From Sea to Soup - Blount Fine Foods

©2012, 2015 Blount Fine FoodsFall River, Massachusetts

Durr, KennethThomas, William

From Sea to Soup: The Evolution of Blount Fine Foods

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011939620

IFROM SEA TO SOUP: THE EVOLUTION OF BLOUNT FINE FOODS

Table of Contents

FOREWORD III

CHAPTER ONE: LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE 1

CHAPTER TWO: A PART OF THE FAMILY 13

CHAPTER THREE: FROM FLOOR TO CEILING 27

CHAPTER FOUR: OUTSIDE THE BOX 41

CHAPTER FIVE: A WINNING STRATEGY 53

CHAPTER SIX: CONSTANT INNOVATION 65

IIIFROM SEA TO SOUP: THE EVOLUTION OF BLOUNT FINE FOODS

Foreword

By (Todd) F. Nelson Blount II

Standing at the end of a timeline looking back is a unique place to be. The old stories now turned legends appear like clips from a great movie where the “good guys” always win and the hard-working are always rewarded. The question is: can we provide that opportunity in the future?

In the year 2000 I became president of Blount Fine Foods. It is a great honor and awesome opportunity to lead this company into the future. As the fifth-generation leader, I started with a great company: a resource of assets, an impeccable reputation, and a going-forward business model. Most important is the team that has continued forward—and this is our connection to the past. Each employee has worked with someone who has been there longer, and with five degrees of separation, we can claim that our team has been together for more than 120 years.

Blount Fine Foods has provided a lifetime of opportunity for thousands of people over those years, and I am committed to providing thousands of opportunities in the future. However, the world has changed. Strategies that once lived on for decades now last just a few years. The competitive environment rewards those who are growing and takes away from those who are stagnant. On August 16, 1996, I was privileged to make a speech at our 50th anniversary party. At the event I remarked: “It is impossible to know exactly what we will be doing for the next 50 years. I do not know if we will be processing clams or Cocoa Krispies. Thus, my vision for Blount is not knowing ‘What we will do’ but rather ‘How we will do it’! Not ‘what products’ and ‘in what place,’ but rather, how we react to the market, carry out our relationships, and manage quality. In short, our performance will be defined by how well we manage change. We cannot be afraid of change—we must embrace it and be change agents.”

This book is written as a tribute to those who came before us. We hope you enjoy it and learn something from it. I know I have! I am confident in where we are going but realize that I am not completely in control, and I am not alone. I thank all of you, all of our stakeholders, and most importantly God, who alone knows the end of the story!

In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will direct your paths. Proverbs 3:6

IV

A SELF-CONFIDENT F. NELSON BLOUNT AT HIS DESK DURING THE 1940S.

1FROM SEA TO SOUP: THE EVOLUTION OF BLOUNT FINE FOODS

Chapter One:

Lightning Strikes Twice

nNelson Blount was ready for anything. In the summer of 1943, the self-assured twenty-five-year-old had sunk everything into a new seafood business with only a general idea of what it would produce. The supply of oysters was running very low. Clams, what Rhode Islanders called “quahogs,” might have been an option, but they were also scarce since most shell fishermen had gone to war. Then Blount’s uncle, Rhode Island fish and game commissioner Harold Gibbs, came to dinner.

More hopeful than desperate, Nelson explained the situation. Gibbs told him about a newly discovered “tremendous bed of clams out in the ocean.” True, they were in deep water on the Atlantic shelf, but a few men could take a good supply with a dredge. On deck the next day as Gibbs pulled up another catch, Blount was crestfallen. These were not the blue-hued “bay quahogs” that Rhode Islanders preferred—they were black “ocean quahogs.” “I’m not sure if they’re marketable,” Blount admitted, “but I’m going to see what I can do.”

This discovery was electrifying news for a small cadre of seafood devotees. It was a stroke of luck for the Narragansett Oyster Company, which would soon link the ocean beds with mainland markets. Nelson Blount never made much of this lucky break—he just assumed that things would go his way. In fact, he always seemed to expect that lightning would strike twice.

THE PLACE AND THE PEOPLE

Nelson Blount was born into a culture based on marine life and into a shell fishing family. At the estuary of the upper Narragansett, freshwater currents mingled with ocean tides; microorganisms flourished and nourished acres of bivalves just below the bay’s hard bottom. Some of the first to harvest them were Long Island oystermen Jonas and Buell Buckingham, who moved to Drowneville, the present day West Barrington section of Barrington, Rhode Island, after the Civil War. In 1880 Jonas’s son-in-law, Eddie B. Blount, started his own company there. Twenty-three years later he set up nearby on the east bank of the Warren River, where the harbor was deeper.

In the century and a half since its founding, Warren, Rhode Island, had been a whaling port, a shipbuilding center, a textile town, and the oyster capital of New England. Oyster beds were planted and tended much like farmland, and in the early twentieth century more than 20,000 acres were being cultivated in Narragansett Bay. One of Eddie B. Blount’s sons took to the business. The good-natured “Captain” Byron Blount took over in 1923. His brother Willis was a bit chillier in disposition. Perhaps appropriately, he started an ice business, building a large plant in Barrington just before the Great Depression.

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Willis Blount’s second son, Francis Nelson Blount, was born in 1918. He was big-boned, had brown hair that tended to be tousled, and could flash a broad, ingratiating smile. When Nelson was very young, his mother was injured. Sent away to live for two years with spinster aunts, Nelson learned independence early. The rest of his childhood was spent at home in Warren, a block from the New Haven Railroad yards. He grew to love the railroads and acquired the restless nature that some boys get from listening to train whistles in the night. From a securely middle-class family, Nelson might have gone to college, but he was too eager for achievement to settle into studies. After high school he went to work in his father’s ice business, slinging one hundred pound blocks with steel tongs and making deliveries by truck.

In the early 1940s the nation mobilized for war, but Nelson remained behind, exempted by a childhood illness. And he did not long remain content in his father’s employ. As nearby Army camps expanded, Nelson worked ever longer

days supplying them with ice. When Willis refused to share the profits, Nelson felt no obligation to stay.

THE APPROVED LIST

On his own in the fall of 1942, Nelson went with what he knew. He bought a truck and, with his Uncle Byron’s help, found an oyster firm in need of a shipper. He began making deliveries to the same Army bases that had bought Willis Blount’s ice, and soon “F. Nelson Blount Distribution” employed 28 drivers. But Nelson was again discontented; within a year he quit the trucking business to go into production.

In early 1943 the Narragansett Oyster Company went up for sale. Its chief asset was a building erected on the Warren waterfront 101 years before. It had been renovated and refitted just before the 1938 hurricane that crippled the ailing industry and put the company into receivership. In the

Willis E. Blount and family pose in front of the newly built ice house in the late 1920s. From left, Luther, Willis, Nelson and Ruth Blount.

Teenager Nelson Blount (right) with his best friend Fred Richardson.


THE GREAT NEW ENGLAND HURRICANE

The hurricane of 1938 dealt a knockout blow to New England businesses already

reeling from the Great Depression. No one had seen it coming. Storms tracking north

usually veered out to sea, but this one was different. In the afternoon of September 21,

1938, the hurricane cut directly across Long Island and slammed into Rhode Island as

a category III storm, its forty-foot wall of water toppling lighthouses and obliterating

coastal villages. The storm struck at high tide, and as the surge came in Narragansett

Bay rose some sixteen feet, the storm scour destroying nearly all of the state’s oyster

beds. Hundreds of Rhode Islanders lost their lives. For H. J. Lewis, the Connecticut

firm that owned the Narragansett Oyster Company, it was the end. For Nelson Blount,

who bought the plant at a bargain price, it was the beginning.

summer of 1943 Nelson bought Narragansett Oyster and painted the building dark green. Only then did he think much about what to do with it.

Nelson conferred with Uncle Byron, but the problem seemed insoluble. It was one thing to deliver oysters—it was another to expand the supply. The combined effects of pollution and hurricane had left the oyster supply at about 20 percent of its former capacity: the bay was tapped out. Were clams an alternative? They were certainly prized by Rhode Islanders who knew them by the Indian-derived name pronounced “ko-hogs,” but they were also in short supply. Bay quahogs, the species Mercenaria mercenaria, were typically harvested by “tongers” or “bull rakers” who painstakingly pried them from the

bay floor. Now, most able-bodied shell fishermen were off at war. Nelson, as it turned out, had staked everything on two dying industries. Then Harold Gibbs’s revelation changed everything.

To clam fanciers who appreciated their strong taste, the ocean quahog, species Arctica islandica, was a legend. A few would occasionally wash ashore in a storm, but no one had ever located the bed. Gibbs found not one, but thirteen of them in Atlantic waters off Point Judith, Rhode Island. Nelson’s challenge was to find a market for them beyond a few odd devotees. Again he went with what he knew—back to the military bases.

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Senator Theodore F. Green (seated) in 1938. The powerful politician brought FDR’s New Deal to Rhode Island and put ocean quahogs on the War Department’s “approved list.”

Camp Edwards, which grew phenomenally during the early 1940s, was one of the largest customers for Nelson’s early enterprises: W.E. Blount Ice, F. Nelson Blount Distribution, and the Narragansett Bay Packing Company.

The quartermaster at Camp Edwards put it bluntly. Ocean quahogs might be palatable, even preferable, in soups or stews, but he could not buy them—they were not on the Army’s “approved list.” Nelson and Byron hastened to Washington. According to Byron, the appropriate strings were pulled by a Warren native who was a long-time assistant to Rhode Island Senator Theodore Green. Nelson recalled telling the senator himself that “you can do a lot to help the shellfish business back to health if you will get the Army to give a good look at our quahogs.” Within six weeks, ocean quahogs made the War Department’s approved list.

Nelson Blount was now astride a booming business. With scarce steel allocated to his suddenly essential facility, Nelson began converting the Narragansett Oyster Company for clam production. “We had to develop a lot of new machinery that was one of a kind,” Nelson recalled.

As military orders piled up, Narragansett Oyster ran full bore. The production cycle began at dusk as shell fishermen landed burlap bags full of quahogs—a day’s catch could reach 250 tons—on the docks at Point Judith. They were trucked to Warren where hastily hired employees unloaded, cleaned, shucked, and cut the clams into strips suitable for chowder. Now in cans, the quahogs went back across the loading dock, bound for New England’s military bases. Narragansett Oyster averaged 100 employees during the war, although at


times Nelson had 125 shuckers working the clam line alone.

This kind of growth might have preoccupied most businessmen, but Nelson was soon distracted. Marcus Urann was a lawyer, the inventor of cranberry sauce, and founder of the cooperative that came to be called “Ocean Spray.” He was much Nelson’s senior but invited him nevertheless into a joint venture—a minced clam cannery. Both Marcus Urann and Nelson Blount were trying to guess what would follow the wartime boom. The Plymouth Packing Company’s minced clams, they hoped, would command a sizeable share of a soon-to-emerge consumer market.

But reconversion did not work out as Nelson had hoped. Supply problems led to some light shipments that cost the company $22,500 to repurchase. Demobilization of the camps brought drastic cutbacks at Warren. Worst of all, ocean quahogs were not as welcomed in family kitchens as they had been in military chow lines. The tongers and bull rakers were returning to the bay, Rhode Islanders were hungry for bay quahogs, and Nelson Blount’s plant was geared for a product that few wanted. He began selling his trucks to meet payroll.

The trucks and trailers of Narragansett Packing and E. B. Blount Sons, parked behind Nelson Blount’s newly acquired plant, not yet painted green.

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A FIRM, A NEW FOOTING

With trouble all around, it was time to retrench. Nelson modified the line to process bay quahogs on a much smaller scale. But characteristically, Nelson decided to build as well. The now empty part of the plant floor could have been a liability, but he hoped to turn it into an asset.

During the war, Narragansett Oyster had immediately shipped nearly everything it produced. Nelson worried that he might still

be stuck with excess supply, but he also realized that this seeming problem might present an opportunity. Typically, New Englanders preferred their clam chowder in the winter—just as supplies of fresh clams were dwindling. Why not sell them frozen? In the summer of 1946 the company invested in 60,000 gallons of freezing capacity, and as Byron later wrote, “It stabilized the demand for the raw product all through the year.”

On September 26, 1946, three businesses were consolidated. Narragansett Oyster Company,

NELSON’S NON-VIOLENT PROTEST

From the start, clam supply—“shell stock” in industry parlance—was of constant

concern to Blount Seafood. Pollution, storms and overfishing could all threaten

natural sources. Nelson believed a solution might be to cultivate clams just as

had long been done with oysters. The only complication was that the state set

aside the most promising beds for oysters alone, even though that industry was

nearly gone. In 1946 Nelson leased some oyster beds off of Bristol anyway and—

to the consternation of state regulators—began seeding quahogs. The next year

he decided to make a test case. After letting a local game warden know what he

had planned, Nelson headed into the bay on the Blount boat Eddie B to make

his harvest. When he returned, the game warden and the police were waiting

at the pier. Although Nelson lost both the district court case and the appeal, he

characteristically put a good spin on the effort, insisting that it would spur the

state to implement a more “up-to-date program.”

FROM SEA TO SOUP: THE EVOLUTION OF BLOUNT FINE FOODS

majority owned by Nelson; Plymouth Packing, owned by Nelson and Marcus Urann, and E.B. Blount Sons Oyster Company, majority owned by Byron, were merged to become the Blount Seafood Corporation. Nelson was by far the largest shareholder in the new firm, with the only other sizeable stake held by Byron. Nelson became president and treasurer; Byron, vice president.

