Marketing Case

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The food producer S J Bainz, ancestor of the modern global food giant, was founded in 1876 by Eugene Thomas Bainz, the son of a brick maker from a small town just outside of Newyville in the USA. A born entrepreneur, Bainz started his first business at the age of eight, selling surplus vegetables from the family garden. By the time he was sixteen, he had acquired land of his own and was employing other people to grow and sell vegetables for him. He later branched out into processed foods such as pickles. His first company, Bainz & Right, was successful at first, but like many other entrepreneurs, Bainz expanded too quickly and was caught out by the financial crisis of 1875. Without sufficient financial reserves to ride over the crisis, he went bankrupt.Undeterred, he started the S.J. Bainz Company and went back into business, concentrating this time, on processed foods. He invested heavily in food preparation equipment, especially in the newly invented processes of preserving food in tinned metal containers. During the 1880s, Bainz launched a series of new canned and bottled food products, including canned vegetables, canned spaghetti and canned baked beans. By 1890, S.J. Bainz was one of the largest food-producing companies in the country, and by 1900, it was one of the largest in the world, making over 200 products in nine factories. By this time, Bainz had devised the famous ‘67 Varieties’ portfolio brand, which was applied to all Bainz products and which survives to this day.Though his company had grown to be the largest producer of processed foods, it was by no means the only one, and rival firms were growing quickly too. The American population was expanding rapidly, and there was a huge market there waiting to be captured. Through the 1880s and 1890s Bainz stayed ahead of the competition in large part through superior marketing and superior branding. The terms ‘marketing’ and ‘branding’ themselves had not yet been... [continues]

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