Lender's Bagels
Lender's Bagels is a brand and producer of bagels that pioneered the bagel industry in the United States. Established in 1927 in New Haven, Connecticut, it became a North American leader in the marketing, distribution and sales of bagels. Lender's introduced frozen bagels and sold the first packaged bagels in supermarkets, eventually becoming the world's biggest bagel producer. The company was sold to Kraft Foods Inc. in 1984 and is part of Pinnacle Foods Group Inc. since 2003.
In New York City, the informal border separating the land of fresh bagels from that of frozen assembly-line bagels is called the Lender's Line.[1]
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[edit] History
[edit] Beginnings
Lender's Bagel Bakery was established by Harry Lender, a Jewish baker originally from Chelm, Poland who had immigrated to the United States from Lublin in August 1927.[2] After first working in a bagel bakery in Passaic, New Jersey, Lender purchased his own bakery on Oak Street in New Haven, Connecticut for $600, and brought his family to join him in the United States on December 30, 1929. New Haven then had a population of over 162,000, many of them new immigrants, and a Jewish population of 25,000, accounting for almost one sixth of the population. Lender's bagel bakery, called the "New York Bagel Bakery", was one of the first bagel bakeries in the United States to be established outside of New York City.[3] In 2007, the site of the first Lender's bagel bakery was dedicated as a playground and named after one of Harry Lenders sons “Murray Lender Playground”.[4]
In 1934, Lender moved to a large former Italian bakery, in a multiethnic neighborhood of New Haven.[3] Aside from sales to individuals, Lender sold his bagels to other bakeries as well as delicatessens and restaurants. As the largest sales of bagels came on Sunday morning, Saturday night was the busiest time at the bakery, and people of all ethnicities even from out of town, began to stop by the bakery on Saturday nights to purchase fresh bagels.[3]
[edit] New processes lead to growth
By the mid 1950s, the logistics of producing as many as 6,000 bagels for sale on Sunday morning, in contrast to relatively low activity the rest of the week, began to demand a solution. As a result, in 1954 Lender perfected a method of freezing the bagels, so that the labor could be spread more evenly throughout the week.[5] This was kept secret, but after two years, the bakery accidentally delivered the frozen bagels, and the secret was revealed. Customers were initially angry, but were won over, when they realised that these were the same bagels they had been satisfied with for the previous two years, and the New York Bagel Bakery started to market the frozen bagels, delivering them also outside of New Haven, for instance to resorts in the Catskills.[3]
Further refinements were developed, such as pre-slicing the bagels and packing them in polyethylene bags to keep them fresh after thawing, and the bakery began selling the packaged frozen bagels in supermarkets. To introduce bagels to an unfamiliar public, the Lender family would prepare and distribute them in supermarket aisles. The plastic bagged, frozen six pack of presliced Lender's Frozen Bagels began to gain market share, and by 1959 supermarket sales accounted for half of the sales.[6] New varieties of bagels were invented, and production was switched over to rotary ovens, rather than labor intensive open, flat ovens.[3]
In 1960, Harry Lender died, and his sons Sam and Murray, who had been running the bakery with him, continued. (Oldest son Hyman had previously left the family business.) When youngest son Marvin graduated from college, he became a partner as well, and shortly thereafter Sam retired. The two brothers teamed up to expand operations, with Marvin managing the bakery and Murray in charge of sales.[3]
In 1963 the Lenders leased the very first Thompson Bagel Machine, invented by Daniel T. Thompson. Until then, according to Thompson, “Sam Lender mixed the bagel dough and one man cut it into small slabs and fed it into an Italian breadstick machine. The Italian breadstick machine made bagel dough strips that were then distributed to workstations where six to eight men rolled them by hand into bagels. With this system they averaged 50 dozen bagels per hour per man. The first Thompson machine, with three unskilled workers, was able to do the work of eight skilled workers.”[7]
[edit] Large scale expansion
In 1965 the bakery, now renamed "Lender's Bagel Bakery", moved to a 12,000-square-foot (1,100 m2) plant on the Boston Post Road in West Haven, in order to have ample reserve capacity for expansion; business increased so quickly that the bakery was working at full capacity within a year.[3] The Lenders began flash-freezing the bagels and produced softer and sweeter bagels than was traditional.[8] In 1974, Lender’s had bought their major competitor, Abel's Bagels in Buffalo, New York.[9] In 1978 the family opened a bagel restaurant in Orange, Connecticut under the name “H. Lender and Sons”, two years later they opened a second one in Hamden. After Lender's Bagels was sold to Kraft Foods, the name of the restaurant was changed to S. Kinder Restaurants. The name is derived from Yiddish esst, kinder, meaning eat, children.[10]
Under Marvin and Murray Lender, Lender's Bagels eventually grew to a highly automated 25,000-square-foot (2,300 m2) bakery, pioneering the modern automated bagel bakery. The company grew from six employees when it moved to West Haven to 600 in 1984, selling about $60 million worth of bagels from four bagel factories producing more than 750,000,000 bagels a year,[3] becoming the world's biggest bagel producer.[8]
[edit] New ownerships
In the spring of 1984, the Lender family sold Lender's Frozen Bagels to Kraft Foods, with the stipulation that Marvin would remain president and Murray spokesman for the next two years. Murray Lender publicized the sale in characteristic form, by holding "the marriage of the century", with Murray and Marvin escorting a 6-foot-tall (1.8 m) Lender’s Bagel, "Len", down the aisle to meet his new bride, “Phyl”, a Kraft Philadelphia brand cream cheese.[3] In 1987, Lender's had three plants in West Haven, a plant in New Haven, one in Buffalo, New York, and one in Mattoon, Illinois,[11] the latter is the site of the annual “Bagelfest”.[12] Kraft, who reportedly spent $12 to $15 million annually to advertise Lender's bagels,[13] sold the company to Kellogg's in 1996 for $455 million. Analysts criticized Kellogg's investment in a frozen product at a time when the popularity of fresh bagels was rising.[14] Kellogs introduced a $20 million television campaign for Lender's in Fall 1997.[15] In October 1999, Kellogs sold the business to San Francisco based Aurora Foods for $275 million,[16] and ceased production at the New Haven factory in March 2000.[14] In 2003, Aurora was bought by Pinnacle Foods, a company of the Blackstone Group since 2007.[17] The Lender's Bagels brand is still in production with a wide variety of bagels.