They were not the only Blounts in the business. Nelson’s older brother Luther signed on for a time in the late 1940s. With engineering and machinist training that his brother lacked, Luther’s imprint was on the equipment upgrades made during the late 1940s. But Luther was uncomfortable working for his younger brother, and in 1949 he opened the Blount Marine boat-building business in Warren.

With Byron focused on the oyster business and Luther on the machinery, Nelson turned to others to help run the business. James Milne was the senior member of the management team and the only one with much prior business experience. Milne took on routine administrative tasks for which his employer was unsuited. Deep pockets enabled Milne to weather the tough postwar transition; he loaned Nelson the funds to meet payroll more than once. The other half of Blount’s small back office was Dalton “Red” Stratton, who joined the company shortly after the war and took on bookkeeping and other accounting tasks.

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But it was Fred Richardson that Nelson leaned on the most. Their relationship was exceptionally close, forged in mutual childhood enthusiasm: Fred had been a “Boston and Maine man”; Nelson, a fan of the New Haven Railroad. This was perhaps the first of the fundamental differences that distinguished the lifelong friends. While still in their teens, the two wrote a book on railroads. Nelson spearheaded the project, but Fred, more patient and by far the better student, did most of the writing. Fred graduated from Brown University in 1939, worked in manufacturing until 1942, and served in the Coast Guard during the war. He joined Narragansett Oyster in 1945 and, upon Blount Seafood’s founding, became corporate secretary and plant superintendent.

STATE OF THE ART

Blount Seafood soon grew to be state of the art in every category, but management seemed proudest of its machinery. One of the biggest innovations came early. Clams were traditionally “hand shucked,” their meat pried from the shell by manual labor on a production line. With Narragansett Oyster’s prices subject to wartime controls, Nelson had to find a new solution to this old problem. An oyster steamer was set up on the floor and incoming clams were lightly cooked—just enough to cause the shells to open and the clam meat to loosen. The result was fewer shuckers on the line and lower labor costs. Knowledge gained from the

The management team in June 1949. From left, Luther Blount, Fred Richardson, Byron Blount, Nelson Blount, James Milne, and Dalton “Red” Stratton.

Businessmen and best friends Fred Richardson and Nelson Blount stand before an early trade show exhibit.


partnership with Marcus Urann enabled Blount to improve the process and boost production of valuable clam broth. Luther followed this up by designing the company’s first concentrated clam broth condenser, putting Blount Seafood in a lucrative side business.

Nelson Blount was hardly modest; for him to acknowledge that he had learned much from Marcus Urann meant a great deal. It was likely that Urann, who served as a director, had something to do with marketing initiatives undertaken in the late 1940s. Although it hung onto its old “Point Judith” brand, in 1947 the company relabeled the entire line—clams and oysters—under the “Whitecap” brand—its logo a two-masted schooner in heavy seas. The

first Blount kitchen also went into operation that year, although on a modest scale. Warren native Ida Bailey Allen earned $150 developing minced clam recipes for the Plymouth plant.

Despite these initiatives, Blount was steadily becoming more an industrial supplier than a consumer producer. After the war, soup manufacturers Heinz and Campbell’s both turned to Blount for chowder clams. A $35,000 expansion was undertaken just for the Campbell business in 1947, although the rest of the stainless steel and white-tiled plant was upgraded as well.

Although bay quahogs were the chief product during the late 1940s and 1950s, the Blount letterhead detailed the company’s full range of products, including scallops.

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There were some setbacks. The Plymouth plant never recovered from its wartime troubles and eventually had to be shuttered. The oyster business survived and branched out into scallops for a time. But it never thrived, even when spun off as the separate company E. B. Blount’s Sons, Inc. But the core products, clams and clam broth, and the core customers, Heinz and Campbell’s—and increasingly the latter—created a money machine. By 1949 Blount Seafood owned twelve trailers, six oyster and clam boats, an airplane, and two plants that produced 90 percent of the East Coast’s chowder clams. And Nelson had become a millionaire by age thirty.

But still the old restlessness returned. Nelson had been flying since earning a pilot’s license in 1944. He ran twice for political office in Barrington and lost. Nelson was more successful in industry initiatives, serving as the chair of the Rhode Island Pollution Abatement Committee for two years before becoming vice president of the National Coast Anti-Pollution and Conservation League in 1948.

When it came to business, Nelson was soon preoccupied with finding the next big thing. As early as late 1946, Nelson was away from Blount Seafood for an entire month. During the late 1940s alone he sold lobsters, purchased

A gallon can for oysters marketed in the late 1940s and 1950s by the E. B. Blount’s Sons subsidiary under the “Whitecap” label.

Blount Seafood in full swing as viewed from the company pier. The tractors to the left are owned by contractor Gilbert Pontes, while the trailers are Blount’s own. To the right are delivery trucks for local shellfish suppliers. In the foreground is Blount’s ever-present pile of discarded clam shells.


a weekly newspaper, and invested in a South American diamond mine. “I’ve lost an awful lot of money and have started a lot of harebrained enterprises,” Nelson later admitted.

In July 1948 lightning really did strike twice, although not as Nelson might have hoped, when thunderbolts from a summer electrical storm hit Blount Seafood in Warren and Nelson’s house in Barrington within fifteen minutes of each other. Although it was not entirely understood at the time, Nelson’s company had already experienced its second lucky strike—within a few years its largest customer would become its only customer, providing a generation’s worth of growth and stability to Blount Seafood.

Nelson Blount had many passions, and flying was one of his greatest. Blount Seafood owned a Cessna in the late 1940s, but Nelson is pictured here beside his own Piper Cub.


Chapter Two:

A Part of the Family

tThe winter of 1947-1948 was tough, even by New England standards. When Narragansett Bay froze over, executives at Campbell’s, the condensed soup powerhouse in Camden, New Jersey, began to worry about the clam chowder stock. Then came a telephone call from Nelson Blount: “How would you like to buy a whole month’s supply at last summer’s prices?” The freezers that he had installed just months earlier contained the scarce clams that Campbell’s needed. Nelson and Fred Richardson headed to Camden, determined to use their leverage to their best advantage.

Blount Seafood would be happy to provide frozen clams, Nelson maintained, but only at a guaranteed volume, and far higher than Campbell’s offered. The soup giant was used to setting the terms, so negotiations went nowhere. Nelson and Fred were on the street hailing a taxi when an official emerged from the building to concede. The prizes that accrued to Blount Seafood were substantial. The relationship with the nation’s top food processor provided engineering and quality control experience that kept Blount at the front rank of the food industry.

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Being part of the Campbell’s family also insulated the company from pressures faced by other firms. But there was a cost: continual concern that Campbell’s might change its mind.

BLOUNT CULTURE IN BOOM TIMES

Through the 1950s, however, the benefits of the Campbell’s contract far exceeded the liabilities. Blount’s timing had been good: Campbell’s was in the midst of a great wave of expansion. From sales of $100 million at the start of World War II, receipts surged to $500 million by the late 1950s as the soup giant’s advertising slogans became part of American culture and its red and white cans the cornerstones of every kitchen. Tomato and chicken noodle were staples, of course, but Manhattan Style and New England Style clam chowder were also solid sellers, and Blount’s product was in every can.

Through the 1940s, Blount had sold not only to Campbell’s but also to companies such as F.H. Snow and Heinz. But as Campbell’s scaled up production, it demanded more and more of Blount’s output—by 1950, virtually all of it. Nelson Blount and Fred Richardson thought hard about making this commitment, but the advantages were too great to turn down. Costs that other producers bore, such as marketing and advertising, would be of no concern to Blount, nor would there be the cash flow concerns that came from balancing multiple accounts: Campbell’s always paid its bills promptly. The deal was sealed with a handshake, and for the

This edition of Campbell’s monthly internal publication profiled Blount Seafood. Campbell’s inspector Charles Heitz is pictured here on the deck of a dredging vessel.


By the 1950s, Blount worked, for all practical purposes, exclusively for Campbell’s Soup. Still, as this 1952 shipping order indicates, a few smaller orders were still filled for companies such as H. J. Heinz.

next thirty years, Blount Seafood became a virtual division of Campbell’s Soup.

The relationship grew ever closer. It was not just clam meat that Campbell’s wanted. Concentrated broth was an equally invaluable component of its chowders, so in late 1950, Campbell’s installed a three-story evaporator at the Warren plant to boost supply. It was the first of many such instances in which the soup company effectively reconfigured the Blount production floor. Not only did Campbell’s build up capacity, it also kept an eagle eye

on quality control through full-time plant inspectors. In the late 1950s, Charles Heitz was on Campbell’s payroll, but he spent every working day either in the Blount plant or on its supplier’s boats.

As Blount Seafood settled into its long, steady run as Campbell’s chief shellfish supplier, an equally stable corporate culture took shape. From the men who fired the boilers every morning at 5 a.m. to the cleanup crew that worked into every evening, nearly all Blount employees were residents of

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STATE OF THE ART - 1949By 1949 when these photographs were taken, the production line had already been through many upgrades and process improvements; it remained essentially the same for nearly another two decades. Pictured are just a few of the steps.


COUNTERCLOCKWISE:In and Out: Burlap bags of raw stock are unloaded on one side of the loading dock, while fresh-packed cans go out the other.

“Cooking”: A chain bag full of clams goes into a thirty-bushel retort for the light steaming that loosens the meat. On the left is Russell Magill who was hired on at age 16 and worked his way up to office manager. He died shortly after retiring, having devoted his entire working life to Blount.

Manual Labor: Shuckers remove clam meat from the shells.

Washing: The clam meat is cleaned and shell particles removed in a Blount-designed “squirrel cage” machine.

One Last Look: Sorting and washing before the clams are canned and head for refrigeration or back to the loading dock. The man looking on in a white lab coat is an inspector for Campbell’s.

COUNTERCLOCKWISE:In and Out: Burlap bags of raw stock are unloaded on one side of the loading dock, while fresh-packed cans go out the other.

“Cooking”: A chain bag full of clams goes into a thirty-bushel retort for the light steaming that loosens the meat. On the left is Russell Magill who was hired on at age 16 and worked his way up to office manager. He died shortly after retiring, having devoted his entire working life to Blount.

Manual Labor: Shuckers remove clam meat from the shells.

Washing: The clam meat is cleaned and shell particles removed in a Blount-designed “squirrel cage” machine.

One Last Look: Sorting and washing before the clams are canned and head for refrigeration or back to the loading dock. The man looking on in a white lab coat is an inspector for Campbell’s.

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Warren or closely surrounding communities. The division of labor among the forty to fifty plant employees reflected the gender presumptions common at the time: men usually handled machinery and maintenance, and women only worked the line, sorting and cutting the clam meat.

Blount provided a few modest benefits. The company offered a Blue Cross medical plan, and in 1953 its first pension plan was implemented. Seasonal landmarks grew familiar: clam bakes in the summer, Christmas parties in the winter. But it was interaction in the plant, especially coffee breaks shared by nearly every employee, that provided opportunities to compare notes, swap stories, and create a corporate family. “Blount seafood was built up because of

loyalty,” said Howard Huftalen, who joined in 1952. “You could count on a person’s word.”

Presiding over it all was the “upstairs” management team. Although his hours were unpredictable, Nelson remained in charge through the early 1950s, his mercurial approach—“generous and smiling one minute and thundering the next,” as one acquaintance put it—familiar to all. Everyone at the plant knew, recalled Nelson’s wife Ruth, that “when he yelled he would get over it in a minute.”

But Nelson had never gotten over his love of trains, and when the Edaville Railroad, a nearby narrow-gauge attraction, went up for sale, he convinced the Blount board, which inevitably acceded to the wishes of the largest shareholder, to buy it.

Campbell’s inspector Heitz stands in the factory doorway. Luther, Byron, and Nelson Blount during the 1950s. At mid-decade, Luther, already operating his own shipyard, purchased the E. B. Blount’s Sons name. Byron retired two years later.


There were also more conventional attempts at diversification. The company considered going into the fish chowder business in the mid-1950s, for example, and it tried repeatedly to build up the oyster business. Despite high hopes, E. B. Blount’s Sons never solved the problem of supply. In 1956, after attempting unsuccessfully to raise oysters off the Florida coast, the company sold E. B. Blount’s Sons to Blount Marine. Byron retired two years later.

ALARUMS, EXCURSIONS, AND A STEADY HAND

In Shakespeare, “alarums and excursions” denote noises and commotion offstage, an apt description of Nelson’s contribution to the company during most of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1954, citing boredom among Barrington’s blue bloods, he bought a farm and moved his family to rural New Hampshire. From then on, the company watched mostly from afar as the legend of Nelson Blount grew.

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AN UNUSUAL ACQUISITION

It would have been hard to imagine a more unusual acquisition for a seafood

firm than a narrow-gauge railroad—that is, unless the firm was Nelson Blount’s.

Ellis D. Atwood, a distant cousin of Nelson’s, built the Edaville Railroad on a

cranberry plantation in South Carver, Massachusetts, in the 1940s. The attraction

floundered after Atwood died and was nearly bankrupt when Nelson acquired it

for the company in 1955. Although Nelson was off to other things before long, the

company made good use of Edaville. From 1955 to 1970 when the line was finally

sold, Blount employees could obtain part-time work on the narrow-gauge when

things were slow at the shop. In the early hours of the morning, a few men would

gather in Warren and then hop in a station wagon bound for Edaville to spend a

day on the track gang, in the machine shop, or painting rolling stock. Some even

went to Edaville to stay. During the Blount years, all three of Edaville’s managers

were promoted out of the plant.

