King Kelly Marmalade Co. – The Sequel

In a prior column (“Ode to My Father ”“ a Real Entrepreneur”) I described the birth of the King Kelly Marmalade Co. in 1927, just before the Great Depression. By using the waste oranges on the ground of his father”™s grove in Garden Grove, Calif., my father, Crosby Winfred Magnusson, known as Win, fashioned a successful business making marmalade out of those oranges, a business that survived and grew through the Depression, World War II and the post-war 1949 depression. Over the years, he employed between 15 and 20 people while supporting a wife and five children. In 1958, at the age of 59, he suddenly died of a heart attack. King Kelly had survived for 32 years.

This is the story of how King Kelly survived for 47 more years after the untimely death of its founder, through profound changes in the food industry and the eating habits of the American public. Three people guided the business into new leadership: the office manager, my father”™s brother and my mother. They ran the plant for nearly a year before a new owner was found.

Mr. Bowen, as he was always known, had worked for Bireley”™s, a division of General Foods. When General Foods decided to move the plant to Florida and the offices to Chicago, Mr. Bowen did not want to move; so he began to look for a small business to buy. A year later, King Kelly was put on the market. My mother made the final decision as to who should be the new owner, a person with experience in the preserving business.

Following in the footsteps of such a fulsome character as my father, whose very being was wound into every fiber of the business, had to be challenging for the new owner as well as the faithful employees in the plant. As a contrast to my father who shared the ups and downs of the business with the family regularly, Mr. Bowen kept the details of the new business to himself according to his son John. In those early days, he apparently devised a new way to slice the orange peel that was very desirable to the peel customers who loved the thicker cut over the thin grind. Well after the sale of the company, Mr. Bowen would visit my mother armed with four numbered jars of marmalade, each with a little difference in the recipe. One jar was the original. Asked which one was best she invariably picked the original. Though there were many experiments with the recipe it seemed to always return close to the original recipe. 

Eventually Mr. Bowen”™s son came into the business and truly made it his own over the years. Some time in the late 1980s I went back to see the plant and the house I grew up in, now containing offices. I was struck by how prosperous the operation looked, extremely well-managed, a new truck with an array of marmalade jars emblazoned across the side panel.  It was clear that he absolutely loved this business, getting there every day at 6:30 am to light the same boiler that powered the plant in my father”™s day.

John Bowen had developed the same close team spirit with his employees that my father always had, his employees dominantly Dutch, while John”™s were Hispanic. He introduced me to them as “the founder”™s daughter.”

There was another aspect to the business that came up on a subsequent visit. The employees who worked late in the evening were reporting strange sounds, door closings and such and were becoming uneasy about being alone in the building at night. Earlier, the secretary said she had seen a figure at the top of the stairs in the house, a man with a fedora hat and long overcoat, exactly the kind of thing my father would wear. No reports of this type had been heard before that point. More about this phenomenon later.

Meanwhile the culture of the country was changing. Breakfast around the kitchen table was becoming a rarity as people began to eat the first meal of the day on the run if at all. Jam on toast was impractical as the breakfast meal of choice became an egg sandwich, easily eaten in the car. Sales for King Kelly orange marmalade began a slow decline, as did all preserves. Even so King Kelly sold more marmalade than the Smuckers brand. In fact, Safeway in Northern CaliforniaLos Angeles; by 2006, there were three. Nonetheless, the Smuckers people hovered in the background, having been interested in acquiring the King Kelly brand for many years. kicked out all the orange marmalades except King Kelly. As John said, “I think that really hurt their (Smuckers) pride.” When the Bowens bought King Kelly in 1960, there were 13 preservers in

As marmalade sales slid, John focused his attention on the peel side of the business, saying “It was easier to steal customers from California Citrus Pulp.” He purchased a semi-truck for hauling more peel, increasing the capacity of the peel-canning operation to about 40,000 pounds per day. Even so, as marmalade sales were declining so were the peel customers cutting back.

After WWII, a second business was launched, canning orange peel for sale to competitors as well as for use at King Kelly.

As the plant became increasingly efficient and marmalade production was down he used his equipment to can other products, thereby keeping his employees busy. However, by 2006 serious problems began to pile up. CAL-OSHA representatives arrived at the door, stating that the food business was now classified as hazardous, never having been on the premises before. By the end of the visit King Kelly had piled up fines totaling $29,935, not a tax deductible expense. According to John, the so-called infractions were a string of petty items. As he said, “If it was so dangerous why didn”™t they come back in two weeks instead of nine months?”Â 

This was the first of three serious events that made John question the future viability of the business. The harmonious arrangement with citrus juicers, wherein King Kelly would take the waste peel, began to fray when many of them switched to FMC machines, which crushed the fruit, giving a better juice yield but not a better quality, especially for the quality of the peel needed to make marmalade. The only remaining source for peel that stayed with the non-crushing Brown Machines was located in Visalia, Calif., 175 miles north. Even so, the freeze in January 2007 forced that firm to run only what it needed for its contracts. King Kelly relied on its own stock of canned peel to make marmalade that season.

Other issues arose. An order for caps for a 14-ounce jar wound up to be an unwanted 18-ounce cap. An order for 14-ounce glass jars ordered in March finally arrived belatedly in June. The time had finally come. In August 2007, John Bowen sat down with representatives from the Smuckers Co. to forge an agreement to sell the King Kelly brand. He described them as a fine team of confident, engaging and intelligent people. Once the agreement was made King Kelly went into full-scale production of marmalade for the next five months to produce a backlog to give the Smuckers people time to figure out how to make their new product. John said they were very diligent about getting the process down pat, even taking pictures of varying shades of the finished product from too light to too dark in order to arrive at the appropriate standard.

John Bowen describes the end of King Kelly as a company this way: “It was so sad as we were like a big happy family. We had a big party at a local restaurant a few weeks before the last day of production. I gave each employee $1,000 for every year they worked (which was many) and $500 to the part-timers as some had been with us for 10 to 15 years. It came to over $90,000 but the employees were the ones who kept the product at its finest and helped the company stay in the forefront for so many years.”

But the brand did not die. King Kelly marmalade is being made now in a Smuckers plant somewhere in Wisconsin. The King Kelly marmalade brand that began on a mother”™s stove just before the Depression, survived the dissolution of the company that produced it for 79 years. Hats off to my father, Crosby Winfred Magnusson, and John Bowen and his father for their stunning stewardship of this company over so many years.

Note: I met a Mr. Smucker in 1949 in my bedroom. I was recovering from TB and my father, having trouble paying all the medical expenses associated with my illness, considered selling the company to Smuckers and he wanted me to meet him.

Sixty-eight years later, following the sale of the King Kelly brand to the Smuckers Co., John Bowen”™s brother observed the same figure in the fedora hat with long overcoat in the plant. Though King Kelly has gone to Wisconsin, my father apparently remains in California. The plant and the house are still owned by the Bowens.

Surviving the Future explores a wide range of subjects to assist businesses in adapting to a new energy age. Maureen Morgan, a transit advocate, is on the board of Federated Conservationists of Westchester. Reach her at mmmorgan10@optonline.net.