[edit] Marketing
Murray Lender's advertisements and marketing promotions put bagels into the public consciousness. He was traveling throughout the United States marketing Lender's Frozen Bagels to a country which was disdainful of frozen foods and unfamiliar with bagels. His success helped elevate the entire frozen food industry. In response to observations that March was the slowest month for sales of frozen foods, Murray Lender organized the frozen food industry to declare March Frozen Foods Month, raising sales dramatically. In recognition of his contributions to the industry as a whole, he was elected chairman of the National Frozen Food Association, nominated to the Halls of Fame of the International Deli-Bakery Association and the Frozen Food Association, and named "Man of the Year" by the Frozen Food Association of New England, the National Prepared Frozen Food Association, and the Connecticut Food Stores Association. In response to the public's growing consciousness of health foods and the drop in popularity of white bread, he began to stress bagels as more natural baked goods, and Lender's Bagels became one of the first products to voluntarily include nutritional information on the package.[3]
Murray Lender appeared as a guest on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.[18] He created green bagels for Saint Patrick's Day, oval bagels for President Lyndon B. Johnson to be photographed eating in the Oval Office, and "bagel heads", miniature decorated bagels, in the likeness of the world leaders attending the 9th G7 summit in 1983.[3]
[edit] References
- ^ Asimov, Eric (March 16, 1997). "Is a Bagel Still a Bagel in Maui?". The New York Times. pp. 3. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/16/weekinreview/is-a-bagel-still-a-bagel-in-maui.html?pagewanted=3. Retrieved November 9, 2011.
- ^ Balinska, Maria (2008), pp.149-150
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k "Secret of The Frozen Bagel, Revealed". New Haven Independent. May 29, 2009. http://www.newhavenindependent.org/archives/2009/05/jews_of_new_hav.php.
- ^ Aitken, Kate (September 13, 2007). "Playground named for famed bagelmaker". Yale Daily News. http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2007/sep/13/playground-named-for-famed-bagelmaker/. Retrieved November 9, 2011.
- ^ Balinska, Maria (2008), pp.151-154
- ^ Balinska, Maria (2008), p.153
- ^ Thompson, Daniel T.. "Thompson Bagel Machine, History and Development". Thompson Bagel Machine. http://www.bagelproducts.com/bagel_formers/history.htm. Retrieved November 9, 2011.
- ^ a b Marks, Gil (2010). Bagel. In: Encyclopedia of Jewish Food. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons. pp. 36. ISBN 978-0-470-39130-3. http://books.google.ch/books?id=ojc4Uker_V0C&pg=PA36#v=onepage&q&f=false.
- ^ Balinska, Maria (2008), p.164
- ^ Bass, Sharon L. (January 4, 1987). "‘Bagel Boom’ Spurs Lively Competion". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1987/01/04/nyregion/bagel-boom-spurs-lively-competition.html. Retrieved November 9, 2011.
- ^ "The View from Putnem; Bagels Give Town an Economic Boost". The New York Times. September 27, 1987. http://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/27/nyregion/the-view-from-putnam-bagels-give-town-an-economic-boost.html. Retrieved November 9, 2011.
- ^ Gregory, Ted (July 25, 2003). "Bagel town feels bite of downturn. Downstate Mattoon is home to the world's largest bagel festival, but the factory that started it all may be in trouble". Chicago Tribune. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2003-07-25/news/0307250297_1_bakery-bagel-capital-world-records. Retrieved November 9, 2011.
- ^ Canedy, Dana (December 24, 1996). "Assignments Added For Two Agencies". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1996/12/24/business/assignments-added-for-two-agencies.html. Retrieved November 9, 2011.
- ^ a b "Metro Business; Kellogg Will Close Lender's Bagel Plant". The New York Times. March 2, 2000. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/02/nyregion/metro-business-kellogg-will-close-lender-s-bagel-plant.html. Retrieved November 9, 2011.
- ^ Kane, Courtney (September 3, 1997). "Kellogg promotes its family of cereals, even the sugary ones, as components of a healthy diet.". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/03/business/kellogg-promotes-its-family-cereals-even-sugary-ones-components-healthy-diet.html. Retrieved November 9, 2011.
- ^ "Business: Diary; An Analyst Speaks Out". The New York Times. October 3, 1999. http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/03/business/business-diary-an-analyst-speaks-out.html. Retrieved November 9, 2011.
- ^ AP (February 13, 2007). "Blackstone Leads Group Buying Food Company". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/13/business/13food.html. Retrieved November 09, 2011.
- ^ Balinska, Maria (2008), p.172
[edit] Further reading
- Balinska, Maria (2008). The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, Yale University Press, November 2008, ISBN 0-300-11229-7, ISBN 978-0-300-11229-0
- Horowitz, Andy, & Fischer, David S., editor. "Jews In New Haven Volume IX: The Lender Family of New Haven, Connecticut", Greater New Haven Jewish Historical Society (JHS), 2009.