First there were the Kentucky Rifles. In the 1940s, Nelson established himself as the nation’s premier collector of the firearms. A few graced the walls of his office at Blount Seafood—in time, most went to Edaville. Then there was big game hunting. Nelson tracked caribou in Newfoundland and stalked grizzlies in British Columbia, sometimes flying to the hunt in his personal airplane. Curiously, Nelson seemed to become ever more the reckless aviator as he entered middle age. He ditched four light planes during the 1950s alone and only gave up air show barnstorming after a near disaster in 1960.

There were also new business deals, chief among them an attempt to establish an East Coast tuna company. In 1961 Nelson organized the Cape Cod Tuna Corporation to catch bluefin in Atlantic waters. It was with high hopes that he commissioned a sixty-four-foot craft from Luther especially for the business, but Nelson had not anticipated the resourcefulness of the big West Coast competitors. Within a year they had moved in to capture the Atlantic bluefin business.


In 1954, with its plant investments leveling off, Blount Seafood began paying steady and sizeable dividends. Nelson plowed many of his into the mature version of his youthful fascination. He had qualified as a Boston & Maine engineer in the early 1950s and then began buying rolling stock for Edaville. Soon he was acquiring standard-gauge steam locomotives in abundance as the nation’s railroads converted to diesel. In 1960 Nelson bought a ten-acre rail yard in North Walpole, New Hampshire, and began building “Steamtown USA.” It was soon the nation’s preeminent operator of steam railway excursions and had a colorful career, moving several times before ending up, after Nelson’s death, a National Historical Site in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

In the early 1960s Nelson became a minor public figure with speaking engagements, newspaper columns, and even television appearances enunciating an increasingly elaborate personal philosophy. Then, in 1962, Nelson became a born-again Christian, an experience that rippled through his family and spread among friends, including the Richardsons. Evangelical Christianity soon became deeply dyed in the culture of the company. Alcohol disappeared from company Christmas parties, and a new emphasis on spirituality marked those and other occasions.

Through it all, Fred Richardson was a steady presence at Blount Seafood. He routinely put in twelve-hour days, spending much of his time at Nelson’s desk. After James Milne died in 1959,

Aside from his company, Nelson Blount’s greatest legacy was the founding of Steamtown, which eventually became a National Historic Site. Here, Nelson stands on the old roundhouse turntable at Steamtown’s first home in North Walpole, New Hampshire.

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Fred’s close friend Red Stratton took on new responsibilities, and as a sounding board for Fred he became the effective number two man at the company. By then, Fred Richardson understood the plant, the people, and the customer as Nelson never had. He could take most of the credit for the stability and security that both Campbell’s and Blount employees enjoyed during these years. On at least one occasion, when Nelson’s enthusiasms threatened to undermine employee morale, Fred did not hesitate to deliver a rebuke. As the 1960s drew on, Fred kept one eye on the business and another on his best friend, always wondering what Nelson might be up to next. And as Nelson trotted the globe, Fred showed up in Warren every morning, ready, said son George, “to deliver on the promises that he made.”

THE PROBLEM OF SUPPLY

Stable as it was during these years, the company’s foundations rested on the uncertain sands of shellfish supply. After World War II, the Rhode Island clam fishing business resumed its quaint Currier and Ives appearance. During the 1950s, some 3,000 individual shell fishermen, equipped only with a small boat and a set of tongs or a bull rake, bobbed on the tide each day, digging Mercenaria mercenaria out of the shallow waters of Narragansett Bay. Dredgers had recently tried to use technology to expand the supply, but they had been beaten back by outraged tongers and state legislators who allowed them into the bay only in winter. Raising clams like oysters had always seemed a

In the late 1950s the management team confers with its number one customer around Nelson’s desk. From left is James Milne, Red Stratton, Byron Blount, Nelson, W. L. O’Neill and R. G. Foster of Campbell’s, and Fred Richardson.

Through the 1950s most of Blount’s supply was pulled by “tongers” out of the bay. The men in skiffs would periodically deposit their supply in the larger boat in the background.


possibility. Nelson had tried it in Narragansett Bay and had seeded Maine’s Casco Bay from an airplane. In 1955 the company bought an experimental boat for transplanting quahogs but almost immediately sold it to the state.

In the late 1950s Blount was buying shell stock up and down the coast, from Maine to New Jersey. But the problem remained: pollution and overfishing simply made bay quahogs scarce, so prices went up and Blount’s profit margins went down. The directors agonized over the problem, but not until 1966 did they hit upon a solution: return to the Arctica islandica upon which Blount Seafood had been built. With Campbell’s approval, Blount switched to ocean quahogs in the late 1960s. By the early 1970s, Blount was acquiring 1,000 bushels of clams a day at half the former cost. It seemed that the dependable ocean quahog had again solved the problem of supply.

TROUBLE IN THE FAMILY

Campbell’s was a demanding patron, but the benefits always seemed to outweigh the costs. “They were tough,” acknowledged Howard Huftalen, who managed the plant from the 1960s to the 1980s. But Campbell’s tutelage ensured that state and federal plant inspections always remained routine. Again and again, said Huftalen, inspectors shook their heads and admitted that they “never saw such a clean plant with such a dirty process.” One of the conditions of membership in the Campbell’s family, however, was full disclosure. Once asked to demonstrate a Blount innovation to another Campbell’s vendor, Huftalen countered, “like Hell, that’s ours!” The response was succinct: “Well, it’s either that or you’re out of business.”

No one expected summary execution by Campbell’s, but management had always worried, said Nelson’s son Ted Blount, “about the direction that they were going and how we fit into that plan.” Management always set

Bay quahogs, their scientific name Mercenaria mercenaria since their shells were used as money by Indians and early settlers. These were Blount’s main product into the 1960s.

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this concern aside, however. In the summer of 1967, a South Carolina company made an earnest offer of acquisition. In late July, Nelson sat down with the board of directors—Fred Richardson, Red Stratton, and wife Ruth—to explain his position. Years ago, he said, Blount had decided “to become, in effect, part of the Campbell family.” He was determined to remain there. The offer was rejected.

A little more than a month later, on August 31, 1967, returning in his light plane from a day at Steamtown, Nelson ran out of fuel. He attempted a crash landing—something he had done before. This time he did not succeed. His death was a great tragedy, but there can be little denying that Nelson pushed his luck farther than most. His company, in sharp contrast, had always been managed conservatively. Nevertheless, by the early 1970s, Blount Seafood seemed to have run out of luck as well.

The chain of events was begun in the late 1960s by an advertising executive who discovered that American households considered Campbell’s condensed soups to be fine for children but insufficiently hearty for the “head of the household.” The result was the heavily promoted “Manhandlers,” with more meat in every serving. This led, in the early 1970s, to the introduction of the more long-lived “Chunky Soup” line.

At first this looked like a boon for Blount, but there was a problem. Ocean quahogs were tough. Blount used pressure cooking to tenderize them,

This page from the board of directors minute books details Nelson’s decision to remain a part of the Campbell’s family. Blount management cited the document often in subsequent years.


but that raised processing costs. And then, of course, there was the taste, fine perhaps for some New England palates, but for its Chunky Soups Campbell’s believed that mainstream America would prefer something sweeter— something like Spisula solidissimus, sea clams found in deep waters mostly off Long Island and New Jersey. It was a business that Blount was not in.

On April 6, 1972, the directors considered the proposition that “the sea clam is a competitive threat to our high-volume business.” They decided that lowering the cost of ocean quahogs might overcome all objections. Blount had been developing a new process for ocean quahogs that did not involve pressure tenderization—the task was to sell it to Campbell’s. Five days later Fred Richardson, Red Stratton, and Ted Blount went to Camden to deliver some samples and plead their case. Campbell’s made no guarantees and never acted precipitately—it would be months before anyone would know. In the meantime, Blount tried other ways of cutting the costs of ocean quahogs, investing $250,000 in a boat that could handle high-volume, water-powered “jet” dredging equipment.

By September, the only word from Campbell’s was that “their requirements will be substantially reduced for the coming year.” By the end of the year, operations were down to about two days per week. The winter of 1972-1973 was a mild one for New England, but it was a tough one for Blount.

Campbell’s decision to use sea clams, pictured here, in its Chunky Soup line created a crisis for Blount Seafood in the early 1970s.

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TOPPING OUT. THE BLOUNT FACTORY WAS SYSTEMATICALLY REBUILT AND EXPANDED FROM THE

MID-1970S THROUGH THE 1990S. PICTURED IS A TOWER ERECTED IN THE WINTER OF 1975 TO ACCOMMODATE A

NEW CLAM BROTH EVAPORATOR.


Chapter Three:

From Floor to Ceiling

When the directors met on June 13, 1973, the mood was somber. Campbell’s was not going to purchase ocean quahogs for Chunky Soup, no matter how they were tenderized. For six months the plant had been working less than half time. Its brand new boat, the Whitecap, had been tied up much of the time so as not to compete with Blount’s regular suppliers. There was no choice but to shut down for more than a month and retool for the production of sea clams. As Blount Seafood’s president, Red Stratton made the proposal. It fell to Ted Blount, however, to implement it.

From 1973 to 1991, Ted took those steps and many more. He built Blount Seafood’s revenues up from this low point to the heights of financial success. He expanded Blount’s product line exponentially and rebuilt the plant from floor to ceiling. And it was all accomplished amid the wholesale reconfiguration of the seafood industry by federal regulation.

TRANSITION

Born in 1943, Frederick Nelson “Ted” Blount was Nelson’s eldest son. He came of age accompanying his father on his adventures and would later submit that, to some extent, he “grew up in a plane.” That experience, coupled with a technical and analytical bent, led Ted to study aerospace engineering at Boston University. His own spiritual journey led him into postgraduate studies at the Denver Seminary. He had just arrived when news came of his father’s death.

Ted had never before given much thought to the business. But he instantly realized that “the family needed someone to be involved, and I was the only logical choice.” He began working

w

Ted Blount, pictured here in the mid-1980s. He was the understated but innovative engineer who rebuilt the plant and the product line during the last quarter of the twentieth century.

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out a management transition plan with Fred Richardson. Ted was determined to finish training for the ministry, but summers were spent at Blount where he started as a laborer and moved steadily through the operations. “I punched a time card and worked for an hourly wage,” Ted later acknowledged.

Fred Richardson had taken the title of president after Nelson’s death. In early 1971 he moved up to chairman and turned the presidency over to Red Stratton. But in effect, from then until he formally became president in the fall of 1973, Ted Blount was always in charge. Ted was not the flamboyant leader that Nelson had been, but he had the patience the company needed during a period of manifold growth and continual challenge. “What he lacks in flair he more than makes up for with careful thought and consistent action and commitment,” said Fred’s son George Richardson. George was in a position to know. Ted’s best friend from childhood, it had been George’s idea that both men attend the Denver Seminary. Upon graduation he worked as a youth pastor in Barrington—refusing Ted’s regular entreaties that he join the business. In 1972 George finally relented. He began as assistant plant superintendent but quickly took on the problem of supply, spending much of his time early on working the Whitecap.

Above: In addition to serving as counselor and sounding board to Ted Blount, George Richardson guided the company through the hazards of supply and regulation from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Below: The corporate letterhead in 1976. With Ted Blount still new to the job, Fred Richardson is prominently identified as chairman.


There were a few veterans supporting this new management team. In the late 1960s, William Cameron came in from another business to take over the back office. When he retired in the late 1970s, he was succeeded by Russ Magill, who had been with Blount almost from the beginning. With one major client, Campbell’s, and two primary products, clams and broth, Blount’s administrative burden was light, requiring only a handful of employees as late as the mid-1980s. Ted nevertheless made sure that Blount computerized its accounts and payroll earlier than most counterparts.

Up to 1984, when Ted’s younger brother Steve Blount took over, Howard Huftalen supervised production. Mechanical skills made Huftalen invaluable from the time he joined in 1952; leadership ability marked him out for management. More than one employee was treated to one of “Howie’s” seemingly offhand anecdotes—tales that inevitably ended with gentle guidance about how not to repeat a certain mistake or misstep.

Huftalen’s generous approach was emblematic of a company culture that by the 1970s and 1980s was marked by cooperation, accommodation, and an unabashedly Christian ethic. “There

Phil Pitzer at work in the Blount back office during the late 1980s. The chalkboard behind him charts Blount inventory.

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was a part of Blount Culture that was tied to Barrington Baptist Church in Barrington, Rhode Island,” said Phil Pitzer, who joined the office staff in the mid-1980s.

The bedrock of that mutual concern was the company’s commitment to safety. Constant upgrades, innovations, and a growing workforce presented many opportunities for mishaps, and Blount had a few. But throughout, the board and management gave a great deal of authority to the company safety committee and closely monitored its program.

If the leadership transition of the early 1970s was smooth, the business was not. Despite the switchover to sea clams, receipts stalled at about $1 million. Then, in early 1975, Campbell’s began expanding Chunky Soup production. Blount was turning out 80,000 pounds of clams per week by late 1976. The higher production volume made the old method of block-freezing clams impractical. After many false starts, Blount came up with a technique for freezing each piece separately. This individually quick frozen, or IQF, process allowed for even greater daily volume and created an opportunity to sell smaller packages of clam meat to restaurants. Revenues shot up, reaching $3 million by the end of 1977. The roller-coaster ride continued. By the late 1970s, known sea clam beds had been overfished, prices were up, supplies were down—and Campbell’s was again in the market for ocean quahogs. Blount adapted accordingly and broke new revenue records on sales of its original product.

