Toothpick firms are working hard in the sticks : The small, arcane industry is serious business, filled with fierce rivalry and closely guarded secrets.
Emily Post pulls no punches when it comes to the etiquette of using toothpicks in public: Don’t! Fair enough--but then again, Emily Post probably never spent much time in western Maine.
If she had, she would have known that toothpicks are considered things of beauty and utility in the area’s backwoods towns. They’re the reason for harvesting the forests of white birch (a good-sized tree can be turned into about 4 million toothpicks). They’re the source of jobs and--etiquette be damned--as much a part of good manners as a properly set dinner table.
“Having a toothpick in your mouth is socially acceptable here,” said Richard Davis, Wilton’s town manager. If you believe otherwise in Wilton--the nation’s toothpick capital and home of the 106-year-old Forster Manufacturing Co., the country’s first and largest toothpick maker--you’re probably the kind of person who would drive a Toyota in Detroit.
Granted, most of us don’t spend much time thinking about toothpicks. Like the mousetrap, they’ve already been perfected. Like salt and paper clips, who cares what brand name they carry? But toothpicks are in 96% of our homes, and Americans use over 30 billion of them a year--for dental care, for holding hors d’oeuvres together, for cleaning in tight crevices and for just looking cool, as James Dean did with that dangling toothpick in the movie “Giant.” So there’s a considerable amount of money to be made in this arcane little industry.
With sales flat and the number of big-time manufacturers having fallen from about 12 at the turn of the century to three today--Forster, Strong Wood Products in nearby Strong, Me., and Diamond Brands in Minneapolis--competition for market share is as fierce as the TV networks’ battle for ratings. The result is that getting hold of the formula for Coca-Cola is a cakewalk compared to penetrating the secrecy that surrounds the toothpick makers’ operations.
When Diamond Brands is asked for sales figures, the company doesn’t return calls. Strong says the design of its equipment is a closely guarded secret. Forster Manufacturing, which was bought for an undisclosed price last year by Advent International of Boston, won’t reveal how many shifts it runs or let outsiders into its manufacturing plant. When three Japanese businessmen showed up unannounced in a taxi, asking for a tour of the facility, plant manager Steve Clark gave them a polite round of handshakes and headed them right back to Boston--150 miles away.
These are toothpicks we’re talking about, not nuclear bombs, but John DiStepano, president of the family-owned Strong Wood Products, explains it this way: “You can’t just go out and buy a toothpick-making machine. We’ve all had to build our own. There are a lot of development costs, a lot of trial and error. This is a small, competitive business, and it’s not economically feasible to give away what you know.”
Long before Emily Post told us not to pick our teeth in public, most Americans carried a toothpick made of ivory, a quill or a precious metal. Then in 1869, while on a trip to Brazil, Charles Forster hit upon the idea of a disposal wooden toothpick after seeing Brazilians use toothpicks that they had whittled from orange trees.
Forster returned home to Boston and started producing them in his basement, but he couldn’t persuade a soul to give up fancy quill toothpicks.
So he hired two Harvard University students to dine in the Union Oyster House and other fine restaurants. After dinner they would demand wooden toothpicks. Told no such thing existed, they would protest loudly, and the manager would appease them by asking if they knew where he could buy such toothpicks. Forster now had his market, and in 1887 he moved to Maine to be near a supply of white birch. Seventeen years later, he introduced his round wooden toothpick to America at the World’s Fair in St. Louis.
Today, Maine’s two manufacturers turn out about 660 tons of toothpicks a year. They’re tough, tasteless and attractive--and you won’t find their ends feathering or breaking off in your teeth like those inferior ones Japan tried to peddle in the United States from timber it had imported from Siberia. At 49 cents for a box of 250, the toothpick may be the last great bargain in the United States.
Can a better toothpick be built? “Perhaps,” said Fred Beauregard, product manager for Forster Manufacturing, which offers mint- and cinnamon-flavored toothpicks and toothpicks with a square center shank that are easy to grasp. “I spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about toothpicks, and I suspect we’ll find a way to improve on perfection.”
