Mike's Book Club: JB Hunt The Long Haul to Success

Hi guys, I'll be back tomorrow with an update. I had a long route today and have been up since 2am I'm kind of tired.

 

That's a great question and I'm glad you asked.

In the late 1800's 1898 will say the market for restaurants wasn't like it is today not even close and wouldn't be as big as it is today for another 79 years.

In Grand Rapids, Michigan in the 1900's you didn't have a big huge booming restaurant industry you had
1 hotel and a few hot dog stands on the corner and a lunch counter that was all. It's like you ever see the movie Big Night from 1994? It was like that some brothers from Italy would own a restaurant and they made the pasta and almost everything in the restaurant from scratch. They would go to Richi DePaulo Italian Grocery Store and buy what they needed. If stuff was delivered it was usually by one off people. One guy sold meat, one guy sold milk and cheese and butter, one guy sold produce.

Van-Westenberg the founder of Gordon Food Service was like the first person in the state of Michigan to deliver food out of a motorized truck, but he started selling just eggs and cheese out of the back of a horse and wagon.

All you had for along time was just a bunch of one off's really. It wasn't till like the 1940's-1950's that you started to see consolidation, where companies started being one stop shops.

Forget about big huge customized chain restaurant distributors those wouldn't be around till the late 1970s really. I mean Performance Food Group was just a merger of other companies. McDonalds was really the first one to pioneer the entire chain/franchise restaurant thing. But the collection of companies that we have today they weren't invented yet.

The first food company to ever run doubles was Gordon Food Service from Grand Rapids, Michigan and that didn't happen until like 1968. They were the first one's who really brought that entire system to the forefront.


Sysco wasn't even around until the mid 1970s. There were always people around delivering one off things like the Milk Man and what not, but the age of when a big truck would pull up to your restaurant and dump off 100-200 cases of everything and anything under the sun didn't exist yet.

GFS most of there customers were institutional places schools, hospital's, cafetria's at factories stuff like that very few were actual restaurants like we have today.

@Radman said something very profound he was talking about a Pizza Hut he deliver's to an older one I would bet and now a days there walk in cooler are packed packed to the brim there almost to small and he said when they built those places in the real late 1970s they didn't think that they would be the kind of places that people would eat at for dinner 7 nights a week, but that's just what happened.

When I was in high school back in 2003 I remember kids talking about how it wasn't unusual for them to eat dinner at Long Horn Steak House 2-3 nights a week and fill in the gaps at other places Chick-Filet or Panera Bread.

Richie Dapallo Food Service from Columbus, Ohio they started out as an Italian grocery store in the italian neighborhood you went there and got your ingredients. They didn't morph into a broad line food service company until the mid to late 1970s.

MBM was the same way he was just a guy who sold meat out of the back of a pick up truck. He just so happened to be from the same home town as the guy who started Hardee's and Hardee's was I think established in the late 1950's, but they were just a one off place at that point it wouldn't have been till the 70s that Hardee's really got moving. MBM the reason there colors are brown and orange is because in the 1980s or whenever MBM bought out Hardee's supply chain. Which was a company known as Fast Food Merchandisers Inc.

Pizza Hut was around it was started in 1958 I think 1959 by the Carney Brothers in Kansas City, those guys didn't get bought out by Pepsi till 1977.

The system of these 28' and 48' trailers dropping 200 cases off at places and trucks pulling doubles from big huge warehouses to distant drop lots and big warehouses that house 50,000 items under one roof everything from fresh meat down to wet floor signs and stuff that really didn't take off till the real late 1970s and the 1990s was when it really started to boom when Pizza Hut for example came out that was probably a thing to Radman's point that people ate at on special occasions or once in a blue moon not like today where nobody cooks anything you just pull an app up on your phone and the delivery car with your food shows up 45 minutes later, when retail and restaurant space started opening up it wasn't until the 1990s. Really if you think about it, why do we have so much unused retail space here in this country? Well self appointed retail historians would say that what you are seeing is an over glut of retail space and building left over from the 1990s. Now some of that and it's ironic is starting to go away, shopping malls that are now abandoned are now being torn down and Amazon is building warehouses there.

Really think about it granted there was no internet back then, but how much did you hear about food service trucking in the 1970s? Yeah there were some places around, but it's nowhere near the size and scope that it is today. Back in the 1970s how many people talked about working at McLane or Performance Food Group? None, because McLane didn't have a food service division and wouldn't for another 21years roughly. The reason I pick 1977 because that was a pinnacle year that was the year Pizza Hut was bought out by Pepsi Company and Pepsi Food Systems Company went into existence.

You didn't have these companies with huge massive fleets like you see today that all was conceived up in the late 1970s and developed in the womb in the 1980s and birthed out in the 1990's because that's when the market was big enough for something like that.

My mom always said that when she was a girl they didn't eat out very often she said she didn't remember going to Pizza Hut until the late 1970s when she was in High School, that's when the first Pizza Hut popped up.

The companies of today really got there starts as companies of yester year that were more focused on serving institutions. Back in the day it was really a lot of small time straight truck guys delivering one off things, or you went out and bought what you needed your self.

A hot dog stand owner in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1950 probably drove his car to the butcher bought 100 kosher all beef franks and then went next door to the baker and bought some buns and went back to his stand and set up shop.

Frozen foods weren't really a major thing until the 1950s and that was really there birth.
This company here:

There a regional company part of a super regional there parent company is Curtze from Erie,PA and Curtze also owns a company out of New York State known as JFS Curtze outfit, but they cover Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan and the part of northern Kentucky near Cincinnati. But this company Northern-Haserot Brandt, that's 3 companies. The entire system went into consolidation Northern was a grocer, Haserot was frozen foods and Brandt was meat and all 3 were bought out by C.A. Curtze:

You didn't see this kind of action in the 1970s I mean think of the golden age of trucking you never heard anyone talking about working for food distributors. I'm not talking truck load guys hauling produce I'm talking guys who unloaded trailers at restaurants with a ramp and wheeler. Yes, they were around, but it's not like today where every 1:5 drivers works for a McLane or GFS, or Sysco, or Performance Food Group or Sygma or US Foods etc etc.

I mean now a days look around and you see these food companies as much as you see regular freight haulers.

You didn't have as many customized places either. Back in the day places did stuff them selves Pepsi distributed them selves, Big Boy distributed them selves Hardee's was the same. You didn't have massive restaurant chains until the late 1970s.

So really to answer your question it was a combination of things, you either went to the supply house and got what you needed your self, or the one off guys with horses and buggies would come and deliver there goods.

Like Con-Sun Food Industries out of Elyria, Ohio they started by a guy who had a horse and buggy and delivered milk and then later they went on to own convenience stores.

Sheetz the east coast gas station chain, they were started as a dairy and they supplied milk to the Pennsylvania Railroad.

The modern day suit and tie guy who goes to the commercial restaurant and offers them one stop shopping that wasn't really something that started to be a thing until the late 1960s and into the 1970s. Before that most food companies were more focused on serving the grocery store market then restaurants, because the market was there just yet. Restaurants you were more on your own, just bought from the one off guys either the one off guys delivered or you picked it up your self or sent your lacky to go do it.

But even still I mean look how popular Restaurant Depot is. There's a lot of people who still go out and pick the stuff up. But the era of true heavy one stop shopping and getting it trucked in that really started booming in the 1990s. At least with the modern companies that we know of today.

 

That's a good point really it was Kraft and Sara Lee that started a lot of the heritage of companies that we know today.