Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men of talent. Genius will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
—Calvin Coolidge
Pops started Hines-Park Foods, Inc. by selling shares of common and preferred stock but retaining for himself the controlling interest by a comfortable margin. The corporation was set up to license the Duncan Hines name to companies around the country. “We shipped the labels to the products, not the product to the labels,” he said. Hines decided to stay out of the investment and instead received fees and royalties.
To test whether housewives would pay premium prices for a quality brand, my father, investing $50,000 of his own money, bought canned products from the S.S. Pierce company in Boston, slapped the Duncan Hines label on the cans, and put them out on shelves of upstate New York grocery stores. The products were also test-marketed in New England, Illinois and the place where I was to eventually end up as a student and to start my family— Chapel Hill, NC. This time, thanks to advertising and promotion in radio and newspapers, people looked for the products in their local stores and paid the higher prices, particularly for the new line of cake mixes that would revolutionize the food industry.
Among the first franchisers to step aboard was Nebraska Consolidated Mills, Inc. in Omaha, Nebraska, a manufacturer of flour, corn meal, and animal feed. Now known as ConAgra, Inc., the flour-milling company at that time had no previous experience with consumer products such as cake mixes. Under the able leadership of its thirty-two-year-old president, Allan Mactier, it worked out a franchise agreement with my father and launched production of the Duncan Hines cake mixes on June 26, 1951. The new line captured 48 percent of the market and the Midwestern grain company’s cake mix sales quadrupled in a year.
The most interesting aspect of the success of the Duncan Hines cake mixes was that they were priced higher than the products of its competitors. The reason for the higher cost was that it was a much better-tasting cake because you had to add your own fresh eggs, milk and butter.
The product was launched after the war years when money was still very tight, and the best treat an average family could have was a great cake at the end of a weekend meal. Putting in fresh ingredients made the cake taste better than just adding water to a mix, and psychologically, it also made the housewife feel like she had created something special. She could see, feel and taste the difference.
The psychology offset the extra cost. Marketing also played a key role, and my father put his publicity genius to work in promoting the Duncan Hines brands. “We could never outspend the competitive giants like Pillsbury, Swansdown, Dromedary, Aunt Jemima and Betty Crocker, so we just tried to outthink them,” he said.
“We were the first to sell cake mix on TV, with Mr. Hines himself doing the commercials. He was seen frosting beautiful cakes with chocolate-colored axle grease because it held up better than icing under the hot lights. We traveled extensively across the country conducting newspaper interviews and making radio and television commercials. We were the first to figure out that outdoor advertising was really ‘outdoor TV,’ so we used the same visual theme for both our TV and outdoor ads, reminding the housewife on the way to the store of Duncan Hines and last night’s TV commercial,” Pops said.
The Hines-Park team was also first to use four-color ads in newspapers using comic presses for color, and Park also arranged “Duncan Hines Days” where Hines would receive a key to the city. Hines and my parents drove all over the nation for these promotional events, and sometimes I went with them. The travel schedule was exhausting, but Hines kept up the pace. His full story is told in a book by Louis Hatchett, published in 2001 by Mercer University Press entitled Duncan Hines, The Man Behind the Cake Mix, and Hatchett commented that Hines’ “travels would make many men his age dizzy and exhausted, but surprisingly, he showed no sign of slowing down his hectic pace—or wanting to.”
With the Duncan Hines cake mix line outselling its major competitors, it didn’t take long for other major food producers, from bread and jam to canned mushrooms and peaches, to realize the potential of selling their products under the Duncan Hines name, and the idea caught hold immediately. A lot of companies were hungry for a recognized name for their products, and for a royalty on the sales, Park gave them one. As Hatchett reported “chicken from Washington, tomato juice from Ohio and New York, kidney beans from Ohio, coffee from Boston, pickles and relish from North Carolina, crab apples from Michigan.”
Louis Hatchett reported in his book in 1949 my father’s Ag Research budget was only $10,000 and within three years it had climbed to over $1 mm. The Duncan Hines brand entry into the food industry in August 1951 was covered in an article in Tide magazine entitled An Adventure in Food MArketing: A CAse study oF A new entrAnt in AMeriCA’s Biggest, FAstest growing industry.
Hatchett reported: “But advertising alone could not account for the firm’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 the supermarket shelves to see if people would buy it on the strength of Hines’s name. For five weeks, there was no advertising, store signs, and no promotion of any kind. The results were phenomenal. The salad dressing was displayed, and supermarkets sold all available stock. When it was later advertised in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis, supermarkets sold almost 9,000 cases in a few days.”
It is interesting to note that the owner of this company, Jim Black, became one of my father’s best friends, making many trips to Ithaca where I had the pleasure of meeting him and his young daughter when I was in my midteens. His daughter, Cathleen Black, is now president of Hearst Magazines and worked for Al Neuharth (in later years another of my father’s friends) as the president of USA Today.