Among the institutions that helped nurture a coherent Blount corporate culture was the Whitecap News, published intermittently during the 1980s and 1990s.


SECRETS AND SOLUTIONS

Blount people have often tended to be the tinkering type. The result has been a

host of innovations and improvements over the years, a few of them now legendary.

In the early 1970s, for example, Campbell’s asked Blount to switch its packaging

from frozen blocks to bags of “individually quick frozen” clams. Years of adjustment

followed. Blount started with machinery intended to freeze diced chicken with carbon

dioxide, but clams were far wetter than chicken and Blount soon had a mess on its

hands. That method was eventually made to work, but Blount did not really master

the IQF challenge until the early 1990s. The solution: a combination of liquid nitrogen

and a Blount-designed belt with spinning fingers that froze the clam strips in mid-air.

Some experiments were startlingly elegant. When microscopic pearls that escaped

all other cleaning systems started showing up in the clam meat, Ted Blount took a

page from nature. Remembering “how the sand settles downstream from a rock,”

he introduced a trough into the line—one with bumps for barriers. Sure enough,

the pearls settled out behind the “rocks” in Blount’s artificial stream. The solution

served until Blount bought its “laminar flow” machine.

DIVERSIFICATION

By the late 1970s, management had become deeply concerned about the boom and bust Campbell’s account, and prosperity provided the breathing room required for strategic thinking. Clams were becoming a high-volume, minimum-profit product—a commodity. Blount had so far managed to remain competitive, but uncertain supply left no guarantee that would continue. “I knew that

if we were going to grow,” Ted recalled, “the area was not in shellfish processing.” Blount had to do more than move a commodity— it had to sell something at a premium.

A first tentative attempt to diversify came in 1976 with the creation of a subsidiary, Narragansett Bay Fish Farms. It soon became evident that Blount had neither the resources nor expertise to pioneer the field of salmon farming, however.

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Ted Blount then began laying the groundwork for the production of less-speculative retail ventures. He set up a laboratory to identify opportunities for diversification. He hired marine biologist Gerald Levine to help develop new products. He installed more freezers for product storage. Finally, he set aside a separate processing room where specialized equipment could easily be set up and taken down.

In 1980, with the goal of eventually obtaining half its annual sales from “value-added” retail

products, Blount went to work. The first big venture was conch. Mostly marketed as the Italian delicacy scungilli, conch was a sizeable snail abundant in Narragansett Bay. By 1985, Blount was selling a million pounds of conch a year, but the retail market proved as tough to crack as a conch shell; most was sold wholesale in frozen blocks.

Stuffed clams followed closely upon conch. This product not only put a premium on the shells that Blount otherwise sold at a loss, it

George Richardson at work on the salmon farming project, Blount’s first—and unsuccessful—try at diversification.


opened the door—if only a crack—into the food processing business as Blount ground its clam meat into a stuffing mixture that consumers could cook at home. Within a year, the new ventures had begun edging into the clam line: Blount started running clams for four days and new products on the fifth.

As the decade went on, the products—grouped in Blount’s new “Division II”—multiplied. The company even began cooking seafood soups. Helped along by a modest advertising program and a small sales staff, Blount was marketing conch, stuffed clams, stuffed scallops, and three varieties of chowder in New England supermarket chains by mid-decade.

Blount did not do it all alone. In 1985 the company landed its first “co-packing” arrangement, producing for the Bayshore Chowder company. There were partnerships as well. New England Seafood Flavors, formed in 1987 to serve the clam broth market, struggled; New England Mussel Products, created in 1988, flourished. In 1989, with mussels packaged mostly in bags showing potential among buyers for New England restaurants, New England Mussel Products hired Randy Neal to promote the product. There were plenty of products that did not make it, including a line of “newburgs” that did not sell and a surimi venture that never got started. But that was to be expected. More disheartening was a dynamic that began with conches and

Stuffed clams, introduced in the late 1980s, were Blount’s most successful side product until the introduction of soup. This label is for Blount’s own Point Judith brand.

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recurred with each new venture. After an initial shakeout period, the cost of raw materials rose and market prices fell. In short, the new “value-added” products also became commodities. Undaunted, Blount continued to explore new markets through the early 1990s. “We just went from one idea to another,” said Steve Blount.

INNOVATION

These forays into the retail market had to be financed, of course, and two things made that possible. The first was the steady earnings of the Campbell’s account during these years; the second was a 1979 corporate reorganization that gave Ted Blount full control of the company. More interested in the company’s future than his own finances, Ted discontinued the generous dividend policy of the late 1950s and 1960s, freeing up cash not only for new ventures but also for internal improvements.

Many of the improvements to the line during these years were incremental, following

upon Ted’s countless visits downstairs. As an engineer, Ted Blount instinctively saw the line as the sum of its processes—heating and cooling, mixing and cooking—any of which could be adjusted or perfected. He encouraged others to experiment as well, his usual caveat being, “as long as you can put it back if it doesn’t work.” The relentless innovation was helped along by Steve Blount, who joined his older brother’s company in 1977. Steve had earlier opted for the construction challenges of Blount Marine over the routine of the factory floor, but upon arriving at Blount Seafood he found ample room for engineering and experimentation. As he put it, “we were constantly thinking it through, trying to make it better.”

Into the 1970s, one of the weaknesses of the clam processing line was that the cooking required to loosen the meat was still done by batch rather than in a continuous process. One solution seemed to be adapting an industrial potato peeler for the job. In 1977 the line was shut down and the thirty-foot-high machine

In March 1986 a worker lays down plastic tubs for chowder, co-packed under the Bayshore Chowder brand. That this was a new venture is evident in that he is using the stuffed clam line. Upturned clamshells, rather than plastic tubs, were usually arranged on the white rings.

With Campbell’s backing, Blount kept the plant on the cutting edge. With evident pride, Floyd Huftalen (left) and Garland Overwood (right) show off the control panel for the clam broth evaporator.

FROM SEA TO SOUP: THE EVOLUTION OF BLOUNT FINE FOODS 35FROM SEA TO SOUP: THE EVOLUTION OF BLOUNT FINE FOODS

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installed. “Everything went wrong with it,” recalled Steve. The general inclination was to stick things out and try to make it work. Ted’s contribution, on this as other occasions, was an insistence on cutting losses quickly—Blount pulled the plug and looked for a better way. The investment in the plant extended far beyond such improvements: by 1984, the cost of replacing worn-out machinery alone was averaging $1 million a year. Blount was, in fact, building up a very valuable property. In 1980 Campbell’s, intent on “integrated production,” made an offer to purchase. But as Blount considered the offer, new Campbell’s management opted for a “just in time” inventory plan. Blount kept the company and could do little but concede when Campbell’s insisted that it hold onto inventory at substantial cost.

But there was ample reward for the sacrifice. Between 1983 and 1984 the company’s business almost doubled, from $5.5 million to $10 million. Blount was running at a steady clip, processing an average of 40,000 pounds of clam meat a day, mostly for Campbell’s. In the early 1990s Blount became a Campbell’s “Select Supplier”—an “honor and a responsibility,” as Ted put it, that tightened compliance and reporting requirements even further. In the early 1990s came another bump up in the Campbell’s ride, and new machinery acquired from a Canadian firm boosted capacity even further. By the time that was installed, Blount’s

clam line was faster and cleaner than ever and ready for a decade’s more work.

SHELL STOCK AND REGULATION

On the production side, despite intervention by its largest customer, Blount largely controlled its own destiny. When it came to supply, however, Blount was subject to an ever-increasing number of variables. Some were familiar: weather, pollution, overfishing and state regulation. But just as Blount was bouncing back from the costly switchover from quahogs to sea clams, the federal government got involved.

The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, passed in 1976, sought to deal comprehensively with the depletion of the nation’s commercial fishing grounds. It created a National Fisheries Management Service and assembled a number of regional councils tasked with creating effective fisheries management plans. As an advisor to the New England and Mid-Atlantic regional councils, George Richardson was in a position to represent Blount’s interests. But he could

Even as the company diversified, Blount remained dedicated to serving the Campbell’s Soup company. Pictured, a Campbell’s official presents Ted Blount with the company’s “Select Supplier” award.


BLOUNT’S BOATS

Blount’s boats have ranged from the Rhodoyster, an experimental

oyster seeding ship built by Luther Blount in the late 1940s, to

the specialized Stormy Weather, which the company owned for

mere weeks in 1955 before donating it to the state for a quahog

transplantation program. But most memorable were Blount’s more

conventional craft.

In 1972 Ted Blount acquired a wooden vessel from Snow’s canning

company and renamed it the Whitecap. At the time, most quahog

fishermen clung to old, inefficient equipment. Fitted with new

high-pressure water, or “jet,” dredging equipment, the Whitecap

became part of an effort to lower the cost of ocean quahogs.

Although the boat was tied up when demand was down, as soon

as it hit the water, Blount’s dealers started thinking about getting

with the times. “They were catching a hundred bushels and we

were catching five hundred bushels,” recalled George Richardson,

who spent weeks on the Whitecap in the early 1970s. Thirteen

years later, Blount purchased the Wando River. With a capacity of

1,500 bushels—three times that of the Whitecap—there was no

longer any need to enlighten fellow fishermen: the Wando River

caught all the quahogs that Blount could use.

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only watch as the authors of the first fisheries management plan put together a dangerous and unworkable “time at sea” system.

In 1990 “time at sea” gave way to a safer, but equally problematic, “Individually Transferrable Quota” (ITQ) system under which boat ownersreceived the right to catch a set number of bushels per year, based on its average catch prior to 1990. In 1984, Ted, George, and Steve had purchased the ocean quahog vessel Wando River. This qualified Blount under the system, but its share was minimal. In general, the ITQ system was a windfall for the big fleet owners and bad news for processors.

This came as no surprise to Blount. It had long been allied with the top clam fishing firm in Atlantic waters. Management had first encountered Leroy “Barney” Truex in 1972. He was then barely out of his teens, working for a New Jersey supplier, and was, recalled George, “the most aggressive, the most entrepreneurial captain out there.” By the 1990s Truex had fifteen boats, held the biggest quota share by far, and provided Blount with all its sea clams. Blount’s own Wando River provided the company with all of the ocean quahogs it needed. Supply was more stable than ever, but still the ITQ system changed the business. From 1990 on, the added value that accrued from any given catch flowed more to the fishermen than the processors.

The Wando River offloads cages of ocean quahogs at the Warren pier. By the 1990s the vessel supplied all of the ocean quahogs processed by Blount Seafood.


This photo, taken around 2000, confirms Ted Blount’s record as a builder. The original buildings lie under the two peaked roofs in the center of the complex; the rest reflect a quarter-century of growth.

In 1973 Blount Seafood’s receipts were less than $1 million. By the early 1990s, the clam revenues had hit a historic high at about $12 million. Although a small share of current business, frozen mussels earned nearly as much as the entire company had two decades earlier. With

one hundred employees, 40,000 square feet of plant floor, and another 10,000 square feet of warehouse space, there was still not enough room. It was a puzzle fitting people, products, and machines between floor and ceiling. But still Ted Blount was thinking about growth.


Chapter Four:

Outside the Box

In the early 1990s, the executive office at Blount Seafood was a last link with the past. Downstairs, Ted could still point out the part of the plant had been built in 1842, although steady renovations and additions, most recently in 1992, had obliterated the evidence. But upstairs, the varnished, wood-paneled walls that had once held Nelson’s Kentucky Rifles remained. The desks where Nelson Blount and Fred Richardson once sat still loomed over the “Whitecap” logo inlaid on the floor. But now the office belonged to Ted Blount and George Richardson, and there was a difference. Once there had been sunlight, but as the plant expanded windows became walls. The old office was now darker, boxed in.

In more senses than one, success had left Blount boxed in. The business had expanded along with Campbell’s, but clams were now commodities that provided unspectacular profits and little opportunity for growth. Nor had Blount been able to substantially grow its

value-added business. The company had stuck to its traditional strengths: efficient production and high quality—that was their “better mousetrap.” But by the 1990s, acknowledged George, “it was the people with the better marketing plan that were getting a path beat to their door.” Ted Blount knew what had to be done, but he also knew that his own expertise fell short. It was about time to step aside and let others lead Blount outside the box.

LEARNING TO SELL

With few exceptions, Blount Seafood developed its talent from within. But by the early 1990s there was too much that the company could not learn on its own—most of it was about sales and marketing. In late 1991 Ted looked long and hard for a senior manager from outside the company who could provide this expertise and more. Someone, he said, who could “spearhead the development of a new corporate identity.” He found John Durkin.

iChapter Four:

Outside the Box

In the early 1990s, the executive office at Blount Seafood was a last link with the past. Downstairs, Ted could still point out the part of the plant had been built in 1842, although steady renovations and additions, most recently in 1992, had obliterated the evidence. But upstairs, the varnished, wood-paneled walls that had once held Nelson’s Kentucky Rifles remained. The desks where Nelson Blount and Fred Richardson once sat still loomed over the “Whitecap” logo inlaid on the floor. But now the office belonged to Ted Blount and George Richardson, and there was a difference. Once there had been sunlight, but as the plant expanded windows became walls. The old office was now darker, boxed in.

