©2012, 2015 Blount Fine Foods Fall River, Massachusetts Durr, Kenneth Thomas, William From Sea to Soup: The Evolution of Blount Fine Foods Library of Congress Control Number: 2011939620 Table of Contents FOREWORD III CHAPTER ONE: LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE 1 CHAPTER TWO: A PART OF THE FAMILY 13 CHAPTER THREE: FROM FLOOR TO CEILING 27 CHAPTER FOUR: OUTSIDE THE BOX 41 CHAPTER FIVE: A WINNING STRATEGY 53 CHAPTER SIX: CONSTANT INNOVATION 65 FROM SEA TO SOUP: THE EVOLUTION OF BLOUNT FINE FOODS I Foreword By (Todd) F. Nelson Blount II Standing at the end of a timeline looking back is a unique place to be. The old stories now turned legends appear like clips from a great movie where the “good guys” always win and the hard-working are always rewarded. The question is: can we provide that opportunity in the future? In the year 2000 I became president of Blount Fine Foods. It is a great honor and awesome opportunity to lead this company into the future. As the fifth-generation leader, I started with a great company: a resource of assets, an impeccable reputation, and a going-forward business model. Most important is the team that has continued forward—and this is our connection to the past. Each employee has worked with someone who has been there longer, and with five degrees of separation, we can claim that our team has been together for more than 120 years. Blount Fine Foods has provided a lifetime of opportunity for thousands of people over those years, and I am committed to providing thousands of opportunities in the future. However, the world has changed. Strategies that once lived on for decades now last just a few years. The competitive environment rewards those who are growing and takes away from those who are stagnant. On August 16, 1996, I was privileged to make a speech at our 50th anniversary party. At the event I remarked: “It is impossible to know exactly what we will be doing for the next 50 years. I do not know if we will be processing clams or Cocoa Krispies. Thus, my vision for Blount is not knowing ‘What we will do’ but rather ‘How we will do it’! Not ‘what products’ and ‘in what place,’ but rather, how we react to the market, carry out our relationships, and manage quality. In short, our performance will be defined by how well we manage change. We cannot be afraid of change—we must embrace it and be change agents.” This book is written as a tribute to those who came before us. We hope you enjoy it and learn something from it. I know I have! I am confident in where we are going but realize that I am not completely in control, and I am not alone. I thank all of you, all of our stakeholders, and most importantly God, who alone knows the end of the story! In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will direct your paths. Proverbs 3:6 FROM SEA TO SOUP: THE EVOLUTION OF BLOUNT FINE FOODS III A SELF-CONFIDENT F. NELSON BLOUNT AT HIS DESK DURING THE 1940S. IV Chapter One: Lightning Strikes Twice Nelson Blount was ready for anything. In the THE PLACE AND THE PEOPLE summer of 1943, the self-assured twenty-five- Nelson Blount was born into a culture based year-old had sunk everything into a new seafood on marine life and into a shell fishing family. nbusiness with only a general idea of what it would At the estuary of the upper Narragansett, produce. The supply of oysters was running freshwater currents mingled with ocean tides; very low. Clams, what Rhode Islanders called microorganisms flourished and nourished acres “quahogs,” might have been an option, but they of bivalves just below the bay’s hard bottom. were also scarce since most shell fishermen had Some of the first to harvest them were Long gone to war. Then Blount’s uncle, Rhode Island Island oystermen Jonas and Buell Buckingham, fish and game commissioner Harold Gibbs, who moved to Drowneville, the present day came to dinner. West Barrington section of Barrington, Rhode Island, after the Civil War. In 1880 Jonas’s More hopeful than desperate, Nelson son-in-law, Eddie B. Blount, started his own explained the situation. Gibbs told him company there. Twenty-three years later he about a newly discovered “tremendous bed set up nearby on the east bank of the Warren of clams out in the ocean.” True, they were River, where the harbor was deeper. in deep water on the Atlantic shelf, but a few men could take a good supply with a In the century and a half since its founding, dredge. On deck the next day as Gibbs pulled Warren, Rhode Island, had been a whaling up another catch, Blount was crestfallen. port, a shipbuilding center, a textile