Death of an Icon: The Nalley's Saga

UPDATE: There was some news on this front Tuesday: Pilgrim's Pride, out of Chicago, made a bid for Hillshire Farms, the company that just two weeks ago made a $6.6 billion offer to buy Pinnacle Foods from Blackstone. The story on Crosscut.

Back in 1903, a 13-year-old Croatian immigrant named Marcus Narancic arrived in New York with 15 cents in his pocket. He couldn't speak a word of English. He took several jobs: in a steel mill, as a meat packer, and finally in a hotel kitchen where he moved from kitchen flunky to pantry boy to fry cook. He became a chef on the Milwaukie Railroad's "Olympian," their train from Chicago to Tacoma, and ended up working at the Bonneville Hotel in Tacoma. The culinary rage at the time, on the east coast at least, was thinly sliced, deep-fried "Sararatoga Chips," which young Marcus learned how to make, using the potatoes out his back door in the Puyallup Valley. (By the 1920s, a manufacturer named Herman Lay would start calling his version of the Saratoga chips "potato chips;" Lay would automate the manufacturing process and started selling his chips nationally.) But before that, in 1918, Marcus Narancic simply rented a storeroom behind his apartment for $5 a month and began selling his chips from a basket, door-to-door, to households and grocery stores.

Marcus soon began adding other food products: pickles (from cucumbers grown in the Puyallup Valley), then beans for chili, then salad dressings, and so on. He changed his name to Nalley and his company built a factory in the canyon off State Route 16. The factory grew and grew until it became one of Tacoma's largest employers.

From the company's website:

In later years, new plants opened up in Tigard, Oregon and Billings, Montana. Nalley's was becoming even more of a staple in the Northwestern household. In fact, at the height of its operation, the company was operating more than 10 potato chip facilities within the US.

Marcus Nalley died in 1962, leaving behind a legacy that would continue to grow and grow.

Today there are over 1,300 food products under the Nalley label ranging from pickles to canned foods to salad dressing and peanut butter. With canned chili as its biggest seller, the Nalley label continues to be synonymous with delicious, high quality food products.

What the website doesn't say is that Nalley's itself is no more. In 2011, it passed into the hands of a large corporation (Agrilink, which was acquired by Dean Foods) and the Tacoma facility was abandoned. Then another, larger still, named Pinnacle, which was buying up "iconic" American brands like Duncan Hines, Birds Eye, and Mrs. Butterworth's.

Pinnacle Foods, in turn, had been acquired in 2007 by a private equity outfit, Blackstone Group, with very deep pockets (close to $100 billion, mostly technology and life sciences). Food? Well, sort of an anomaly, it turned out.

So this is what happens when your jar of pickles, your bag of chips, or your can of chili loses its independence. You can't really blame anyone. It's not as if Marcus Nalley intended to betray the trust you put in him or his family; it wasn't a deliberate betrayal, at any rate. Nalley's was once an icon of local food, and then? Then it wasn't. It ceased to be. Long before it closed the plant in South Tacoma, long before the pickles started coming from India, long before its slow, sad decline as a regional brand, Nalley's became infected with the cancer of ambition, a cancer that required transfusions of money from banks and investors. It wasn't failure that infected the company; on the contrary, it was success. The Nalley's that survives today, in an obscure corner of a giant holding company, didn't lose its way because it was trying to survive hard times; rather, it sold its soul because it was lured toward the dazzling light of success.

And it was all so long ago. The Nalley's name survives, but it's a dimming memory. The damage is irrevocable. What we need to keep in mind is that the same fate awaits others, be they brands of beer or coffee, airplanes or bookstores. Do you really think that there will still be 21,000 Starbucks stores in the year 2100?

And should you think that Nalley's is a unique, one-off tale, consider the many familiar brands that have disappeared. Bakeries are particularly hard-hit, since they begin as family affairs and require a level of dedication that rarely survives a second generation: Brenner Brothers, Gai's, Langendorf. The spiritual successor to Nalley's, Tim's Cascade Snacks, has been a part of Pinnacle Foods for many years, and Pinnacle itself announced in May, 2014, that it would be acquired by Hillshire Brands, parent company of Jimmy Dean sausage, Ball Park franks, and Sara Lee desserts. No telling, yet, whether they will even make a pretense of keeping Nalley's alive.

Back to Tacoma for a closing note and an update on the Nalley Valley viaduct, State Route 16. Washington's transportation engineers determined that it couldn't carry enough traffic, so they've been tearing down the old roadway and replacing it with new overpasses, bridges, berms, interchanges and underpasses. (No tunnels, that's just for the Seattle viaduct.) Details and pictures here.