By 1952, my father had licensed 124 companies to use the Duncan Hines label—twelve were bread bakers and eighty-three were ice cream makers. Another farm co-op, the Lehigh Valley Cooperative Farmers dairy in Allentown, PA, developed the rich-tasting ice cream, and in 1950 distributed a million cartons carrying the Duncan Hines name.
I don’t think some of the unique ice cream flavors back then are offered to consumers today. One of my favorites was apple ice cream which contained chunks of cooked glazed apples, and this was one dessert where you could see, feel and taste the difference.
To go with the ice cream, Hines endorsed eleven ice cream toppings, and other licensees carried the Duncan Hines brand name on orange juice, salad dressings, chili con carne, canned peas, fruit sherbet, spices, ketchup, steak and seafood sauces, and products from twenty jams and jellies to coffee and canned mushrooms.
Every one of these food products was prepared under strict guidelines dictated by Mr. Hines through the Duncan Hines Institute, Inc., founded in 1949, and supervised by Pops as president of Hines-Park Foods, Inc. The name was not put on anything “unless you could see, feel, or taste a difference,” Pops said. The Institute also carried on the “Recommended by Duncan Hines” tradition by publishing the books in which, by the way, the listing was free. The money was in the sale of the books and in leasing signs bearing the famous slogan to the listed eating and lodging establishments. It was said Park and Hines liberated America’s homemakers from the drudgery of the kitchen and revolutionized the food industry.
By 1955, more than 250 products were carrying the Duncan Hines name, and these products were doing annual sales of $50 million.
Through the Duncan Hines Institute, the licensing was eventually extended to manufacturers of electric coffeemakers, toasters, pepper mills, and outdoor barbeque grills. The Duncan Hines program was called “the last chance for the independents.” The franchises even included a line of cookware, and up until a few years ago, I was still getting calls from people wanting to know where they could replace the worn-out Duncan Hines pots and pans they bought a half century earlier.
Through his corporation, Adventures in Good Eating, my father also took over writing and expanding the Adventures in Good Eating, Lodging for a Night and the Duncan Hines Vacation Guide and began writing recipe columns for newspapers as well. Through the Duncan Hines Institute in 1955, he published Hines’s The Dessert Book and the same year the Duncan Hines Food Odyssey, a 274-page book on a collection of Hines’s recipes and traveling reviews.
Stewart Underwood recalls the effort he put into increasing the guidebook’s circulation and sales. At first the books were sold only in the listed establishments, which restricted their circulation.
His assignment was to find ways to expand distribution through other means. Underwood came up with the idea of approaching Standard Oil in Chicago with a proposal allowing Standard to put its logo on the front of the guidebooks if it would distribute them through its gas stations across the country. When he first walked into the marketing VP’s office, the idea was rejected out of hand. But Underwood was persistent. As soon as he got down to the lobby, he told the receptionist to call the VP and tell him he was coming right back up for a second try.
When he walked into the office the second time, he received an apology from the VP, and with a fresh start, sold the idea. The agreement resulted in an initial order of 500,000 guidebooks to be displayed on cardboard racks in Standard Oil gas stations. The deal also led to Standard’s competitor, Mobil Oil, moving into the guidebook business thorough their Mobil Travel Guide, which still exists today. Underwood also eventually got distribution for the guidebooks through bookstores that carried paperbacks, which vastly increased their circulation.
Utilizing the same art that appeared on the food packages and in advertisements, a distinctive sign was created and offered to restaurants and lodging places recommended by the guidebooks. This “Recommended by Duncan Hines” shingle, hanging in front of a restaurant, resort, or place of lodging, was to become a highly sought-after symbol of prestige. So much so that Hines had to take one con man to court for selling counterfeit signs. Duncan Hines, and later the cake mix, also became the subject of cartoons in magazines from the New Yorker to Playboy.
There was a second aspect of signage that Underwood recalls.
Aside from supervising the five or so full-time salesmen on the road selling the shingles and guidebooks to listed restaurants, hotels, motels, and resorts, Underwood’s job was to lease and erect billboards all over the country. The five-by-sixteen-foot signs displaying the “Recommended by Duncan Hines” message with the distinctive logo rising above the top of the billboard advertised listed establishments willing to pay the average charge of $85 a month.
At the time, the business was able to write off the entire cost of putting up the signs as a tax-deductible expense instead of capitalizing and depreciating the cost over seven years. This combined with the income, Underwood said, led to my father’s realization of just how profitable the outdoor advertising business could be.
From this humble beginning, outdoor advertising was later to become an integral part of the relationship between my father and me. After returning from an independent career in 1971 to work for him managing his Outdoor advertising division until buying it in 1988.
