Hormel Is Much More than Spam

Bloomberg gives an in-depth look at Hormel Foods (HRL). Here’s a sample:

Spam, more than any other product, defines Hormel. Through its 125-year history, the company’s strategy has been simple: protein, preferably with a long shelf life. Its other brands—Dinty Moore beef stew, Mary Kitchen hash, Real Bacon toppings, Herb-Ox bouillon cubes and its eponymous chili—sound like the shopping list for a Cold War fallout shelter.

In 2014, Hormel filed a patent for a meat sandwich that lasts longer than 14 days. As Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Ettinger put it, Hormel maintained “a very American-dominated portfolio with a lot of kind of traditional American food type items.”

This is not, in short, a brand given to taking risks or chasing trends.

But around 2007, Hormel quietly embarked on a venture that would take it deeper than it had ever been into the cupboards and kitchens of Americans, many of them immigrants, many of them young. It led to a series of acquisitions and a blitz of research and development that helped round out its pantry of products and inoculate it against the fickle modern food trends of a kale-and-quinoa world.

One of the first things it did was hire an anthropologist.

Read the whole thing.

Posted by Eddy Elfenbein on August 15th, 2016 at 12:15 pm

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