“Boss of the Biscuit Business”
Adolphus Williamson Green was enjoying a successful career as a prominent Chicago lawyer. Then one day in 1889 a group of midwestern bakers walked into his office. They wanted to know if Green could help them form a “bakery trust,” akin to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil trust and Carnegie’s steel trust.
A young Adolphus Green.
Green may have giggled to himself at the thought of a bakery trust, but he was intrigued. Since he didn’t know a thing about baking, he toured bakeries and retailers across the country to learn about the business. He discovered many tiny regional bakeshops competing with one another to distribute barrels of biscuits to small groceries. The barrels sat wide-open on grocers’ floors, attracting mold and vermin, spoiling much of the product before it ever reached the customer. Bakeries were using outdated methods in an age of mechanization and modern distribution. Green saw the problems, and became drawn into the world of biscuits, “largely against my will,” he admitted.
Note the open biscuit barrels in this illustration by Reginald B. Birch from “Little Lord Fauntleroy.” Select to enlarge any image. Phone users: finger-zoom or rotate screen.
Green drew up the paperwork and organized the American Biscuit and Manufacturing Company, combining the smaller bakeshops into a single corporation which would have the capacity to modernize and control quality and pricing. He did the same with another group of bakeries, forming the United States Baking Company. When he took over the prosperous New York Biscuit Company in 1898, the three groups were combined to form the National Biscuit Company, with Adolphus Green as Chairman of the Board. Nabisco was born.
Moving his offices to a massive bakery in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, Green planned the launch of Nabisco’s first national product: a soda cracker. Rather than packing in bulk barrels, the new cracker would be sold in small boxes, a then unheard-of idea. Green tapped his associate Frank Peters to invent a moisture-proof package. Peters developed an inter-folded wax paper/cardboard box while sitting at his kitchen table. Nabisco patented the new carton and named it “In-er-seal”, launching a revolution in food packaging.
Nabisco’s headquarters on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. (Library of Congress)
After months of trial and error, Green came up with a name for the new cracker, “Uneeda Biscuit”, and trademarked it. It soon became the best-known trademark in the world. The package’s visual design was developed by Frederic W. Goudy (you probably have his Goudy font on your computer). Green spent a whopping $7 million in advertising for the cracker, the largest ad budget in history up till that time. The image of a little boy in a raincoat holding a box of Uneeda biscuits was plastered on streetcars, billboards, walls of buildings, sides of trucks, and in thousands of print ads. The result? In its introductory year, over one hundred million packages of Uneeda Biscuits flew off the shelves.
Uneeda Biscuit promotions were in ads, in-store signs, and on buildings.
Nabisco followed this success with a line-up of products which would become world-famous, thanks to Adolphus Green’s promotional skills. Baking inventor James Henry Mitchell created a machine which produced a tube of jam surrounded by a tube of dough, a product which he likened to pie. The Fig Newton was born, named for a suburb of Boston, and sold like hotcakes. Green re-branded many standard existing products with trade-markable names: oyster crackers were renamed Oysterettes, animal crackers were called Barnum’s Animal Crackers to cash in on the famous promoter’s moniker, and shortbread became Lorna Doone, after a character in a popular Scottish novel.
Green’s biggest coup came in 1908, when his arch competitor across the East River, Loose-Wiles, maker of Sunshine biscuits, introduced a chocolate sandwich cookie called Hydrox. It became a sensation. Green fought back with Nabisco’s Oreo sandwich cookie. Oreos started outselling Hydrox immediately, and became the largest selling cookie in the world.
Hydrox vs. Oreos.
Adolphus Green was known as a hard task-master and perfectionist. He had a special railroad car built so he could personally inspect every one of his hundreds of bakeries around the country, putting the fear of God into his employees who nervously prepared for the arrival of the Boss of the Biscuit Business. The lawyer who reluctantly became a biscuit-maker, creating the modern bakery industry and the world’s favorite cookies, passed away in 1917. But the business he created just keeps growing and growing.