town, These were not the blue-hued “bay quahogs” and the oyster capital of New England. Oyster that Rhode Islanders preferred—they were beds were planted and tended much like black “ocean quahogs.” “I’m not sure if farmland, and in the early twentieth century they’re marketable,” Blount admitted, more than 20,000 acres were being cultivated “but I’m going to see what I can do.” in Narragansett Bay. One of Eddie B. Blount’s sons took to the business. The good-natured This discovery was electrifying news for a small “Captain” Byron Blount took over in 1923. His cadre of seafood devotees. It was a stroke of luck brother Willis was a bit chillier in disposition. for the Narragansett Oyster Company, which Perhaps appropriately, he started an ice would soon link the ocean beds with mainland business, building a large plant in Barrington markets. Nelson Blount never made much of this just before the Great Depression. lucky break—he just assumed that things would go his way. In fact, he always seemed to expect that lightning would strike twice. FROM SEA TO SOUP: THE EVOLUTION OF BLOUNT FINE FOODS 1 Willis E. Blount and family pose in front of the newly built ice Teenager Nelson Blount (right) with his best friend Fred Richardson. house in the late 1920s. From left, Luther, Willis, Nelson and Ruth Blount. Willis Blount’s second son, Francis Nelson Blount, days supplying them with ice. When Willis was born in 1918. He was big-boned, had brown refused to share the profits, Nelson felt no hair that tended to be tousled, and could flash a obligation to stay. broad, ingratiating smile. When Nelson was very young, his mother was injured. Sent away to live THE APPROVED LIST for two years with spinster aunts, Nelson learned On his own in the fall of 1942, Nelson independence early. The rest of his childhood went with what he knew. He bought a truck was spent at home in Warren, a block from the and, with his Uncle Byron’s help, found an New Haven Railroad yards. He grew to love the oyster firm in need of a shipper. He began railroads and acquired the restless nature that making deliveries to the same Army bases some boys get from listening to train whistles in the that had bought Willis Blount’s ice, and soon night. From a securely middle-class family, Nelson “F. Nelson Blount Distribution” employed 28 might have gone to college, but he was too eager drivers. But Nelson was again discontented; for achievement to settle into studies. After high within a year he quit the trucking business to school he went to work in his father’s ice business, go into production. slinging one hundred pound blocks with steel tongs and making deliveries by truck. In early 1943 the Narragansett Oyster Company went up for sale. Its chief asset was a building In the early 1940s the nation mobilized for war, erected on the Warren waterfront 101 years before. but Nelson remained behind, exempted by a It had been renovated and refitted just before the childhood illness. And he did not long remain 1938 hurricane that crippled the ailing industry content in his father’s employ. As nearby Army and put the company into receivership. In the camps expanded, Nelson worked ever longer 2 THE GREAT NEW ENGLAND HURRICANE The hurricane of 1938 dealt a knockout blow to New England businesses already reeling from the Great Depression. No one had seen it coming. Storms tracking north usually veered out to sea, but this one was different. In the afternoon of September 21, 1938, the hurricane cut directly across Long Island and slammed into Rhode Island as a category III storm, its forty-foot wall of water toppling lighthouses and obliterating coastal villages. The storm struck at high tide, and as the surge came in Narragansett Bay rose some sixteen feet, the storm scour destroying nearly all of the state’s oyster beds. Hundreds of Rhode Islanders lost their lives. For H. J. Lewis, the Connecticut firm that owned the Narragansett Oyster Company, it was the end. For Nelson Blount, who bought the plant at a bargain price, it was the beginning. summer of 1943 Nelson bought Narragansett bay floor. Now, most able-bodied shell fishermen Oyster and painted the building dark green. Only were off at war. Nelson, as it turned out, had then did he think much about what to do with it. staked everything on two dying industries. Then Harold Gibbs’s revelation changed everything. Nelson conferred with Uncle Byron, but the problem seemed insoluble. It was one thing to To clam fanciers who appreciated their strong deliver oysters—it was another to expand the taste, the ocean quahog, species Arctica supply.