By combining a keen sense of business with a keen sense of humor, Robert J. Vlasic turned family-owned into the country’s largest supplier of pickles, gherkins, sauerkraut and other bloom seasonings at home on May 8. died. He was 96 years old in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
His son Bill, a former Detroit bureau chief of the New York Times, confirmed his death.
People have pickled vegetables for thousands of years, and preservation habits have long been popular in North America.George Washington is said to have collected 476 kinds of pickles..
Still, when Vlasic grew up in Detroit, the son of a Croatian immigrant who ran a dairy dealer, Americans consumed only 1.8 pounds of pickles a year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. rice field.
If that sounds a lot, consider that by the time Vlasic sold his company, Vlasic Pickles, to Campbell Soup Company in 1978, that number had more than quadrupled. £ 8 per person.. Vlasic dominated about a quarter of the market, far surpassing its closest and much larger rival, HJ Heinz.
The company’s success was largely due to Vlasic’s management insights. As a trained engineer, he argued that the more the manager puts the report on one page, the more important it can be noted.
But he combined that hard-nose conference room behavior with a laid-back, easy-going approach to his products. He loves pickle jokes and eventually collected them in the pamphlet “Bob Vlašić’s 101 Pickle Jokes”. The cover featured a gunman, a cowboy hated gherkin, and this salty nice slapper. Marshall dill. “
Vlasic Pickles entered the American pop culture Pantheon in 1974 with the debut of its mascot, the Vlasic Stork. Perhaps dressed in a bow tie, pince-nez, and a postman’s hat, he grabbed the pickles like a cigar and broke wisely with a voice borrowed from Groucho Marx.
“Now it’s the best-tasting pickle I’ve ever eaten!” I went to one of his taglines and delivered it with a friendly rare and pickle wag. “Ham ham! Make your toys poiki!” I went to another.
If the details of the bird’s tailoring were strange, at least the spokesperson’s choice makes sense. By the mid-1970s, the baby boom had collapsed and childbirth had declined, which could require new work for storks. And the company had already placed ads based on the belief that pregnant women were anxious for pickled cucumbers.
“Sweety, it’s 4 o’clock pickle time,” the husband tells his wife in one early Vlasic print ad. It was a kind of humor for Mr. Vlasic.
“I thought pickled cucumbers were fun food.” Vlasic told The New York Times in 1974.. “We decided that we didn’t want to take ourselves or our business very seriously.”
Robert Joseph Vlasic was born on March 9, 1926 in Detroit. His grandfather, Frank, was a Croat who took his family from the town of Livno (now Bosnia and Herzegovina) to Michigan in 1912.
Frank Vlasic opened the creamery with the money he saved by working in a car body factory. Bob’s father, his son Joseph, expanded the company into distribution and soon became the state’s largest dairy distributor. Bob’s mother, Marie (Messinger) Vlasic, was a housewife.
After serving in the Marines during World War II, he. Vlasic returned to Michigan to join the family business and earned a degree in engineering from the University of Michigan in 1949.
By the early 1940s, the business had begun to expand to fruits and vegetables, embarking on the idea of bottling pickles for ease of transportation and storage. They were a hit: pickles were the perfect food for wartime America. All the scraps of food were preserved there.
When he was promoted to the company, Vlasic decided to move it from distribution to production. He bought sauerkraut plants in Imray City, about an hour north of Detroit, and added a machine to make pickled cucumbers. He signed contracts with cucumber and cabbage farmers and expanded to nearby states and ultimately to the rest of the country.
Vlasic initially sold pickles in three styles: plain, Polish and Kosher, but in the end it was the most spicy. At its peak, it sold nearly 100 products, from classic spears and stackers to luxury relishes.
When Vlasic sold the company to Campbell Soup, he claimed a seat on Campbell’s board of directors. He didn’t just get it. He chaired the board of directors from 1989 to 1993. (The Vlasic label is currently owned by Conagra Brands.)
Mr. Vlasic married Nancy Reuters in 1950. She died in 2016. Along with her son Bill, four sons, Jim, Rick, Mike, and Paul, survive. 17 grandchildren. And five great-grandchildren.
After selling the family-owned company, Vlasic founded and ran a technology company, O / E Automation. However, he spent more and more time serving nonprofits and charities around Michigan. He was a financial adviser to the Archdiocese of Roman Catholicism in Detroit and was the first person to lead the board of directors of Henry Ford Hospital outside the Ford family.
It was a job he enjoyed, as his son said.
