Salt Lake Processor Is 63 and Still Growing

Fresh Cut
August 2001

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah - It was April 1938 when Charles F. "Chick" Black and his wife Marietta founded Mrs. Condies Salad Company and began making cole slaw in their kitchen after work each day. Today, the family business they started is likely the oldest continuously held family-owned fresh-cut processing operation in the United States.

As a young man in Salt Lake City, Chick worked for Grand Central Market when it was "a nice fruit stand more than anything else," according to his son, Gary Black, currently president of the family business. It was when he went to Los Angeles to work for another supermarket, that the company founder happened upon the idea for his future business.

"He actually saw a package of cole slaw down there," Gary recalls. "So somebody was down in the Los Angeles market doing it. This was probably in 1936 and then he came back up to Salt Lake and met and married Mom. Then they started the business in 1938."

The couple’s first customer was Chick’s grandmother, Annie Condie, who owned the Liberty Park Grocery Store. Their first salads didn’t have a name on the bags and, to help her grandson, Mrs. Condie recommended the new product to her clientele.

"She would say, ‘I’ve got this little package of salad. Try it,’" Black recounts. "And that was how it got the name Mrs. Condie’s Salad Company. It carried that name until 1979 when Charlie, Bruce and I bought Mom and Dad’s remaining interest out and changed it to Condies Foods."

Raising Vegetables
During the 1950s, Chick created branches in Denver and Helena, Montana. He closed down the Montana facility because the market didn’t support his business and, in 1979, sold the Denver operation to his partner, Leo Barlow. Also during the 1950s, Black’s entrepreneurial spirit led him to start raising his own vegetables for processing. He started and later closed down a farming operation in Glendale, Arizona, before establishing Black Island Farms in nearby Syracuse, Utah, in 1964, where the family still grows green and red cabbage, carrots, onions, peppers, radishes, spinach and some lettuce.

Just last year, both Bruce and Charlie Black, Gary’s brothers, retired from Condies Foods. Charlie, who has been in charge of raising vegetables, will continue to manage the family-owned farming operation, while at Condies, the new management team includes Gary as president, Scott Black as plant manager, John Longaker as purchasing manager, and Lorie Longaker as special events manager. Keith Ross is sales manager.

With new management in place, Condies Foods is positioned to continue the pattern of growth it has established over the past 63 years, according to Gary Black. His team is excited about several new products and prospects that fit well with the company’s production strengths.

About four years ago, Condies began sanitizing and repacking tomatoes for major foodservice customers in the Salt Lake area who wanted to improve the quality and safety of their fruit. That new operation has brought exciting growth to the company and has helped set the stage for the introduction of other tomato and tomato-based products that hold promise for future growth, according to Black.

Salsa’s Getting Hot
"We’ve been doing salsa for a couple of years now," he explains. "We do a corn salsa for a major foodservice customer and that gives us the basis for doing our own proprietary recipe as a retail pack. Right now it’s in the grocery stores and sales are building just almost on a constant basis. You see sales slowly increasing as consumer awareness of the product grows.
"It’s a delightful product. I can see where the retail growth will happen and then we’ve got foodservice, too. We sell all the major foodservice distribution companies that serve this area. We’ve introduced it to them and we get tremendously great response when we go to their food shows and showcase it. It’s been slow, but I think the salsa is a good, viable product."

Black and his team are already dicing tomatoes for a variety of customers and now major foodservice operators who are looking at bringing pre-sliced tomatoes into their kitchens instead of buying whole tomatoes and slicing them on-site. He and his staff look at the future of tomatoes in light of recent successes with other fresh-cut items around the country.

"Fruit is an area that is not saturated yet in this market," Black says. "There is a lot of opportunity in the fresh-cut fruit area. Our thoughts are that sliced and diced tomatoes will blossom like other areas in the next couple of years. We’re just in the beginning stages on sliced tomatoes."

Black says Condies is purchasing a tomato-slicing machine manufactured by TechnoFoods and distributed in the United States by Maxwell Chase Technologies LLC. He chose the unit because it slices fruit, removes both caps for dicing, and deposits usable slices into packages ready for sealing.

