Rudkin of Pepperidge

In the polo-playing set around Fairfield, Conn., Margaret Rudkin was merely the pretty, red-haired wife of a polo-playing stockbroker--until her son got sick. She thought that bread might be a good thing to build up his strength. Not store bread, but old-fashioned homemade bread. Mrs. Rudkin got out a bread recipe left by her grandmother. It called for flour to be milled by stone in the old-style way, quantities of whole milk and butter. So Mrs. Rudkin rolled up her sleeves, ground some wheat into flour in a coffee mill and baked bread in her kitchen.

The bread was fine for her son; neighbors also found it fine. Like many Americans, they were tired of the mass-produced American bread scientifically refined until it is purified of almost all taste. At their urging, Mrs. Rudkin took eight loaves in a wicker basket to a nearby grocer. They were sold so fast that she set up a bakery of her own in the stable of her Pepperidge Farm, hired a neighbor girl, Mary Ference, to help her bake. In three months she had sold $2,500 worth of bread. By September 1938, the end of her first year in business, she had doubled and redoubled production, was turning out 4,000 loaves a week.

Rising dough. She found that she had to sell her bread for 25-c- a loaf, more than double the amount charged by the large bakeries. But she counted on the Pepperidge taste to carry the Pepperidge price. It did.

She expanded into the New York market merely by handing a slice of Pepperidge bread to the head of a Manhattan grocery store. The manager said he hadn't tasted any bread like it since he was a boy. Within a short time he was ordering 1,200 loaves a week.

To supply her growing market Margaret Rudkin acquired a fleet of eight trucks, moved her plant from the stable into an empty service station in Norwalk.

For her whole wheat bread, she got two ancient, water-operated grist mills to grind the flour, stubbornly insisting that the gram had better flavor and nourishment when it was ground in that antiquated way. As she continued to expand, she added melba toast, pound cake, etc. to the Pepperidge line. But she was careful not to expand so fast that she could not finance it out of earnings. In all, she has had to borrow only $5,000 outside capital and has kept the company a family enterprise.

She ruled her rising business like a benevolent despot. She paid wages higher than the industry level, instituted bonus and insurance plans. In return, she reserved the privilege of making them all work hard. Her employees, mostly women like the bonus-- and Margaret Rudkin-- enough to overlook her perfectionism As a result, Pepperidge has never been unionized.

Homemade Bakery. Recently, when business outgrew the garage, Mrs. Rudkin resolved her trouble in characteristic fashion. She sketched her idea of an ideal baking operation, complete with sloping tables for hand-kneading the bread. Then she drew a floor plan to house it. When she handed it to the architect, she warned him: You do the outside and the stairways, but don't change my plans." Last week Mrs. Rudkin and her 160 employees roudly moved into their new $625,000 plant. A U-shaped concrete building, it has a capacity of 4,000 loaves an hour. With it, Mrs. Rudkin expects to double her business to $3,000,000 this year, net about $300,000. Though she is now mass producing bread herself, she has made only one grudging concession to the mass market. She has started to sell a loaf already sliced.

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