In more senses than one, success had left Blount boxed in. The business had expanded along with Campbell’s, but clams were now commodities that provided unspectacular profits and little opportunity for growth. Nor had Blount been able to substantially grow its

value-added business. The company had stuck to its traditional strengths: efficient production and high quality—that was their “better mousetrap.” But by the 1990s, acknowledged George, “it was the people with the better marketing plan that were getting a path beat to their door.” Ted Blount knew what had to be done, but he also knew that his own expertise fell short. It was about time to step aside and let others lead Blount outside the box.

LEARNING TO SELL

With few exceptions, Blount Seafood developed its talent from within. But by the early 1990s there was too much that the company could not learn on its own—most of it was about sales and marketing. In late 1991 Ted looked long and hard for a senior manager from outside the company who could provide this expertise and more. Someone, he said, who could “spearhead the development of a new corporate identity.” He found John Durkin.

i


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Durkin was approaching the end of his career when he came on as director of sales and marketing in January 1992. He knew the retail food business intimately, having worked for independent distributors as well as for General Foods, Frito-Lay, and Pizza Hut. He knew a lot of people and had a host of industry connections.

It did not take Durkin long to find new ways to sell Blount’s products. By early 1993 he had placed Blount Seafood products in a number of retail outlets including the Price Club warehouse chain. Durkin also made inroads into the food service industry—restaurants

and the wholesalers that serve institutional customers. Key to serving this sector was downsizing the IQF technology that Blount had employed on the clam line since the 1970s. By 1994, five-pound IQF bags of chopped clams were steady food service sellers.

Durkin also helped change the conservative company culture. He saw potential in the stuffed clam line but insisted that Blount vary the menu. Eyebrows were raised when he launched a cheese-flavored version. “We all thought it was going to be silly,” recalled production supervisor Rocky Silva, “but it was a big seller.”

During the 1990s, John Durkin taught Blount Seafood how to succeed in sales.


Up to 1994, Blount had tackled each retail campaign separately, marketing different products under the Whitecap, Point Judith, and New England Mussel Products names. In 1994 Blount acquired the mussel joint venture and brought all of the products together under a newly designed Blount brand logo.

Yet another joint venture, launched the next year, took Blount into the value-added outskirts of familiar territory. The Eastern Clam Corporation based in New Bedford, Massachusetts, produced high-quality sea clam tenders and steaks. Production was slow because the clams had to be painstakingly hand shucked by skilled workers, mostly Cape Verde islanders. But profits were reasonable, and three years later this successful subsidiary was also wholly acquired by Blount.

Blount was learning how to sell. In the second half of the 1990s, food service customers began to account for a sizeable portion of Blount’s balance sheet. There were IQF clams for Macaroni Grill restaurants and mussels for Buca DiBeppo and the Olive Garden. Sales of seafood products to SYSCO, the food service giant, hit $1 million in 1996 and passed $5 million by the end of the decade.

Between the lines of the success story, however, could be seen some troubling signs. The seafood product market continued to display the familiar trend toward higher volume and lower profit over time. At first Blount had purchased mussels fished off of Cape Cod.

When John Durkin convinced Blount to introduce flavored stuffed clams, a few eyebrows were raised, but the initiative turned out to be the first of many that took Blount in profitable new directions.

Skilled hand shuckers produce meat for high-value clam strips and steaks at the Eastern Clam Corporation, later Blount New Bedford.

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When that supply dwindled, the company obtained them in Maine and then Canada. As acquisition costs went up, new competition drove profit margins down. The same dynamic also occurred in the stuffed clam sector. There were still things to figure out, but Blount was learning faster.

THE CROWD AT THE TOP

At about the same time that he decided to build up Blount’s sales expertise, Ted began to think about retirement, hoping to “back away from direct control of the company” by mid-decade. Partly due to Ted’s deliberative bent, and mostly because the transition coincided with a fundamental shift in corporate focus, the process took a bit longer than expected. Through the late 1990s there were essentially two management teams. John Durkin retired in 1998, but Ted and George backed away slowly as the new generation stepped to the fore.

Through the mid-1990s, Ted devoted much of his time to what he called “considered growth,” working with John Durkin to determine what new products they could make in the Warren plant and sell at a profit. George Richardson and Steve Blount, meanwhile, were preoccupied by the never-ending supply problem. By 1996 the search had led them to Iceland to outfit a processing plant and to teach local fishermen how to shellfish. By 2000 they were holding together joint ventures in Iceland, New Zealand, and Canada, and sourcing shell stock as far away as India and China.

In 1997 Ted handed the presidency over to George as part of a transition plan, but not surprisingly given his many commitments, George hardly ruled with a heavy hand. The production line remained under the purview of Steve Blount, who served as vice president of operations. One of Steve’s chief

In 1994 the long-used Whitecap and Point Judith offerings gave way to a new Blount brand.

The variety of new products sold by Blount during the 1990s included frozen lobster bisque, IQF clam strips, mussels, and vacuum-packed littleneck clams.


contributions during these years was overseeing implementation of a “Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points” (HACCP) program, a complex systematic means of ensuring food safety up front through prevention rather than after the fact through inspection. The measure of his success can be taken by the fact that the Food and Drug Administration, which implemented the program for seafood producers, considered Blount a model for the industry.

As the youngest member of the second generation, Steve Blount was something of a transitional figure; most of his time in the mid-1990s was spent coaxing as much productivity out of every square foot of the Warren plant as possible. The question of how to move Blount out of commodities and into high-profit, value-added sectors remained to be answered. Solving it fell to the third generation and the newest member of the management team.

F. Nelson Blount II, known to all as “Todd,” was born in 1967 during his father’s first year at the Denver seminary. Growing up he considered Blount Seafood to be a “summer job kind of place”—he worked in maintenance and processing during his high school years and attended college at the University of Vermont.

After college, Todd Blount went to work for NYNEX, the New England telephone company that became a part of Verizon. His time at the bureaucratic communications giant convinced him to build his career at the family business: “I wanted to be part of something smaller,” he joked.

During the years of transition and diversification, Nelson’s next to youngest son Steve Blount provided continuity and a tight focus on the seafood operations.

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IN SEARCH OF SUPPLY

Long before Nelson Blount’s day, pollution, overfishing and storm damage routinely

drove shell fishermen ever farther afield. By the 1990s, Blount was seeking out

supply for its many specialty products from across the globe. Mussels, for example,

had once been plentiful in Narragansett Bay. But by the time Blount made them part

of its product line, the safest mussel supplies were off of Cape Cod and Nantucket.

Then, in October 1991, came the event dubbed “The Perfect Storm.” It destroyed

the New England mussel beds and sent Blount to Nova Scotia in search of supply.

Those beds turned out to be so productive that Blount decided to put down roots.

“We were bringing the mussels all the way down from Canada, so why not move the

system up there?” Rocky Silva remembered asking. Silva and Steve Blount headed

north to teach lobster fishermen how to catch mussels and to help a local packing

company set up a mussel operation that met the standards of the Blount label.

Before joining full time, however, Todd entered the business administration program at Boston University, where he found himself “the only guy who wanted to do traditional business.” In late 1993 Todd began working at Blount one day a week as he completed his MBA. He was due to come on full time after graduation in June 1994.

By then, Blount had new evidence—if it needed any more—that it had farther to go in escaping the old ups and downs. The early 1990s brought a boom in Campbell’s business. The company expanded accordingly to “ride the crest of the

Campbell wave.” But then the wave crested. By early 1994, Blount was carrying excess capacity and it was looking like a bad year. Blount had already identified the soup business as a likely opportunity for growth. Willing to try anything to get out of the box, Ted and George set a goal of “becoming the low cost producer of seafood soup in our markets.” They set aside $200,000 in financing for Todd to make it happen.

STIRRING UP INTEREST

In the summer of 1994, Todd Blount set up the company’s first dedicated soup operation in a


corner where the conch equipment had been. A study indicating that plastic bags were superior to cans for soup storage convinced him to spend most of his funds on equipment for packing freezer bags. The bookkeepers established “Division III,” and Blount was in the soup business. A coup came quickly—in September, national restaurant chain Legal Sea Foods approached Blount about producing chowder for retail sales under its label.

That early win provided some room to move, and Todd pushed ahead in what seemed like a reasonable direction: Blount would come up with soup varieties that potential food service customers might purchase. In the fall he reported to the board that “lots of interest has been stirred up.” Unfortunately, much of it came from within

Blount itself. Most of the recipes were developed by Todd, John Durkin and Gerry Levine, but intrigued employees from sales to production might weigh in as well. “We’d spend hours on a particular recipe,” recalled Todd, “but then it didn’t matter because no one bought it anyway.” Todd had demonstrated the old Blount tendency to focus first on equipment and quality—events and some expert help would set things straight.

As Blount struggled with soup recipes, the food service business was taking off. The 1980s and 1990s brought the emergence of the two-income family with less time for cooking and more money for eating out. As the proportion of the American food dollar spent in restaurants or other food service venues rose, tremendous opportunities arose. For one thing, with fewer

Left: The soup-making corner at Blount during the 1990s. An innovation that came early during the soup revolution is visible at the bottom center: the use of the Cryovac® boil-in-bag designed to be frozen.

Above: A young Todd Blount under the tutelage of Ted Heidenreich, a longtime supply vendor and family friend.

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contacts to be made and no investment in shelf space required, it was much easier to get into the food service sector than retail. For another, commercial sources of Blount’s chosen entrée were in demand. By the 1990s, restaurants no longer had the time or the stove space to dedicate to soup making. If they had proven recipes, however, there was no reason that Blount could not make the soup for them.

But it took lots of pavement pounding to figure that out, and the man who did it was Bob Sewall. He earned a degree from Providence College, but it was in the restaurant management and food sales industries that Sewall acquired the experience that Blount badly needed. He joined the company in May 1994. When Todd came on full time a month later, he wanted Sewall on his team. Necessity dictated, however, that Sewall spend most of his time coming up under John Durkin, selling stuffed clams, IQF bags of clams, and frozen clam broth.

But during the day-to-day with customers, Sewall always turned the conversation to soup, and slowly he obtained the business and recipes upon which the line was built. In some respects, Sewall acknowledged, his job was the easier of the two. He would take an order, make a promise, “and Todd would figure out how to get it done.” One of the first restaurants to give Blount its business was the Chart House chain, and the team in Warren worked overtime to please. With no real culinary experience, Todd recalled, “we made about forty versions to get one to be like the customer wanted.”

By the late 1990s, Bob Sewall had emerged as Blount’s sales leader. He earned his stripes selling stuffed clams but soon moved into fare with wider appeal—Blount’s burgeoning soup business.


ANOTHER NEW ENGLAND TRADITION

Long before asphalt and concrete linked the towns and cities of New England,

crushed clamshells were among the most pervasive of pavings for the roads

and paths of seaboard districts. Blount Seafood helped keep this tradition alive,

even though its shell pile was not always so greatly valued. The company made

many arrangements for disposal over the years: shells were sold to stuffed clam

companies or given away to anyone with a truck. Blount even leased the pile to

one enterprising local for a time.

By 2001, when Blount was producing some ninety cubic yards per day, the pile

had become a pilgrimage for eager New England gentrifiers who could buy a

cubic yard of shells—about 1,500 pounds—for one to three dollars, depending

on the season. After a few weeks of being bleached in the sun and crushed by

cars, the ocean’s answer to asphalt could indeed assume an inspiring beauty. One

homeowner even waxed poetic about “the way the driveway sparkles in the sun

and moonlight. It looks like it’s covered with broken glass.”

In the late 1990s, clams for Campbell’s, seafood, and soup were all proceeding on parallel tracks, and both the old and new teams were managing from the top. Things were confusing. “We’ve got six people here,” Todd remembered asking. “Who’s doing what?” By the summer of 2000, things were clearer. Todd, firmly in charge, in fact if not yet in title, made a bold move—he sold the stuffed clam line. It was one of Blount’s chief

retail seafood products but returned little in profit. Todd hoped to put company time and trouble to better use.

GROWING GOURMET

In committing Blount to becoming a “low cost producer of seafood soup,” Ted and George had been on the right track but wrong on two counts. By 2000, Todd believed that Blount should stretch in two directions: it had to

50

field high-cost, high-margin soups and it had to move well beyond seafood.

America was once a “meat and potatoes” nation, but the national palate experienced a great diversification in last quarter of the twentieth century. As consumption of seafood spread from the coasts inland, the business grew accordingly. By the 1990s, though, it was certain that chowder and burgers would never reach parity—seafood consumption had leveled off.

But customers were pointing out an alternate path. Restaurants, happy with Blount’s work and hoping to consolidate accounts, started asking “you’ve done our chowder, would you please do our black bean?” By 2000 Blount was doing the black bean and more, but a new obstacle had arisen. The most popular soups—beef and chicken—could only be produced in facilities that met exacting USDA standards. Blount did not have the expertise to qualify, but there was a small producer in nearby Bristol, Rhode Island, that did.

Todd had driven by a number of times. First he tried their soup. Then he asked the owners to lunch. In August 2000 he bought the company, Great Soups Incorporated. Great Soups had been founded five years earlier by a husband and wife team with restaurant experience, Jens and Marie Retlev. In the transaction, Blount acquired a few customers and a number of recipes sold under the “Cooks and Butler” brand name. Most

Todd Blount (right) with chef Jens Retlev, the founder of Great Soups, Incorporated. Blount purchased Great Soups in August 2000, putting it on the path to diversification into meat and other gourmet soups.

Blount’s expanding soup business was on full display at the 2001 International Boston Seafood Show. Louise Goodman (right), then Blount’s controller, was on hand to help serve.


importantly, Blount obtained the expertise required to qualify for USDA approval.

