Finding A Cause

It was, of course, in the grocery store.  Armed with a list from my wife, my three year-old and I had made our way through every aisle but the last.  One quick run through dairy and we were out, not that I could convince my son of that.  He had given up all hope of ever leaving, focusing instead on retribution.  He was, literally, kicking and screaming.

It worked.  I barely broke stride to grab the very last thing on the list - sour cream.  The store in my town, half an hour north of New York City, had four brands.  About three, I knew absolutely nothing. The generic was made by some unknown company, possibly even one of the other three on the shelf.  The package gave no indication whatsoever.

Friendship, it turns out, is made in a factory in western New York for mostly northeastern states.  Despite its regional roots, Friendship is a subsidiary of Dean Foods, the largest processor of dairy products in the United States.  Their holdings include Land O Lakes, Meadowgold, Garelic Farms and other regional brands produced in about a hundred factories nationwide.  With 27,000 employees, Dean Foods is a publicly traded company with $11.2 billion in sales in 2009.  

Daisy began with a single horse and buggy in Chicago in 1920.  It now distributes sour cream and cottage cheese across the country from its Garland, Texas factory, the largest sour cream plant in the world.  In its fourth generation of private ownership by the Sokolsky family, Daisy doesn't have to disclose its finances like a publicly traded corporation.  Manta.com estimates that it has under 50 employees with revenues of less than $50 million a year.

The last of the four was Breakstone's.  It was the only sour cream in the store I'd heard of.  I didn't know much, but I remembered a TV commercial from my childhood.  I remembered Sam Breakstone.  He lived sometime in the late eighteen hundreds and was such a perfectionist at his small, New York store that he would throw out batch after batch of sour cream.  Each time, he'd bellow at his poor employees, until finally they made a sour cream good enough to satisfy him.  Here he is in a 1977 ad for salad dressing, and again in the same year for cottage cheese.

Now, in the second or two it took me to make the decision, with my son pounding at my hands, I knew that the image I had wasn't true.  Breakstone was dead, probably for over a hundred years.  There was no store in New York anymore.  However Breakstone made the sour cream back then, they probably had modernized at least a little.  But surely there had to be some continuity.  His exacting standards must be preserved at least in some way.

And so I grabbed the Breakstone's sour cream, and continued to do so for over a year, even though it was the most expensive brand on the shelf.  I started buying the cottage cheese, too.

They tasted good.

I was happily eating cottage cheese directly from the container.  The wife and kids were asleep.  The package reassured me that, as I believed, Breakstone's was established in 1882.  I actually thought of writing to tell them how much I liked their products.  (Try it.  It's a great way to score coupons.)  Turning the carton around, I read these very surprising words, "Kraft Foods Global, Inc.  Northfield, IL."

The high-quality, locally produced products - passed down for over a hundred and twenty years from Sam Breakstone's own kitchen - were owned by Kraft, the largest food company in the United States and second largest in the world.  Dean Foods has 27,000 employees; Kraft has 127,000.  Deans had $11.2 billion in sales in 2009; Kraft had $38.8 billion.  In 2010, it rose to $49.2 billion.  A dozen Kraft brands bring in revenues of over $1 billion each, another seventy bring in more than $100 million.  Forty brands are at least a hundred years old.

It makes one wonder what's true.  Was any of it?  Were my memories really owned by multinational corporations and advertising executives?  Was there really ever such a person as Sam Breakstone?

I intend to find out.  I intend to track down just exactly what was true back then and what is today.  I'll learn who the people were who put Sam Breakstone in my head, why it worked, and what else they might have done.  And I'll find out just how much of Breakstone's still exists in the behemoth that is Kraft Foods.  How much does marketing matter?