreds of such trusts were set up.
Nevertheless, the organizers sometimes made millions by floating new stock issues in the big new companies. In this context, a group of biscuit and cracker bakers came to the Chicago law office of Adolphus W. Green was a most unusual fellow.
Born in , AW was the last of eleven children of a Boston Irish family. His father died and his mother took in boarders to make ends meet. None stood out as much as AW. Like his mother, he loved books and read continually. She also inspired in AW a love of literature, the arts, and the classics. The bright, serious boy made it into the prestigious Boston Latin School, then graduated from Harvard at the age of twenty, in the top quarter of his class. Off he went to find his fame and fortune in New York City, hoping to become a lawyer.
At the time, many young men became lawyers by clerking at a law firm rather than attending law school. Surrounded by his beloved books, with time to visit museums and attend the theater, Green was soon made head librarian. In , the contacts he made at the library led the twenty-five-year-old Green to a job as clerk for a top law firm.
Green worked hard and studied hard. He learned from the top attorneys in the nation, and easily passed the bar by the time he was thirty. Following the great fire of , the city was rebuilding, open to new ideas and new faces.
But it was still a rough, dirty city, and Green was at first repulsed, missing the high culture of New York that Chicago had little use for. Yet Green prospered, adding young partners to his law firm. He began to work for some of the most powerful business leaders in Chicago. His reputation as a top business lawyer spread. In he married, and over time had eight children. They wanted his help in forming a trust, a combination that would bring together many bakers, allow them to get stock in the new company, and lessen competition.
As he did throughout his life, AW Green studied everything he could about the biscuit and cracker industry. He soon became an expert on the business.
AW found that every city of any size had one or two cracker bakeries. Using old-fashioned, labor-intensive production methods, these local bakeries delivered wooden barrels and boxes of crackers to stores in horse-drawn wagons.
Over time, the bakers added various cookies and crackers to their product lines. Most of them had well-known local brands, usually sold only within several miles of the bakeries. Bread bakeries were — and are — a separate industry, producing a perishable product with a much shorter shelf life and therefor even smaller trading areas. The cracker barrel had become the symbol of the country general store. Old-timers sat around he barrels sharing the town gossip.
But the person who bought the last crackers, at the bottom of the barrel, often found soggy crackers, insects, and rodent droppings there. The railroads together with the rise of mass magazines led to a national market for products. Coca-Cola , Heinz , and other national brands were developing fast. AW did not believe that the old industry structure of small bakeries around the nation could survive the changing world without consolidating. So in , the forty-seven-year-old Green helped this group of bakers incorporate the American Biscuit and Manufacturing Company.
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We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification. The chief architect of the merger and the first chairman of the new company was Adolphus Green. Green, a Chicago lawyer and shrewd businessman who had negotiated the American Biscuit Company merger, remained the guiding force at N.
It was Green who was responsible for N. Every N. All of its merchandise was marked with the company's distinctive emblem: an oval topped by a cross with two bars. Green found the symbol in a catalog of medieval Italian printers' marks, where it was said to represent the triumph of good over evil. Green decided to launch the National Biscuit Company by introducing a new line of biscuits.
He chose the ordinary soda cracker, but gave N. Until then, crackers had been sold in bulk from cracker barrels or large crates, which did little to retard sogginess or spoilage.
Novelty packaging was not enough. Green also commissioned the Philadelphia advertising agency N. The Ayer agency suggested "Uneeda Biscuit" and also helped promote the product with illustrations of a rosy-cheeked boy clutching a box of Uneeda Biscuits.
The boy was dressed in a rain coat and galoshes to call attention to the packaging's moisture-proof nature. The Uneeda Boy became one of the world's best-recognized trademarks.
Across the country, newspapers, billboards, and posters queried, "Do you know Uneeda Biscuit? A host of imitators attempted to cash in on the popularity of Uneeda, and the company's attorneys were kept busy defending N. The company won injunctions against rival bakeries marketing "Iwanta," "Uwanta," and "Ulika" biscuits.
By N. The National Biscuit Company built its reputation on securing customer loyalty to recognized brands such as Uneeda. In the early years of the 20th century, the company concentrated on expanding its line of cookies and crackers. Older products originally created by Nabisco's precursor bakeries that continued to be successful included Fig Newtons and Premium Saltines.
In N. In both Lorna Doones and Oreos were created, the latter eventually becoming the world's best-selling cookie. Yet Adolphus Green still managed the biscuit conglomerate as if it were a small family business. Green disliked delegating power. He personally inspected every company bakery once or twice a year, and most local managers communicated directly with Green. Green's authoritarian style annoyed many of his colleagues and led to frequent resignations from the board of directors.
As a result, when Green died in , few of the original directors remained and company management was in disarray. The most pressing task for Green's successor, Roy E. Tomlinson, was reorganizing N.
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