Last month Northfield-based Kraft Foods Inc. sold off Post, one of the country’s oldest cereal brands, for $2.6 billion. The deal was just the latest in the processed food behemoth’s complicated history of mergers, acquisitions, spin-offs, and sell-offs. Shuffling properties in the pursuit of profit is of course nothing new among corporations, but the sale prompted me to take a good look at The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Cheese, an enormous coffee-table history of the 104-year-old company. Produced in-house and published in 2005, the book tells the story of innovators who bucked managerial shortsightedness and seemingly impossible technical challenges to create some of the most iconic products in the world pantry.
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In 1998, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the company’s research and development center in Glenview, Kraft packaging specialist Anne Bucher and a colleague put together a historical exhibit of technological patents. Bucher dug into the company archives and discovered a trove of oral histories of company inventors, beginning with founder James Lewis Kraft, the Chicago cheesemonger who figured out a way to melt cheddar without separating the proteins and fats, thus allowing him to package it in sterilized cans.
Many of the inventors in the book are cast heroically—not surprising for a motivational publication heavy on the rah-rahs. What’s remarkable is the subdued but ever present subtext of conflict between management and R & D. When Maxwell House instant coffee was being developed for use in military rations, few in management believed it was even possible. The inventors persevered, and when one of them hit on a method of infusing aroma into the deodorized crystals, his boss marveled that instant coffee “finally had a soul.” Over and over inventors scored successes with products originally deemed impractical or unprofitable, from soft Philadelphia cream cheese to Stove Top Stuffing to Lunchables. The moral for Kraft employees, says Villines, is “Never say, ‘I can’t work on this because I can’t get time on the agglomerator.’”
For more on food and drink, see our blog The Food Chain at chicagoreader.com.
