those Keseys in the mix
http://www.oregonlive.com/O/index.ssf/2010/03/sometimes_a_great_yogurt_nancy.html
By Katy Muldoon
March 27, 2010
EUGENE -- A legendary day in a home-grown company's history dawned
warm and grew wickedly hot, to a skin scalding 107 degrees. And boy,
oh boy, was there skin to scald.
"The Grateful Dead said it was the stark nakedest scene they'd ever
attended," remembers Chuck Kesey, who asked his friends in the band
if they'd truck on up to Oregon and play a benefit for his struggling
little company, Springfield Creamery.
Unlikely as the deal seems today, the Dead did just that on Aug. 27,
1972. They set up west of Eugene, in Veneta, where the Oregon Country
Fair encamps each summer. Funky, hand-drawn posters advertised the
pot-luck picnic and Dead concert for $3 in advance or $3.50 at the
gate -- "cheap," as the posters noted. The creamery transformed its
Nancy's Honey Yogurt labels into concert tickets, and more than
20,000 Dead devotees, some clad in little more than their own fur, spilled in.
The result: one of those quintessential Oregon events that fueled the
state's happy hippie reputation and cemented its place in the budding
natural foods movement. Springfield Creamery, whose practices and
products epitomized the pure, healthy goodness the movement yearned
to spread, survived, thanks in part to the $12,000 to $13,000 raised that day.
Without it, the business that grew to symbolize a nation's evolving
food tastes might not have stuck around long enough to celebrate its
50th anniversary this year.
**
Chuck Kesey comes across as quirky -- a 71-year-old mad scientist in
a milkman's cap. A charismatic, anti-establishment entrepreneur whose
frothy white mutton chops nearly meet mid-chin. A fellow who launched
his career in 1960 with the help of two great loves, his new bride,
Sue, and that biological trickster, bacteria.
The stuff fascinated him. It had ever since he studied live cultures
as a dairy science student at Oregon State University in the 1950s.
Sue Kesey, a secretarial science major in OSU's business
administration school, remembers typing his term papers extolling the
virtues of Lactobacillus acidophilus, one of those good
microorganisms that lives naturally in the human gut, and the
bacteria commonly used to ferment yogurt.
But that would come later.
The Keseys graduated in 1960 and moved to Springfield, where Chuck
and his brother, celebrated author Ken Kesey, grew up as "creamery
rats," working alongside their father, Fred, who managed the Eugene
Farmers Creamery.
With $350 in the bank, Chuck and Sue leased the defunct Springfield
Creamery for $150 a month, and began packaging milk in gallon glass
jugs for other creameries. They delivered milk to stores, homes and
Springfield's schools.
But by the end of that decade, the milk business changed, and not in
the little guys' favor. Production consolidated and industrialized.
Rather than having it delivered to their doorsteps, consumers stocked
up on milk at increasingly prolific supermarkets.
If the Keseys wanted to stay in business for themselves, they needed
a niche product -- one that suited the back-to-nature sensibility
they shared with so many in their generation and those that followed.
Chuck Kesey's great notion: yogurt, infused with his beloved bacteria.
**
Nancy Van Brasch Hamren had a recipe. Her health-conscious
grandmother made yogurt, and so did she during the months she lived
on Ken Kesey's farm near Eugene.
Hamren, a lanky, soft-spoken Californian, ran in circles simply
psychedelic with history. She lived in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury
district from 1966 to 1968, the bookends to 1967's Summer of Love.
Her boyfriend's sister was married to Jerry Garcia, the Grateful
Dead's shaggy-haired lead guitarist. And they all knew Ken Kesey --
from his books, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a
Great Notion," and from the infamous, drug-juiced parties known as
Acid Tests, which he hosted and promoted.
When Ken Kesey traveled to Britain to work with the Beatles in 1969,
Hamren and her boyfriend moved to Oregon to look after his farm. When
Kesey and his family returned, she needed a new pad and a job. Down
at the creamery, his brother, Chuck, needed a bookkeeper. He and Sue
hired Hamren, and they started talking yogurt.
The time was right. The place, too.
Eugene and Springfield brimmed with hippie bakeries, granola makers,
co-ops and natural-food stores. College kids and others living there
moved beyond white bread long before the mainstream pondered crafting
diets around fresh, local, organic food.
"It was a very fertile place for an alternative vision, particularly
in the natural foods world," says Cameron Healy, who in 1972 paid
$1,000 for a little bakery next to the Keseys' creamery. "People had
a real sense of mission."
Healy went on to found Kettle Foods, of Salem, a leading natural and
organic snack manufacturer, which had estimated annual sales of $150
million when he sold it in 2006. Today he and his son, Spoon Khalsa,
run Kona Brewing Co., which makes, among other brews, Hawaii's only
certified organic beer.
Hamren and Chuck Kesey started cooking yogurt, experimenting with
various bacteria, natural sweeteners and fruit from nearby farms and
orchards. They think Springfield was the first U.S. creamery to use
live acidophilus cultures in its yogurt. It's among the bacteria
known as probiotics, believed to aid in digestion and perhaps
stimulate the immune system and help prevent infection.
Willamette People's Co-op bought the first commercially available
batches of the creamery's yogurt, and when the stock ran out, a
caller from the co-op asked, "Can you bring us some more of that
Nancy's yogurt?"
It had a nice ring -- more palatable, Sue Kesey says, than a yogurt
called Chuck's.
