How to Grow Faster

"Anything making animals grow faster is almost certain to reduce their price." With this consumer-conscious observation, President Dwight Joyce of Cleveland's Glidden Co. last week began promoting a new product to make animals grow faster--and, possibly, to reduce the price of food. The product: "ABC and X" animal feed, which contains waste fish products and secret antibiotic drugs that help animals to get more nourishment from their food. The new feed, said Joyce, will make turkeys grow bigger, speed up the growth of chickens 5% to 20%, pigs 20% (until they reach 100 lbs.).

Glidden is not primarily in the feed business; it is one of the biggest U.S. paint companies. But last week President Joyce planned to be in the feed business in a big way, helped by a nationwide ad campaign plugging his new feed with the slogan: "Grow faster with Glidden."

Soybeans & Sex. It was just such enthusiasm to launch non-paint products that had made Glidden grow as fast as an ABC-and-X-fed shoat. In 33 years, Glidden has expanded from a $2,500,000-a-year paint company into a $200 million-a-year concern with 37 plants in the U.S. and Canada. It turns out hundreds of products, ranging from bug poison to salad dressing, from lacquer to sex hormones. In the past two years, Glidden's new products have included a quick-drying paint (Spred Satin), sweetened coconut shreds that stay fresh until used, silicone enamel (a cross between porcelain and plastic used for washing machines, refrigerators, etc.), and a long-keeping commercial shortening for cooking. The latest project: an economical way to extract Cortisone from soybeans.

This odd assortment of products was.

born out of a research technique which President Joyce describes as "pre-meditated accident." Says he: "We're always running experiments and making combinations of things to see what they'll do." Ten years ago, for example, Glidden experimented with "fish stick water," the watery residue left after the oil is pressed out of fish (for meal), to see what it would do. The result was ABC and X.

Oil & Oleo. The man chiefly responsible for Glidden's expansion into non-paint fields is 50-year-old Dwight Joyce's father, Adrian D. Joyce, who at 78 is still active as chairman of the board. A successful businessman at 45, father Adrian quit his job as sales manager for the Sherwin-Williams [paint] Co. to form a syndicate to buy Cleveland's little Glidden Varnish Co. for $2,500,000. In three years, he picked up eleven more paint companies, strategically spotted through the nation.

To assure himself raw materials, Joyce bought a linseed oil plant, a lead plant and a zinc mine, and built a turpentine and rosin distillator. Everything he did led to something else. The crushing season for linseed oil lasted only six months; to keep his plant busy the rest of the year, Joyce started crushing coconut oil from copra. Since the best market for coconut oil was in food products, he bought up seven food companies, including E. R. Durkee & Co. (spices, Worcestershire sauce, mayonnaise and oleomargarine).

When Joyce found that the Germans were using soybean oil in paint, he built a soybean processing plant, used the oil himself and sold the meal to animal-feed manufacturers. To develop new soybean products, Joyce hired Dr. Percy Julian, a Negro chemist from DePauw University. The choice was good; Julian was the first to mass-produce sex hormones from soybeans successfully, gained further fame in World War II by developing a fire-fighting foam to smother gasoline and oil fires.

Through the years, Joyce plowed profits (which hit $8,600,000 last year) back into the company, has paid dividends continuously since 1933. This week, son Dwight had more good news for stockholders. In the first quarter of its fiscal year, said he, Glidden's sales hit $57.1 million for a net of $2,600,000. Says Dwight: "Right now, both our paint and food divisions are going full blast ... If times are bad and paint becomes a luxury to some people, they still have to eat, and they will be more inclined to eat margarine than butter."

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