Bridgford Skips Frills to Make Bread, Profits : Retail: The family-owned company competes with giant food firms such as Oscar Mayer by keeping its operations very simple.
When it comes to being folksy and unpretentious, the Bridgford brothers are the Bartles and Jaymes of frozen bread dough.
While most corporate executives pad around on plush carpeting in a walnut-paneled suite, the president and chairman of Bridgford Foods Corp. shout at each other across the linoleum floor of the cluttered office they share.
There are no secretaries to guard the window-walled inner sanctum nestled in the corner of the expansive factory floor. To see the joint chiefs of this company of 550 employees, including 200 in Anaheim, you just walk right in.
“I’m his secretary,” quips Chairman H. William Bridgford, 59, while casting an eye toward younger brother Allan Bridgford, 56, the company president whose desk is a few feet away. If you want coffee, Bill Bridgford heats the water in a microwave oven and measures in a spoonful of instant. Instead of Muzak, the office hums with the muted thumps and clanks of the production line.
Bridgford Foods is a living testament of how a conservatively run, decades-old family business can remain competitive without having to rise to the size of its giant competitors.
It can also retain the folksy, aw-shucks stamp of its leaders. While Bartles and Jaymes are fictitious characters in wine cooler advertising, the Bridgford brothers are quite real. Bill, who wears a lab coat, oversees production. Allan, who has a brighter shine on his black shoes, tends to marketing and promotion.
On the strength of products such as ready-to-bake dough, luncheon meats and microwaveable sandwiches, Bridgford Foods has held its own against such heavyweight brands as Hormel, Oscar Mayer and Farmer John. The company ended fiscal 1990 with earnings of $3.9 million on revenue of $84.3 million, with a return on revenue slightly below the average of the nation’s largest food companies.
But what really makes Bridgford Foods special is its strong earnings growth in recent years. Its profits have risen each of the past five years and was up 9% last year. The closely held company’s stock market value has climbed from about $5 million in 1984 to more than $128 million this month.
Bridgford Foods traces it roots back to the 1930s when the brothers’ father, Hugh Bridgford, opened a butcher shop in San Diego. The company moved to its present headquarters, a century-old meat packing plant, in 1944. The move into ready-to-bake breads came in 1962 after a baker tinkered with some dough he had accidently popped into the freezer. Today, the company has plants in Illinois, New Jersey and Texas, besides Anaheim and San Diego.
Despite its low profile compared to some of the giants of the processed meats and baking industries, Bridgford Foods is finally getting its due. Forbes magazine recently ranked it as the 68th-best small company in America. The accompanying article noted heated competition in the microwave sandwich market and proclaimed “an informal test by Forbes found the Bridgford flame-broiled cheeseburger by far the tastiest.”
The Los Angeles Times’ list of the top 100 Southern California firms ranked Bridgford Foods as having the 23rd-highest two-year average return on equity in 1990, up from 29th place in 1989.
But a little success is not about to go to the heads of the Bridgford brothers. They still stick to their own traditional business methods, some of which have been discarded by competitors who considered them too expensive, antiquated or hokey.
For instance, other companies have turned to food distributors to market their products to supermarkets. But Bridgford Foods still has its own force of 110 “field service representatives” to ensure that the store manager’s hand gets shaken and that the products are well displayed. Though the extra workers are costlier, “nothing replaces the personal touch,” explained Allan Bridgford.
The packaging is colorful but basic. The company cranks out a full-color calendar every year filled with frozen bread dough recipes such as “Incredible Pizza Layer Loaf” and “Hand-wiches.”
Ronald L. Strauss, an analyst for the Chicago investment firm William Blair & Co., said Bridgford appears to be well managed. “They are good guys,” he said. “They are low-cost operators and pinch pennies.”
Allan Bridgford said the company’s success is due to finding niches in the market that the bigger guys may have overlooked.
Hence, diners never find out that the hot brown bread that they are served at an upscale restaurant may have been Bridgford frozen dough a couple hours before. Many of the company’s products, such as the specialty breads or cinnamon rolls, are aimed at the restaurant, vending machine or institutional market.
Some new products make it; some don’t. Among the notable flops, says Bill Bridgford, were the holiday hams covered with candied cherries that fermented within their wrappers in the 1950s. A pizza-making kit introduced in 1980 also flopped when consumers were too impatient to wait for the dough to defrost.
“For every 100 product ideas, we’ll try 10 and maybe one will stick,” said Bill Bridgford.
One of Bridgfords’ biggest hits has been its line of microwave-ready sandwiches--roast beef, ham and cheese, hamburger and cheeseburger. The Bridgford brothers say that their sandwiches have the edge because of a company secret: the bread.
“A cheeseburger is a melding of our technology,” notes Allan Bridgford.
Though the company may cling to some traditional marketing ideas, it has not spared the introduction of new technology in its plant. The billing and ordering operations, for instance, are fully computerized.
The number of workers in Bridgford’s dough-making operations, where wheat flour and shortening are turned into one-pound frozen bricks ready for shipment, has been cut from 92 to four over the years.
One thing that has not changed is their main marketing venue--trade shows. The company attends roughly 300 trade shows a year.