That fall, Todd became president of Blount Seafood. And in the spring of 2001 he took the company decisively beyond seafood, cooking up the first batches of chicken soups and chilies at the new USDA-approved facility in Warren.

But still the company’s roots, and most of its revenues, were in seafood. Indeed, Blount put 150,000 gallons of cream and 500,000 pounds of potatoes into the 8 million servings of chowder it produced in the year 2000. It was traumatic to say the least when the next year Legal Sea Foods, Blount’s biggest chowder customer, went out of the retail business. A dejected Bob Sewall thumbed his Rolodex, looking for something else to plug the hole. In November 2001 he found it: Shaws, a major New England grocery chain, ordered both “hot to go” soups for its salad bars and “Shaws Signature Series” cups for its shelves. Blount soups would soon be in front of 4.5 million Shaws customers every week. “This is a big deal for us and Blount,” acknowledged a Shaws spokesman.

Warren’s soup side went into high gear. Blount turned out six new products in one week alone during the spring of 2002, including such exotic concoctions as carrot ginger and Hungarian mushroom soup. There could be no doubt that Blount had escaped the confines of the commoditized seafood business. The company’s revenues hit $45 million in 2002. Campbell’s share of that was $11 million—roughly what it had been ten years before.

And it was becoming time to build anew. The company had more than one hundred full-time employees dispersed between Blount, New Bedford (the former Eastern Clam Corporation), a logistics facility in East Providence, and the Warren plant. “We were bursting at the seams,” said Rocky Silva. “Two rooms, two shifts. There were no more rooms and no more hours in the day.” That left Todd Blount no alternative but to keep thinking outside the box.

5252

BLOUNT PERSONNEL WRESTLE A 20-OUNCE CUP FILLING MACHINE INTO PLACE EARLY ONE MORNING IN THE FALL

OF 2005. THE MACHINE HELD THE KEY TO BLOUNT’S LATE 2000s RETAIL GROWTH.


Chapter Five:

A Winning Strategy

iIt was the fall of 2005 and Blount Seafood seemed bound for the big league—if it could only grab the chance. That summer, club store giant Costco and the West Coast grocery chain Raley’s had placed “full program orders” that included fresh soups in sealed 20-ounce cups. “These were two opportunities that were bigger than we deserved at the time,” Todd Blount later admitted.

The company had produced fresh cups before, but nothing on this scale. The machinery order was placed, and the clock began to tick. By October, Costco and Raley’s orders were coming in—but still no cup filler and sealer. Todd Blount started paying courtesy calls to the Long Island manufacturer bearing gifts, pizza, anything to encourage haste. The equipment finally arrived in the early hours of a morning a few days before the deadline with much work still to be done. After a long weekend spent tinkering, Blount shipped the first order just in time.

As the 20-ounce cups cascaded from the line, it was apparent that a change had taken place. The company had been in large-scale manufacture for years, but always of “product” for customers. Blount provided the ingredients, but someone else made the meal. The company was still producing in a big way, but now it was the chef, and this was fresh food for “consumers.” Todd usually remained cool under fire, but he had been afraid he might miss his chance. “If it had gone any worse,” he said, “it could really have made a difference.”

From the start, Blount Seafood had been good at taking chances. And on some occasions the survival of a business might hinge on a late shipment or a malfunctioning machine. But this was not one of them. For even then, Blount was well into a carefully planned and steadily executed transformation. There might still be odd moments of trepidation or even terror, but Blount had become very good at managing change.

DOING THINGS RIGHT

Identity is a powerful thing. It protects values and ideas that might otherwise be rashly cast aside in a moment of frustration. It is something that stands still even when everything else seems to be in motion. Yet, sometimes, circumstances change to the point where one realizes that what had seemed like a cornerstone of one’s identity was really just a symbol of something deeper.

Blount Seafood’s home on the Warren waterfront had always helped keep the company’s identity tied to its roots as a family enterprise. But, with business growing, keeping the company headquartered there started to seem like clinging to the past. The location had always demanded compromises. Where industry and community once naturally coexisted, the booming plant had begun to try local patience, and increasingly ran up against municipal restrictions. Moreover, along the way there had been

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renovations and annexations—even the waterfront itself was extended by fill. Finally, the reality was undeniable: Blount had run out of room.

The time had come to build a new headquarters. By 2002 the search for a suitable location had begun in earnest. Management would have preferred to remain in Rhode Island, but nothing fit. A property that could work, however, was only a dozen miles distant, in an industrial park on the northern edge of Fall River, Massachusetts. A 45,000-square-foot facility was already on site, and there was plenty of surrounding land that would accommodate expansion. In the summer of 2003, after a year of negotiations, Blount completed its acquisition, and soon built a 20,000-square-foot addition to the existing building. The purchase of new equipment brought the company’s total investment in its new headquarters to $12 million.

A good deal of thought went into the build-out. Safety considerations were paramount. Escape valves, for example, were located on the outside of the building, so as not to endanger employees. Efficiency was also of great concern, so employees, who were in the best position to know what worked and what didn’t, helped with the layout. After years of compromise, it was good to start fresh. As John Cavanagh, the recently hired director of engineering, put it, “it gives you the opportunity to do things right in all areas.” In that respect, although the building lacked the old waterfront mill’s historic charm, its design was a reflection of Blount’s core values.

As production started up at the Fall River plant, there were many more things to get right. Rather than two kinds of clams and a handful of seafood products, Blount was now

Above, left: Blount’s new 65,000 square foot plant at 630 Currant Road in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 2004.

Right: Opening day at the Fall River plant. From left, Joanne Britland, Mike Backus, Greg Phillips, Todd Blount and Will Roff.


keeping track of a multiplicity of raw materials and hundreds of recipes. As customers multiplied, mere “shipping” turned into “logistics.” Through the early 2000s, Todd Blount tracked recipes and purchase of raw materials in a Microsoft Access database that he had designed himself. Information technology grew an order of magnitude after the move to Fall River.

Warren now enjoyed some much-needed breathing room, but things hardly slowed down there either. Blount’s New Bedford operations, including production of breaded products,

were all moved there. As Todd’s attention turned to Fall River, Steve Blount lent a critical sense of continuity to Warren, where the old “family firm” culture still hung on. Things were inevitably different in Fall River which became—in the estimation of Phil Pitzer, who moved from the back office in Warren to the head of information technology at Fall River—“more corporate in culture.” Perhaps also inevitably, although managers and employees continued to draw deeply upon Christian ideals, the company’s formerly pronounced piety became more subdued.

A link with the past. When the executive offices were built out at Fall River, the company’s original Whitecap logo was installed in a lobby mosaic.

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Blount headed into 2005 with a brand-new plant specifically geared to produce frozen soup for the food service customers that had fueled the soup breakout. And there was room for the processes and people required to keep up with the changes ahead.

CULINARY REVOLUTION

In the late 1990s, product development was a “seat of the pants” affair—something to be expected perhaps from a family firm. Jens Retlev brought a more culinary approach, but his experience did not prepare him to scale up the test kitchen as Blount required, and he moved on in 2004.

William Bigelow, however, was prepared for the challenge. Bigelow had done undergraduate work in nutrition and earned a master’s degree in food science. Upon joining Blount in 2002, he undertook the technical side of product development: drawing up production specifications, nutritional standards, and ingredient statements.

But Blount was now less in the business of making product and more in the business of making food—high-quality food at that. So there was bound to be as much art as science to product development. That side of the equation was tackled by a chef who started with Blount in 2003. Chefs can be demanding at best and dictatorial at worst, but Jeff Wirtz displayed a temperament well suited to what

Despite his youth, William Bigelow had substantial training in food science before heading up Blount’s product development team.

Scaling up. A worker adds ingredients to a 200 to 300 gallon batch of soup on the Fall River production floor.


Bob Sewall dubbed Blount’s “culinary think tank.” He was confident enough to prepare dishes before clients and their house chefs, accommodating enough to take their direction, and patient enough to duplicate their recipes.

There was more to it, of course, than merely tearing out pages from a client cookbook. Flavor, consistency, and durability all had to be made to exceed home cooking standards if a product was to survive freezing, storage, transportation, and several hours on a restaurant steam table. And, as a gourmet producer, Blount had to do it without recourse to the stabilizers and other additives that low-cost producers commonly included. Blount cooked its fare in quantities about half the

industry standard, but it still took a lot of scaling up to produce two-hundred-gallon to three-hundred-gallon production batches.

Bigelow and Wirtz formed a team that knew how to persevere and maintain a sense of humor. Explaining to a reporter that they averaged about fifteen attempts in creating a recipe, Wirtz mused that “I don’t think there’s ever been a product developed in one try.” “Not that was any good, at least,” interjected Bigelow.

As early as the summer of 2004, the culinary think tank had produced some one hundred soup recipes, but product development work did not always stop there. That same year, for the D’Angelo Sandwich Shops, a chain with two

In the Blount test kitchen, executive chef Jeff Wirtz chops celery in the foreground, while research and development chef Jacob Kim adds ingredients to a steam cooker.

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PERSONIFICATION AND INSPIRATION

Once, Blount Seafood had been personified by its hard-charging founder. But if there is

a public face of Blount Fine Foods today, it is neither fisherman nor family member but a

youthful executive chef named Jeff Wirtz featured prominently on the website. Growing

up in Norfolk, Massachusetts, in a two-wage-earner family, Wirtz began cooking to fill

in for his folks. He earned a bachelor’s degree in culinary arts at Johnson & Wales

University in Providence, where such celebrated chefs as Emeril Lagasse have studied.

Wirtz was twenty-seven years old when he joined Jens Retlev at the developing “culinary

think tank” in Warren. Within two years he was firmly in charge of the kitchen and training

his own assistants. Wirtz’s ability to duplicate and scale up recipes made the difference for

Blount’s soup division, but from the beginning he has also pioneered on his own, grounding

recipes in traditional flavors and textures while giving a culinary nod to contemporary tastes.

In 2005 Wirtz even took his seafood risotto recipe before the crowd and the cameras at the

Great American Seafood Cookoff in New Orleans. Today, Wirtz’s recipes are much easier to

find—on the Blount Fine Foods website.

hundred franchises, not only did Blount produce the right recipe within a week, but it also helped implement a customer sampling program.

While the product development team focused closely on producing good food well, the management team dealt with a host of distractions. As Blount built up its soup capabilities, more traditional products proliferated. By mid-decade the company was marketing breaded scallops, crab cakes, littleneck clams, and many others in six separate divisions. The seafood specialties in

particular, now being sourced from across the globe, required a great deal of attention for comparatively little reward. “We had been trying to do all things for all people,” concluded Todd Blount.

There were consequences for the bottom line. With clam production for Campbell’s down 25 percent, the year 2005 was a tough one. That September, the management team made some tough decisions. Blount’s historic business came in for scrutiny. With tight limits on supply and a fully tapped market, it


was decided that the clam business, although providing welcomed profits for now, was likely to be a problematic earner in the long run.

The soup business, in contrast, seemed poised for long-term profitability. Perhaps thinking of the as-yet-unfilled orders from Raley’s and Costco, Todd Blount argued that more resources would be required to build up the business. He also believed that the building had to be done quickly. The gourmet soup sector might not expand indefinitely. When it slowed, the biggest players would own the market, and Todd hoped Blount would be one of them.

SOUP COMES OF AGE

Management emerged from its fall 2005 meeting with a simple strategic plan: cut the distractions and concentrate on what worked. The next year Blount sold its entire imported seafood line—only clams and breaded clams remained. Those familiar with the up-and-down trajectory that the seafood products had displayed ever since Blount sold its first conch understood the essentials of the plan. But there was one unanticipated detail that would lead to lots more change.

The Raley’s and Costco opportunities were, in Todd’s words, “bigger than we deserved”

New England Clam Chowder, Blount’s first entry into the high-end soup market, remained a best seller into the 2000s.

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because the mechanism that built the soup business was geared toward food service. The early fruitless experiments in Warren had confirmed that a company with no reputation in soup could hardly expect to cook up its own recipes and successfully sell them retail. There had been some small attempts, most notably with a “Signature Soups” line sold under the Blount Seafood brand name in the mid-2000s, but the future still seemed to be in food service.

The Costco and Raley’s business was for store brands, but they compelled Blount to jump headfirst into technology required for retail—equipment for packaging small, fresh portions rather than four-pound frozen bags. The big break into retail came in 2008 when old customer Legal Sea Foods and new client Panera Bread licensed Blount to produce and sell their house soups to club stores. The latter agreement in particular “was a tremendous lift,” said Bob Sewall. “Panera looked at fifteen soup companies and chose us.”

By then, Blount had taken another decisive step in the new direction. Direct ventures into retail soups were complicated by the corporate name: only the most adventurous consumer could be expected to buy “Blount Seafood Beef Chili.” So Blount brought on marketing director David Vittorio to reconfigure the company’s Internet, print, and media presence. In late 2007 Todd launched a new corporate name and brand: Blount Fine Foods.

The nomenclature underscored a change that

Perhaps Blount’s biggest break into retail came in 2008, when the company beat out fifteen competitors to produce Panera soups for marketing in club stores.

A new corporate name, reflecting a wider variety of high-quality foods, was registered with the state of Rhode Island on December 19, 2007.