Sliced Tomatoes Exciting
"I think the sliced tomato thing is going to be extremely exciting," says Keith Ross, Condies’ sales manager. "They could be as exciting as salads were years ago when they started up. Other processed tomatoes will be exciting, too, but the sliced tomatoes will be especially big. Anybody is a potential customer that buys a certain sized tomato and slices it in a restaurant. That’s why it’s going to be so huge."
Another product that benefits from Condies’ tomato expertise is seven-layer bean dip. The company makes two sizes of bean dip trays that include diced tomatoes, cross-cut green onions, diced onions, fresh salsa, manufactured beans, cheese, sour cream and olives.

"People that buy this product like it," Black says. "It’s very good and it sells well. They sell right alongside the vegetable trays that have the carrots, broccoli and cauliflower. Some holiday weekends, like New Year’s Day or for the Super Bowl, we sell thousands of them. It’s kind of fun to see what happens when we put them on the shelf."

Black’s son, Scott, agrees, "Fruit sales are pretty consistent, but over the last year, the seven-layer bean dip has actually increased. It’s constantly increasing. I actually think just those two sizes of bean dip trays we’re doing could surpass what we’re doing in fruit. Cinco de Mayo is coming up and it will be interesting to see how the dip appeals to the Hispanic population during that holiday. During the Super Bowl, we actually sold twice as much bean dip as fruit. I think it will be a great product."

Tomatoes are just one of the top four products Condies processes, according to Gary Black, who notes about 75 percent of the company’s overall business is devoted to foodservice, while the rest is retail. One popular item among foodservice establishments is potatoes, a product Condies provides precooked, either as mashed potatoes or in various cuts.

Raving about Potatoes
"They’re a preservative-free precooked potato," the company president explains. "Most of them are breakfast-type, sliced, diced or shredded for hash browns. We’ve done them for years and I get great reviews from the people that buy them, but we don’t sell a lot of retail product.
"We do a lot of things. We do broccoli, cauliflower, carrot sticks, fajita mix, stir-fries and little veggie bags, but when you add them all together, it isn’t measured in tons like these four major items. Tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce and onions are truckload items."

As the 2002 Olympic Winter Games approach, the management team at Condies Foods is preparing for three hectic weeks of booming business by talking with processors in Atlanta who went through a similar experience, according to Scott Black. The XIXth Olympic Winter Games will run from February 8-24 and the VIIIth Paralympic Winter Games will follow from March 7-16. The Olympics are expected to bring some 80,000 visitors to Salt Lake City each day, or a total of about 1 million people.

"If you can imagine, our business will expand so fast and it’s just for a short time," Keith Ross reasons. "It’s going to be hard to be prepared. Crews at companies we talked to averaged 90 to 100 hours per week. We want to try to anticipate that a little bit. The companies we talked to ended up having to buy a lot of raw product at the normal produce market. That is normally high-priced compared to buying truckloads off the coast. They couldn’t adjust their pricing to compensate and they had some financial problems caused by the whole thing. We’ll have some hard times, I think."

A Future for Tomatoes
Looking beyond the Olympics, however, John Longaker predicts a great future for tomatoes while other segments of the business like potatoes and onions continue at their current rate of growth.
"We may investigate tomato wedges or sliced romas," Longaker predicts. "There are so many foodservice opportunities and countless uses for tomatoes. We see a lot of growth potential for our company in those areas."

Given the fact that Condies already repacks tomatoes for customers, the company is in an excellent position to take on a variety of tomato products because it will be able to control its supply of tomatoes at the right stage of ripeness for its products, Gary Black agrees.

"We’re right on the frontier of the processed tomato," he reasons. "Several processors have been dicing tomatoes and amazingly diced tomatoes have a great shelf life. Then this salsa thing has taken off and now the sliced tomatoes are getting started.

"If we were a processor in another area and we needed tomatoes to slice, we would go to a repacker and source them, whereas with us, we just have to transfer them from one side of the building to the other. It allows us to tie tomatoes into our product line very well."

From their vantage point of more than 60 years in business, Black says he and his energetic management team plan to continue in the same tradition Chick Black started when he put up his first package of fresh-cut cole slaw.

"He was a pioneer in processed salad," Black concludes. "We will continue that tradition at Condies Foods by being a trailblazer in pre-sliced tomatoes and other great new products. The future is bright for our company and continues to get brighter each day."

© 2003 Columbia Publishing
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