Gerber Plans to Grow Up as Market Does : Marketing: The baby food company is preparing to expand into products designed for the preschool set.

The world’s largest baby-food company, Gerber Products Co., says it’s getting ready for when the baby boom goes bust.

Gerber has new products and selling strategies aimed at expanding sales beyond the 1-year-old and younger babies who currently slurp, throw and spit most of its applesauce, strained carrots and other mushy meals.

With such a specialized market, Gerber executives keep a close eye on demographic trends, snatching up indications of how many babies are born or will be born.

“Last year for the first time in 25 years, births topped the 4 million mark,” Gerber Products Division President Robert L. Johnston reassured stockholders in the high school auditorium in Gerber’s western Michigan headquarters town of Fremont. “It isn’t over yet,” he said at the annual meeting.

Food industry analyst William McMillin of Prudential Bache Research in New York, said that for Gerber, “the test will come later in the decade when the birth rate slows.”

Baby boomers aren’t having as many children as their parents, who filled the nurseries with a record 4.3 million new tots in 1957 at the height of the post-World War II boom, said Greg Spencer of the U.S. Census Bureau.

Births have surged recently as many of those children had children, said Martin O’Connell, head of the bureau’s fertility statistics branch.

Later in the 1990s, O’Connell said, “I would say the companies that prosper will be those dealing with 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds.”

Gerber employs more than 12,400 people, sells baby products in 50 countries and reported $1.14 billion in sales in its last fiscal year.

Said chairman Alfred A. Piergallini: “Our strategy is to attempt to dominate the 0- to 4-year-old range.”

Stockholders were told Gerber has ways to ride with the trend:

* Sell to different ages. High-fiber juice drinks aimed at older children and adults will be in stores next month. Microwave snacks such as spaghetti and meatballs for children up to 3 hit the shelves in September. They carry the Gerber name, but the Gerber baby is gone from the label.

The company already has 71.5% of the $900-million-a-year market for traditional baby foods such as strained carrots, applesauce and cereals for babies up to 1. The market for children up to 3 also could thrive, Johnston said.

* Streamline. Gerber, which makes about 180 baby food products, has sold some sidelines to raise cash for the basics. It sold 115 day-care centers in May for an undisclosed amount. In March, it cut some unprofitable clothing lines. It closed a Canadian baby food plant, consolidating food making in three U.S. plants, which Johnston said cut $2 million a year from manufacturing costs.

* Sell in more countries. Piergallini said sales in Poland recently topped the $1-million mark. The company anticipates new business in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and has new ventures under way in Egypt, Turkey, Greece and Saudi Arabia.

* Add products. Piergallini said Gerber will put its brand on bottles, pacifiers, dishes and toys, and add Gerber clothing to that marketed by its Buster Brown and Weather Tamer units.