$0

$20,000,000

$40,000,000

$60,000,000

$80,000,000

$100,000,000

$120,000,000

1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011

Clam Meat Sales

Soup & All Other Sales

had gradually developed over time. In Fall River, Blount had grown into something much larger and very different from the shellfish processor of the past. Even still, Blount did not stray too far from its old specialty. The plant in Warren stayed true to tradition and remained proud of its work, even retaining the old Blount Seafood name on the building. And in early 2009 Todd Blount went to the Boston Seafood show to roll out the new Blount brand of gourmet soups for the retail market: New England clam chowder figured heavily in what Todd called the company’s “conscious effort to upgrade America’s soup experience.”

By then it seemed that Blount had found the

steady and sustainable business long sought by management. From 2008 to 2009, during the steepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, Blount’s revenues rose nearly 13 percent. In fact, a plunge in clam-related revenues was more than overcome by the strong performance of the soup line, which grew nearly 27 percent. The Panera and Legal Seafood business had played a strong part in this performance, for although strapped Americans may have forgone a night out, they still had an inclination for restaurant-quality food. After five years of focusing on it, the “grow the soups” plan was paying off.

Between 2003 and 2010 Blount’s business

As this chart indicates, after 2000 Blount’s soup business decisively outpaced clam production, fueling a decade’s worth of growth and transforming the company.

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almost doubled in size, with revenues reaching upwards of $94 million. The work force had more than doubled, with two hundred full-time and one hundred seasonal employees on the rolls. The Fall River plant was already reaching capacity. When Blount originally purchased the property there in 2003, it had anticipated an eventual expansion, and acquired an adjacent property as well. Nobody, though, had expected expansion to happen so soon. In early 2010 construction began. By the end of the year the plant was more than doubled in size to 108,000 square feet, at a cost of $16 million. It was a “green” design in tune with the times, including rooftop solar panels, energy-efficient doors and lighting, and a cost-effective central refrigeration system.

Meanwhile, Blount had begun to look at entirely new areas for growth. Promising opportunities

seemed to await in sauces, spreads, and dips, which were usually sold by the same distributors who handled soups. By 2010 Blount was already producing dips under the Panera name. What are called “wet” salads, such as chicken and pasta salads, also represented an exciting way forward, not least because many of these offerings, such as a new lobster salad, drew on Blount’s seafood expertise.

Blount also found itself in a position to grow through new acquisitions that would build on strengths, overcome weaknesses, and serve more customers. In 2011 Blount purchased Neco Foods LLC, a Florida firm with expertise in high-quality wet processed foods. In 2008 Neco had reorganized and hired new culinary talent in a bid to become a provider of fine prepared foods, including soups. Becoming part of the Blount family seemed like the next step forward. The sale was completed in August, and Neco became Neco Fine Foods. For Blount, having Neco on board represented an opportunity to gain access Neco’s experience in dips and spreads, as well as a new toehold in markets in the southeastern United States.

The new customers and products that came with the Neco acquisition led to further growth, but it soon became clear that it would not be economical to maintain Neco’s inadequate leased facilities in Florida. In March 2012 the difficult decision was made to close it. Some of the staff moved to new jobs in New

As Blount’s “grow the soups” strategy paid off, in 2010 the Fall River plant was doubled in size.


THE MARKET AND THE COMPANY STORE

The purchase of Great Soups, Incorporated and the Cooks and Butler brand was,

perhaps, the decision that led most directly to the development of Blount Fine

Foods—a first step toward something big. But it was also a step toward something

smaller, although equally close to the heart of Blount. Great Soups fans, it turned out,

were accustomed to stopping by Bristol for their favorite varieties. “About a day after

we closed down the Cooks and Butler store, they started calling us to buy soup,” Todd

Blount remembered. Since Blount sold only four-bag cases to its food service and

restaurant customers, there were always a few odd bags around for retail.

In May 2001, Blount opened its first “Company Store” on Water Street in Warren.

Eventually Blount bought Hall’s, a small local seafood shop, and rechristened the

Water Street store as the “Blount Market.” By the mid-2000s, take-out sandwiches

and soups were also available at Blount “Clam Shacks” in Warren, Riverside and

Fall River—the latter shares quarters with Blount’s second Company Store.

England, while Blount worked to find new jobs in the area for those who could not make the move. Meanwhile, in December 2011, Blount acquired the Cape Cod Chowder Company of nearby Marion, Massachusetts, moving its chowder business to the Warren plant, and its seafood dips and spreads to Fall River. Some of these employees also joined the Blount team.

The tide of demand for premium quality fresh foods was showing no signs of ebbing. With

new space, an expanded product line, new acquisitions, and a burgeoning soup business, Blount Fine Foods was well equipped to keep growing through the second decade of the new century. Of course, rapid growth had its own hazards. The question now was whether Blount could keep making the right choices to take advantage of the opportunities that awaited, while holding onto the principles that had made it successful in the first place.

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BLOUNT’S ANNUAL CLAMBAKE TRADITION IS ONE OF THE MANY WAYS THE COMPANY CONTINUES TO

DRAW ON ITS SEAFOOD HERITAGE.


Chapter Six:

Constant Innovation

For more than 130 years, a Blount had been making a living from the sea. By 2011, though, it was abundantly clear that there were no longer any prospects for growth in the Blount company’s traditional clam business. Demand remained flat, and supplies were as strained as ever. Few consumers were willing to pay premiums for high quality, which meant profits could only be made on the margin. So, as Blount’s premium soup business kept growing and generating value, it made little sense to keep devoting resources to processing clams. The time had come to bid a fond farewell.

The first priority was to find Blount’s traditional business a good home. Sea Watch International, based in Easton, Maryland, was the largest processor of clams in the world. Its scale of operations made it the only U.S.-based company capable of competing in the thoroughly commodified global seafood market. Moreover, since the 1990s, Sea Watch had been majority owned by the Truexes, the same clam fishing family that had been friends and trusted suppliers of Blount since the 1970s. For Blount, knowing the priority Sea Watch placed on safety, efficiency, and quality made the decision to sell a little easier. The transaction was completed on September 6, 2011. At the same time, Blount parted ways with some of its oldest customers, including, after sixty-four years, Campbell’s.

Saying goodbye, though, did not diminish Blount’s commitment to its heritage. For instance, abandoning the plant in Warren remained out of the question. The company instead dedicated the facility to clam chowder production, and, finding the title unclaimed, styled it the World Headquarters of Clam

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After Blount sold its clam processing business, it transformed the Warren plant into the World Headquarters of Clam Chowder.

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Chowder. It was a fitting moniker, as Blount was soon making over seventy-five varieties of the New England staple there. The company also remained committed to its chain of Blount Clam Shacks. The stores were not a part of Blount’s core business—they were simply another satisfying way of keeping the company’s past tied to its future.

A VALUED ASSET

If the old Blount clam business had reflected mid-twentieth-century aspirations to stability, the new soup business capitalized on the early twenty-first century’s constantly evolving cultural and economic landscape. Todd Blount had always known that facing up to that landscape’s challenges was going to be the company’s reality. As he remarked in 1996, when he gave a speech honoring Blount’s fiftieth anniversary, he did not know if, fifty years hence, “we will be processing clams or Cocoa Krispies.” The only thing that was certain was, “Our performance will be defined by how well we manage change.” Over the next two decades he was proven right.

As Blount searched for new ways to develop its

business, the only thing not subject to change was its dedication to quality. This was not just a point of pride; it was the cornerstone of the company’s ongoing success. Blount’s relatively small-scale production allowed it to be creative with recipes and to enhance quality, which added an abundance of value to the final product. At the same time, Blount did not have the facilities to produce soup in the quantities and at the cost needed to compete with the largest, less expensive brands. One of the reasons why Blount’s soup business never sparked conflicts with Campbell’s was that the consumers who sought out fresh, top-quality soups were, by and large, not the same as those who bought canned soups. So, for Blount, it was quality or nothing.

If quality was the one constant in the winning equation, the variables were harder to pin down. The company’s new ventures into salads and dips were soon found to be unworkable. Although these items had originally seemed like an obvious complement to Blount’s soup business, the fact that the ingredients were mixed cold meant these product lines were subject to entirely different quality assurance and regulatory compliance procedures. It proved too difficult to integrate production of dips and salads with existing operations, and products in these categories had to be phased out. “We were never going to hit production efficiencies,” Todd Blount admitted. But, because the company understood the nature

Blount’s Clam Shacks gave the company a visible presence locally, as well as another link to its seafood past.


of measured risk taking, it was able to move on before too many losses accrued, and it helped its customers find new suppliers for the discontinued products.

Meanwhile, the opportunities in soup continued to multiply—the trick was to take advantage. The new class of consumers of premium food that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s was not content with higher quality. They were seeking an ever-wider variety of flavors, and demanding a full range of healthy options. Restaurants and retailers had to pay careful attention to new food trends to compete for business. Blount soon realized that one of its crucial advantages was that it had the ability

not just to meet present demands, but also to work with customers to create tomorrow’s big sellers. To reinforce this advantage, Blount began to assign a culinary staff member to each of its sales teams, so that customers could consult a trusted expert on demand. As Bob Sewall put it, “If we’re just shipping you soup, we’re not interested. We have to be a resource, an asset to our customers.”

Back in Fall River, the members of William Bigelow’s research and development team worked hard to satisfy the company’s increasingly complex commitments. A big part of Blount’s business continued to be developing proprietary recipes for Panera and Legal Sea

Blount’s expertise in product development helped its soups, under a variety of labels, become more available in grocery stores nationwide.

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Foods, as well as private-label products for retailers nationwide. Bigelow’s team also was responsible for putting great tastes behind Blount’s own label. Blount-brand soups remained popular with restaurants and food service providers, and were now reaching more and more consumers through club stores and supermarkets. Blount was soon producing over 800 distinct products, each carefully tailored not only for flavor, but to maintain its quality through production, storage, transportation, sale, and preparation.

As Blount’s marketing began to revolve as much around its culinary expertise as its specific products, the company began to engage outsiders to share in this integrated vision. In early 2014 the company inaugurated a partnership with nearby Johnson & Wales University, which was renowned for its culinary arts program. Marketing students taking part in an “Ad Lab” seminar had the chance to develop social media strategies to support the launch of new Blount soups. Several months later, Blount hosted its first-ever “Culinary Summit” in Newport, Rhode Island. Bringing together leaders in the premium food industry was an opportunity to exchange ideas on culinary trends and product development, and, of course, to trumpet Blount products and the company’s approach to business.

THE CULINARY CHALLENGE

By 2010 the new culinary culture emphasizing healthier and more flavorful ingredients had become thoroughly mainstream. Chefs and connoisseurs were emboldened to introduce new flavors to the nation, and people were ready to give them a try. This was the era of discerning diners proudly sharing photos of their meals on social media, and attentively following new trends in cuisine like never before. And, increasingly, shoppers expected to find the kind of foods they were eating at restaurants on grocery store shelves.

For food producers, the key was to understand how they could best serve this culture. Some, for instance, were in a good position to feed the

Blount heavily promoted its expertise in organic fresh foods. Here chefs Thomas Gervasi and Benjamin Murray pose with a few of Blount’s organic soups at the National Restaurant Association’s 2014 show.

Blount’s research and development team members take pride in creating recipes that satisfy consumers’ search for new ways of eating well. Left to right: Vilija Bonda, Benjamin Murray, Robin Leatherwood, Jeff Wirtz, William Bigelow, Matt Yusen, Thomas Gervasi, and Caitlin Sewall.


THE COMPLETE PACKAGE

Not all of Blount’s research and development was directed toward creating new

recipes. Packaging was also a major component. Blount’s Panera-brand soups and

sides, for instance, were soon being placed in containers with an eye-catching

new shape. As William Bigelow explained, “Packaging is what draws the consumer

over. You kind of eat with your eyes, so if you see it, you’ll buy it.” Another

important project was helping to develop new “cool rip” technology, which keeps

the packaging cool even as its contents are heated in a microwave.

One of the biggest goals was to create smaller packages, and to integrate them

seamlessly into production operations. Sixteen-ounce and ten-ounce containers

catered to consumers who were pressed for time, but still looking for a good

meal. In fact, for younger consumers, the very idea of a meal was coming into

flux. The “millennial” generation was enthusiastic about fresh prepared foods,

and often snacked throughout the day instead of eating breakfast, lunch, and

dinner. Developing smaller container sizes was part and parcel of marketing to

new tastes and lifestyles.

latest fads, but most could not afford to change product lines so quickly. Blount’s research and development team understood it was important to identify the trends that were likely to endure, and to explore their culinary possibilities. One trend that had already proved its staying power was the organic food movement. Blount had avoided using artificial ingredients and preservatives whenever possible, simply because maintaining a “clean label” was a good way to maintain good flavor. So, it was natural step

to begin sourcing certified organic ingredients.

Blount also quickly realized that emphasizing its organic offerings was a good way to build its own brand. Some consumers of organic products bought them out of a strong conviction in the foods’ specific environmental and health benefits. For many more, though, the organic label was simply a shorthand for eating well. As Bigelow observed, “People want transparency in their food, from no preservatives and short

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ingredient decks they understand, all the way to sustainability, from packaging to locally sourced ingredients.” If consumers began to associate these qualities with the Blount line of organics, that would benefit the brand as a whole. At the same time, Blount gained valuable experience in producing and selling organic foods, which it could tout to its customers. “We have become the organics expert in fresh foods,” Sewall boasted.

