MY parents were a big inspiration. My mom started college in her 40s and graduated magna cum laude at 50. My dad became a route sales driver for a bread company at 18 and rose to vice president for the largest commercial baker in Texas before he retired.
I learned the fundamentals of the food business from my father. I remember visiting stores with him when I was a kid and helping him straighten the loaves of bread on the rack. He taught me the importance of having the best-tasting food on the shelf.
I had several jobs for his company growing up. My first was mowing the lawn, and through high school and college I drove bread trucks.
Attending college in the East — at Princeton — was a huge change. The only other time I had been out of Texas was on a weekend trip to Arkansas. I was naïve as a kid could be, and the guys I lived with taught me a lot. After graduating with an economics degree in 1983, I sold investments in Dallas for five years. It wasn’t a great fit, but it was a good learning experience. Next I joined Frito-Lay as an analyst. After three years as a numbers guy, I decided to return to sales. That put me back in a frontline position, driving a truck again, selling and servicing supermarkets and convenience stores. I tell my son that I’ve been selling food in a bag ever since.
I recall visiting a store in Terrell, Tex., one Fourth of July. Chips and that holiday go together somehow, so I was able to empty my truck there that day. But the retail business can be tough. One of the hardest-selling environments I ever experienced was Houston.
Frito-Lay had 70 percent market share there, but my group still had the same sales growth targets as our colleagues across the country. Convincing one of the convenience store chains to give us 12 displays in each of its several hundred stores was probably the most difficult sale my team ever made. These were small stores, and we already had 10 displays in each one, so we were pushing the envelope. But it worked out well. In the food business, you don’t want to try to force a product on retailers and have them regret the purchase.
I stayed at Frito-Lay 12 years and rose to be a vice president for marketing. I felt it was time for a change, so when a recruiter called about Malt-O-Meal in 2001, I was intrigued. This is a family-owned, entrepreneurial company like the one my dad worked for, which is what I was looking for. I started as vice president for sales and marketing, was promoted to chief operating officer in 2004, and to C.E.O. in 2008.
We’re challenging the legacy cereal brands. To compete, we have to keep our prices low for consumers and give retailers a good margin. It’s a challenge. Everyone has to work shoulder to shoulder here. I played football and rugby in school, and I don’t have a lot of patience for prima donnas. Companies are only as good as their people.
I like to say the office is a dangerous place from which to view the world. I often travel to stores with the other senior executives. That’s where the customers are, and the senior team has to be there to understand them.
We discovered, in forgoing cereal boxes, that bags alone are more environmentally friendly. We made that decision to save money, but when we realized the benefit to the environment, it made us cast a wider net and look for other ways to be more sustainable.
Every summer, a friend and I take our teenage sons fishing for a week in the Canadian wilderness. An outfitter drops us off and we’re on our own. The boys prepare the potatoes, and I clean and cook the fish we catch. Because I’m in the food business, I’m the cook.
As told to Patricia R. Olsen.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=17ea99afadd5432367706c3879352dda