Processed Cucumbers

At Chicago's huge Palmer House one day last fortnight, 50 businessmen attending the annual convention of their trade association, opened the meeting by chanting in unison: WHERE'S THIS YEAR'S PECK OF PICKLED PEPPERS PETER PIPER PICKED? There was not a man present that could not reel off Peter Piper without a bobble, and older hands did not boggle Theophilus the thistle-sifter. But full as they were of percussive alliteration they were no mere funsters. They were members of the 46-year-old National Pickle Packers Association representing 85% of an industry which has done a business of as much as $50,000,000 a year (1929).

Last week the harvest began in Wisconsin and Michigan. Hundreds of Peter Pipers--itinerant pickers, farm laborers, owners of small cucumber patches--worked their way on soil-stained knees between rows of tender vines, carefully pulling off little fellows to be made this winter into gherkins, midgets, tiny-tims and other one-bite numbers, bigger fellows to be brined into dills and koshers.

For 1939 pickle prospects are good. Probable gross: slightly better than 1938's $40,000,000. Pressing problems for this year are a shortage of dills (a reaction from last year's overselling of the dill market) and a dearth of one-bite pickles. Last year's summer rains played hob with this year's little fellows. Cucumbers grew overnight from midgets to larger sizes before they could be picked. This year's prospects (for next year's pickles) are better.

Largest pickle packer in the business is Heinz, with an estimated gross between $5,000,000 and $10,000,000 a year. Heinz policy keeps it out of the trade association but it works closely with N. P. P. A. whose biggest members are Widlar Food Products (Standard Brands), Libby, Mc-Neill & Libby and Squire Dingee. Biggest pickle States today are Wisconsin and Michigan but the oldest is New York where Dutch burghers packed dills not many years after Henry Hudson debarked from the Half Moon.

Some pickle points:

> The industry's best sales plug in recent years has been the claim that pickles contain vitamins, particularly Vitamin C (which prevents scurvy), fill a dietary need for people who do not eat enough fresh vegetables and fruit.

> Summer is biggest pickle sales period. Reason: picnics and basket lunches.

> The pickle business is peculiarly sensitive to depressions and unemployment. Reason: its steadiest consumer is the working man who likes a pickle in his lunch box.

> According to pickle lore Thomas Jefferson was a pickle-eater, may have composed the Declaration of Independence while sucking on a dill, and Julius Caesar led spiced cucumbers to his legionaries.

> Pickle planting has been reduced from 81,620 acres in 1938 to 47,652 this year and prospects of reducing a carry-over of some 5,756,663 bushels are the best in three years.

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