If organics were a good way to begin to address consumer interest in healthy eating, taking full advantage of that interest was a more complex task. Different consumers could have vastly different ideas about what constituted a healthy meal. Many, of course, remained interested in low-fat options. Others, equally health conscious, were more concerned with how genuine the ingredients in their food were, demanding, for instance, real cream even if it was high in calories. The endless parade of diet trends and fads could prove particularly daunting to address. Rather than designing entirely new lines of products around particular diets, such as regimens that are gluten free or high in protein, Blount’s team kept on

the lookout for products that could be easily adapted to those diets. This approach ensured that Blount did not lose sight of the most important thing. A recipe, Bigelow reflected, “could have twenty grams of protein and all the essential fatty acids you need for a day, but if it tastes bad you’re never going to sell it again.”

Another big challenge was choosing exactly which popular tastes to incorporate into new products. One important trend was that consumers were eager to move beyond flavors and textures that they associated with mass production, and to embrace a more “artisan” or “hand-crafted” approach to cuisine. Panera, the owner of Blount’s biggest licensed brand, had already shown with its national chain of bakery-cafés that an artisanal style could be brought to a broad public. Blount similarly found that consumers could find a hand-crafted taste in well-made soups with ingredients selected for their robust flavor. Then there were the ingredients of the moment. Kale, once an unknown vegetable, was selling extremely well, and made for great-tasting soup. Yet, an eye always had to be kept on the future. For instance, as the public stood poised to unlock the hidden potential in cauliflower, Blount was ready to show them what it could do for their soups.

Of course, for all the shifts in tastes brought about by the new culinary culture, some truths were eternal. Among these was that soup is a comfort food. Year in and year out,

Hearty soups, such as the Panera-brand broccoli and cheddar soup, have sold consistently well.


hearty soups, such as broccoli cheddar and clam chowder, continued to sell briskly, as did Blount’s growing variety of chilies, stews, and gumbos. Appreciation for Blount’s lobster bisque was such that the company became the nation’s leading producer of the seafood classic.

In 2013, with an excellent handle on premium soups, Blount once again began exploring new avenues for growth. Having learned that cold-mixed salads and dips were not in the cards, the company looked for opportunities in foods that were mixed hot, like its soups. It introduced side dishes such as macaroni and cheese, collard greens, creamed kale and spinach, butternut squash, and mashed sweet potatoes. Breakfast foods also seemed to represent a vast new frontier, which Blount ventured into with

a new ancient-grain oatmeal. Nobody could know whether these products would ever become soup’s equal on the production lines. But, with Blount’s flagship business having grown up from nothing in only twenty years, the company was not about to set limits.

A FIRST-CLASS OPERATION

Blount’s ability to develop new products of consistently high quality led to a steady expansion in business. By 2011 the company had passed $100 million in soup sales, a mark that would double to more than $200 million by 2015. In 2012, to manage the company’s increasingly complex finances, it hired Mike Mistrot to serve as chief financial officer. Meanwhile, with the rapid expansion

Blount’s sides and breakfast foods quickly found a natural place alongside the company’s soups.

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in both the number of products and the volume of food being produced, the company’s production operations had to grow increasingly sophisticated to meet the burden. Blount’s responsiveness to shifting customer needs had become its hallmark, but its reputation depended more than ever on the ability to deliver on its promises.

To keep Blount’s operations up to the challenge, the company reinvested roughly $10 million each year into new equipment and upgrades. As new space from the 2011 addition to the Fall River building became available, the company added new production and packaging lines to handle larger volumes. Plans were made to buy machines specially designed to handle the larger solids found in Blount’s

side dishes. The company’s most spectacular investments augmented its existing strength in controlling the temperature of its production process, a prerequisite for preserving quality. Between 2011 and 2014, Blount installed two large-scale chillers, which ferried packages of hot foods around a giant spiral through sprays of frigid water, bringing them rapidly down to refrigeration temperature. The plant also vastly expanded its on-site freezer and cooler storage capacity, reducing the need to shuttle raw ingredients and finished products to and from off-site storage facilities.

Automation also became more prevalent at Fall River. Blount had used automatic filling and labeling machines for decades, but now robotic hands could be found expertly placing finished units into boxes for shipping. Jonathan Arena, vice president of operations, observed, “What we’re finding is that these pieces of equipment allow us to extend ourselves to high speeds.” With plant expansion creating more work all around, increased automation left employees free to take on tasks where their skills could be used to best advantage. “We don’t normally go toward automation to eliminate people,” Arena explained. “We go toward automation to keep higher efficiency levels.”

Automation of production scheduling was increasingly vital in keeping the plants running smoothly. There were hundreds of recipes to prepare in varying quantities, using hundreds of

Production planner Deb Thornhill scrutinizes Blount’s production schedule. The company’s ever-increasing variety of products created a complex challenge for those managing production operations.


SAFETY AND QUALITY FIRST

Even as operations became more sophisticated, Blount’s safety, quality assurance,

and regulatory compliance measures became more elaborate. Employees were

trained in proper procedures in brief but frequent meetings, and were closely

supervised to ensure those procedures were assiduously followed.

For Blount’s products to pass muster, they were subjected to inspection at all

stages of production and transportation. The temperature of perishables in

transport had to be continually monitored. Products were tested all along the

production line, not only to guard against contamination, but to ensure they met

specifications for flavor, color, texture, and consistency. Equipment had to be

thoroughly cleaned and inspected between production runs to keep regulated

allergens used in certain products strictly isolated from allergen-free products.

All safety and quality controls had to be meticulously documented. In 2010 Blount

reached a milestone in its efforts by achieving Safe Quality Food (SQF) Level 2

certification. The company ultimately tripled the size of its quality assurance team to

about thirty members, and hired Todd Brown (right) in 2013 to serve as vice president

for food safety and quality. An expert in quality assurance with thirty-five years of

experience in the food production industry, Brown had the capability to ensure that

as the range of Blount’s products and the scale of its operations grew, the company’s

safety and quality standards became ever more rigorous.

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ingredients, all to be shipped at different times and in different quantities to customers across the nation. It was no trivial matter to decide which products to produce when, where to store them, and how to transport the finished products. Fortunately, mathematicians and computer scientists had been studying these kinds of problems for decades. Dennis Bergeron, who joined Blount from food services giant Aramark in 2009, had the skill set and food industry background to develop solutions for the company’s problems in production scheduling, inventory control, and logistics.

Even as Blount upgraded its machinery and operations, its plants would not have been able to function without a dedicated and capable workforce. One of the greatest challenges proved to be coping with the fact that demand for soup rises dramatically in the winter. By 2015 this meant that the company’s workforce had to swell from about 300 to about 400 employees during peak season. Blount’s human resources staff, led by Ronnie King, worked year-round to manage these fluctuations, and to make sure that dedicated temporary workers could be found. Fortunately, many workers had jobs in such areas as landscaping during the warmer months, making them available to help make soup as the New England weather turned cold.

Meanwhile, Blount increased its investment in its permanent workforce. A newly instituted Learning and Development program helped employees develop their skills, acquire certifications, and grow within the company. Arena recalled, “One thing that we learned is that you’re only as good as the people working for you, and the better you can develop them, train them, engage them, get them thinking about being a participant in the growth of the company … that makes a big difference.”

A RECIPE FOR SUCCESS

Blount’s thriving soup business was built from the simple premise that the company could do well by bringing high-quality food to as many people as possible. For a long time, the focus was on simply getting that job done right. But, as the new business matured, the work of the various

Capital investment kept products moving efficiently from preparation to packaging to shipment.

Information technology helped Blount keep on a tight production schedule, down to the minute.

Ronnie King, senior director of human resources, leads a new-employee orientation.


parts of the company began to harmonize in new ways. Sales staff began to market the company’s research and development capabilities. Research and development created products that operations could produce efficiently and effectively. Human resources hired employees with the skills that operations needed, and in the numbers necessary to meet demand.

As all the parts of the business began to work in unison, that made it easier to do the things necessary to grow, and to become more sophisticated. As Todd Blount explained, “No one person’s got all the answers. Everybody’s

got a part of the answer, and when we come together we make really good decisions—and we’re able to make quick decisions.” With senior staff increasingly making important decisions among themselves, and with employees at all levels seeing how the company worked together as a whole, there was a new freedom to think about the bigger picture. “We’re not so exclusively focused on today’s job,” Blount reflected. “We’re thinking about planning in the next year.”

Good planning was helping Blount to sustain its rate of growth year after year, to the point that,

Blount’s success has been built from many ingredients—literally and figuratively.

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even as it grew into its 2011 plant expansion, trends showed it was already time to think about another. The company drew up plans to double the size of its footprint in Fall River by the summer of 2016. Because the only land left on the property was classified as wetlands, arrangements had to be made in conjunction with local government officials to recreate those wetlands on nearby property, which Blount acquired for the purpose. Once the permits were issued, Blount was free to begin construction, using many of the same green building techniques that it had applied to its existing facility. Meanwhile, the company was also thinking about growing through acquisition, or by building a plant in another part of the country.

Of course, becoming more deeply integrated into the local community of Fall River was

important, too. New Englanders are famously local in their outlook, and, even though Fall River was only about twenty minutes from Warren, it was a whole other world for Blount. The company’s Soup Store and Clam Shack there helped create local recognition for the Blount name, but the company was eager to reach out in other ways as well. It donated soup to homeless shelters, to youth group and school fundraising campaigns, and to a local veterans organization. Soon the Blount team got to know, and began to support, the organizers of other local charity organizations and events. Food was also a big part of Blount becoming known as a great place to work, which helped attract dedicated new members of the Blount team. As Ronnie King put it, “Manufacturing is an environment that if you

Blount’s executive team in 2014. Left to right: Todd Blount, president; William Bigelow, vice president of business development—research and development; Jonathan Arena, vice president of operations; Todd Brown, vice president of food safety and quality assurance; Mike Mistrot, chief financial officer; and Bob Sewall, executive vice president of sales and marketing


love it, you love it. You come to work, and at the end of the day you can see the results of your actions. And when the results of your actions are putting delicious food in people’s bellies, it feels really good.”

FOUR LEADERS, FOUR COMPANIES

Over the long arc of its history, Blount Fine Foods is not so much the story of one company, but rather of four, typified by each of its four key leaders. Nelson Blount was an entrepreneurial spirit through and through. Howard Huftalen recalled that he was “always going and getting something else started.” Given his family background it was perhaps inevitable that he strove to make a living from the sea. But it was not saltwater that ran through his veins—it was change. Blount Seafood was only one product of

his zeal for new ventures. Throughout his life, his attention dwelt as much on trains and airplanes as on boats harvesting the ocean’s bounty.

It was left to Nelson’s friend Fred Richardson to keep a steady hand on the tiller. In their youth, partly out of the duty of friendship, Fred authored the book about railroads that Nelson had aspired to write. And, in many ways, Fred was also the “author” of Blount Seafood in the 1950s and 1960s. He was the one who built it into a Rhode Island institution and a steadfast member of the Campbell’s family. Fred Richardson died in April 2007, but he lived long enough to see the company become something he himself could not have imagined. Never evincing concern or regret, he always asked in his later years about how the “new” businesses were doing, and was proud to

In 2015 Blount prepared to expand its Fall River plant into the undeveloped property behind it. Before construction could begin, plans had to be approved to recreate the wetlands located on the site on nearby land.

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learn of their success.

Trained as an engineer, Ted Blount worked hard to keep the operations of the family firm up to date and running smoothly, even as his leadership strategies sowed the seeds for something new. He was eager to find better ways of doing things, from developing new products to installing new machines. He explored possibilities for new ventures, and saw the importance of finding new customers. He was a teacher, showing the management team not just the potential of Blount’s existing business, but also what the company could aspire to become.

The transformation of Blount Seafood into Blount Fine Foods was a direct product of a zest for change that Todd Blount shared with his grandfather. But, where Nelson had always wanted to start new things from scratch, Todd channeled that spirit into a vision that was his own. His goal was to harness change, and use

it to build the family business into something that was bigger and stronger than it had ever been. This sort of change, it turned out, could take on a life of its own, leading the way for those who were willing to listen to its lessons. As Blount Fine Foods continued to grow and prosper in the twenty-first century, everyone at the company was eager to see where change would lead them next.

Good food has always been the heart of Blount. Employees and their families line up at the annual clambake.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This history represents the combined efforts of many people who, despite many other obligations, invested time, energy and patience in helping to capture the Blount Fine Foods story. Jonathan Arena, William Bigelow, Ruth Blount, Steve Blount, Ted Blount, Todd Blount, Howard Huftalen, Ronnie King, Phil Pitzer, George Richardson, Bob Sewall and Rocky Silva all shared recollections and insights gained over years of experience at Blount. Rocky Silva also provided a tour of the Warren Plant while John Cavanagh hosted a tour of the Fall River facility. Phil Pitzer made Blount’s vast collection of digital images available, and Todd and Ted Blount provided thoughtful edits to the manuscript. Graphcom Creative pulled the words and pictures together into a coherent and compelling volume. Sarah Arguin, David Vittorio, and Rachael Blount Girard designed the cover. Kenneth Durr and William Thomas at History Associates Incorporated researched and wrote the manuscript and selected and captioned the images. Gail Matthews and Vanessa Lide, also at History Associates, painstakingly proofed every sentence. For Blount Fine Foods, Andrea Walker managed the project with patience and good humor from start to finish.

PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

Library of Congress, 4 (top)

Boston Public Library, 4 (bottom)

Campbell’s Soup Company, 14

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, 3, 23

All other photographs and illustrations courtesy of Blount Fine Foods

From Sea to Soup - Blount Fine Foods

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