Sausage Kings Root for a Fatter Market Share

Like the easy-going, down-home characters they portray in their television commercials, sausage kings Jimmy Dean and Jerry Owens don’t give the impression they are fighting whole hog for the fattest share of the market.

It seems mostly a gentleman’s competition for leadership in the breakfast sausage market between the two Dallas-based companies, whose officials praise each other’s products as high quality.

Jimmy Dean Meat Co. ranks first nationally, while the regionally distributed Owens Country Sausage leads in Texas, according to both companies’ most recent A.C. Nielsen Co. market share figures that exclude link and microwave sausage.

Each claims to be the leader in the Southwest region, although they decline to release those figures.

“We’re tough competitors, but there’s plenty of room,” says former entertainer Jimmy Dean, who heads his company of the same name.

“They are formidable competitors. We continually go at it tooth and nail with each other,” says Jerry Owens, chairman of the venerable, 60-year-old Owens Country Sausage.

Both Jimmy Dean and Jerry Owens personally pitch their products on TV. The two Texans speak with an easy drawl about home and family and hearty breakfasts.

Dean’s celebrity status came almost 30 years ago when his “Big Bad John” country-Western song hit the charts. He also hosted a television variety show.

His answer on how he got into the sausage business is his standard one--even in a telephone interview from his boat, the Big Bad John, floating somewhere south of Miami where Dean is wintering:

“Had you ever seen my act, you would realize diversification was imperative. I was in the hog business in Plainview and the market fell out, and we were losing out. Quality sausage was something I didn’t think existed,” said Dean, a remark sure to leave the Owens people aghast.

Dean founded the company with his brother, Don, in 1969. But the brothers waged a nine-year legal battle after Jimmy Dean made critical remarks about his brother’s management of the company in the 1970s. Don Dean is no longer with the company.

In 1986, Jimmy Dean was ordered by a Dallas jury to pay Don $500,000 in damages for violating a 1980 agreement to keep quiet about his brother. A federal appeals court overturned that last year.

Family relationships at Owens have been smoother.

Owens attained his reputation selling sausage as his father, C.B. Owens, did before him. But from his appearance and manner, Owens could easily pass for a country-Western star himself.

“Our emphasis is on our family’s involvement (with the company) on a day-to-day basis and the family heritage and a history of reliability and consistency,” he said, sporting a Western-cut corduroy jacket, plaid shirt and thin gold chain around his neck.

Jerry Owens’ son, Stewart, is now president of the company.

Jerry Owens said it never really occurred to him to do anything but take over the family business, which started back in 1938 with the idea of using ham, loin and shoulder cuts in sausage--instead of using it to “get rid of the trimmings.”

“Pork sausage was an abused product,” Owens explained.

While both companies are headquartered here, both are now owned by bigger out-of-state corporations that allow them to continue to market their products under their own brand names.

While Dean is distributed nationally, Owens is marketed from Arizona to Mississippi and as far north as Oklahoma and Arkansas.

In 1984, Jimmy Dean Meat Co. was acquired by Chicago-based Sara Lee Corp., which also owns other smaller sausage companies. Owens was acquired by Bob Evans Farms Inc. of Columbus, Ohio, in 1987.

“I think that’s a big enough market that both are highly regarded in their respective areas. I don’t sense that either one is out to murder the other,” said Elliott Schlang, senior vice president of Prescott, Ball & Turben, an investment firm in Cleveland.

He called the Bob Evans-Owens merger a “very nice geographic expansion,” though it is too early to tell if it will be successful.

While their advertising harks back to home cookin’ and simpler times, both sausage companies also are venturing into more modern-day markets--with biscuits and microwave foods that are quick and easy to serve.

“Convenience is the deal today,” Owens said. “Life styles are kind of changing with more working moms. Breakfast in many households has become getting a bite on the run.”

His latest TV commercials show Owens hawking a sausage biscuit that can be heated in the microwave oven.

Likewise, the Jimmy Dean company is pushing English muffins topped with ham and cheese or sausage. Dean said the company will soon be test-marketing a small packaged hamburger but declined to give more details.

Mesquite-smoked sausage is being marketed in the Dallas area.