The Nancy's Yogurt brand was born.
**
The year was 1970 and next door to the creamery, the Keseys opened
the Health Food and Pool Store. A mural outside depicted a fun-filled
utopia, complete with a rainbow, a man in the moon, a smiling sun and
dancing milk jugs. Inside, not far from the pool table, bulk foods,
whole grains, herbs, candles and, of course, Nancy's Yogurt, filled
the shelves.
Chuck Kesey smiles slyly and his eyes glint as he describes the store
as "a real culture shock to Springfield."
Healy, the fellow who bought the bakery next door, remembers that the
place lit up whenever Ken Kesey, who died in 2001, rolled up in his
Cadillac. He and a few of the Merry Pranksters, as those in his
entourage were known, would hop out, shoot pool and raise the sort of
high-energy ruckus that fueled their radical reputation.
That reputation and the impact Ken Kesey had on 1970s youth culture
gave Nancy's Yogurt a nudge, or, as Gilbert Rosborne puts it, "The
Kesey name gave it hippie star power."
Rosborne was a University of Oregon graduate student who delivered
Rolling Stone magazine in Portland and Seattle. He recalls sitting
outside the creamery chatting with Chuck Kesey when he wondered
aloud: Why not drive a truckload of Nancy's Yogurt to that long-hair
haven, the San Francisco Bay Area, and try to sell it?
He needed a partner and asked a Mill Valley, Calif., acquaintance --
a guy as sharp at auto mechanics as he was with a harmonica -- to
join him. Rosborne and his new partner, Huey Lewis, called their
venture Natural Foods Express.
They bought old delivery trucks and Lewis tuned them until they
purred. The two men took turns driving the long slog between
Springfield and the Bay Area, Lewis blowing tunes on the harmonica as
they traveled. And the Bay Area devoured Nancy's Yogurt.
"Rock'n'roll, natural foods, pot. We were gonna create a whole new
world," says Rosborne, who lives north of San Francisco, in a
Larkspur, Calif., home he and Lewis once co-owned.
The men dissolved their business partnership around the time Lewis'
band, Huey Lewis and the News, hit it big in the 1980s.
These days, Rosborne delivers wine for a living, but he still fills
his fridge with Nancy's Yogurt.
"The main thing I got out of it," he says, "was good digestion."
**
The brand grew, and not because the Keseys were superior salesmen.
They admit they weren't. But their customers spread the probiotic
gospel. Over time, Nancy's Yogurt, made with milk from nearby
dairies, found its way into grocery coolers in every U.S. state and
across Canada. Today, the company's annual sales exceed $20 million
and Nancy's is among the top-selling natural yogurts, especially in
the Northwest.
"Word-of-mouth marketing," says Stan Amy, co-founder of the New
Seasons Market chain, "is more powerful than any other form."
Customers like more than the yogurt's tangy flavor and the
opportunity to mix in as much fruit, which comes packaged separately,
as their taste buds desire. Amy says Nancy's buyers groove to what it
symbolizes: using top-notch ingredients, live cultures and
traditional methods instead of white sugar, chemicals and
industrialized processes. They admire that the creamery remains
independent instead of selling out to a big company. And they
appreciate, Amy says, that the yogurt's flavor, logos and recyclable
plastic cartons -- fondly known as "Eugene Tupperware" or "Nancyware"
-- have changed little over time.
"Not only was the product symbolic," he says, "but the people in the
company are, too."
Stroll through the Springfield Creamery today -- the company kept the
name but moved into a larger facility in Eugene in 1987 -- and many
of the 55 or so employees are Kesey children, grandchildren, nieces,
nephews, cousins or spouses. Seven have worked there 30 years or
longer, and Nancy Hamren still manages the office more than 40 years
after taking the creamery job.
Sue Kesey, 71, handles the business end, as she has from Day 1. Sue
and Chuck's son, Kit, 45, is in charge of operations. Their daughter,
Sheryl Kesey Thompson, 48, markets the line, which now numbers more
than 80 products, if each size and flavor of everything from yogurt
and kefir to cottage cheese and cultured soy is tallied separately.
Chuck remains the scientist and chief taster, personally testing each
yogurt batch.
The creamery has struggled some.
One evening in 1994, an employee called Sue and Chuck's home, a
little more than three miles from the plant, to tell them a fire had
started upstairs and firefighters were on their way. Sue recalls
seeing flames and billowing smoke as soon as she pulled out of her
driveway, headed for the creamery.
Investigators determined the fire, which spread fast and destroyed
most of the plant, likely started with a faulty fan switch in a storage area.
The company had been debt-free until that night. Insurance didn't
cover the cost of rebuilding, but Sue Kesey says there was no
question that's what they'd do. "There were so many people working
there," she says, "and we loved what we were doing. We wanted to keep
doing it."
The next morning, their entire crew arrived to scrub soot off the
walls and begin to patch together a temporary plant from what was left.
Customers, distributors and store owners wrote letters promising they
wouldn't defect to other brands. They'd wait for Nancy's to return.
About three weeks later, the company was back in the yogurt business.
The Keseys turned the disaster into opportunity. They rebuilt a
permanent plant three times bigger and far more efficient than the
old one. That move, Kit Kesey says, positioned the company well for
the growth of natural and organic foods in the last decade plus.
"How," Sue Kesey asks, "could it have been any neater?"
--
Katy Muldoon: 503-221-8526
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment