Rolling Restaurants

All over the U.S. a little-known but strategic war industry is booming. It is the business of factory feeding. Two years ago this business contented itself with bourgeois monikers like "lunch wagon" or "canteen." Now the factory feeders haughtily call themselves "subsistence contractors," "industrial caterers," "rolling restaurants" and (at Cessna Aircraft) "Witamin Wagons."

The need for factory feeding is as old as U.S. industry, but now is acute. Some war plants are so huge that it would take a worker his entire lunch period just to get to a central cafeteria and more than that to get out the gate; some production jobs are so hush-hush that workers are locked in for their entire shift. Nobody knows how many millions factory feeders gross annually, but it is a big regional business.

> In booming Detroit at least $50,000 a day is spend in concessionaires' factory cafeterias and rolling canteens. Biggest factor nationally is the F. B. Prophet Co., which grosses $50,000 per day, services 61 companies and some 250,000 workers in the U.S. Probably No. 1 local caterer is Trainor Bros. Inc., which serves 150,000 workers a day at 13 Detroit factories (including Briggs Mfg., Continental Motors, Fruehauf Trailer) via 20 trucks and trailers and 120 rolling canteens. Average price for a full meal: 35-c-. Though it takes four caterers to cover the whole of River Rouge, a good part of Henry Ford's giant plant is served by the Springwells Box Lunch Co., which serves 20,000 men a day with a choice of three sandwiches, dessert and fruit (20-c-), 12 oz. of stew (io?0, 16 oz. of coffee (12-c-), single sandwiches (6 to 12-c-), plus one hot dish a day.

> Los Angeles is the home of perhaps the most extraordinary factory feeder: the Anderson Boarding & Supply Co., which calls itself "the biggest subsistence contractor in the world." It serves some 40,000 meals a day from Salton Sea (246 ft. below sea level) to Climax, Colo. (11,320 ft. above) and in many cases houses them too (total cost: $1.75 a day; $1.50 for meals, 25-c- for rooms). Founded by railroad-camp Flunky William Lancelot ("Billy") Anderson 30 years ago (when he was the first Westerner to provide fresh sheets and milk to camp workers), it is now run by his chubby widow, grosses around $4,000,000 on meals alone.

Widow Anderson, who was doing all right long before the war, now has contracts for feeding workers at naval air bases, U.S. Gypsum, Phelps Dodge's huge new Morenci mine, Climax Molybdenum, etc. She has even operated entire industrial towns (movies, pool halls, filling stations, etc.), last year ran two camps in the Bahamas for Paramount, is now setting up a new camp at Mecca, on the Salton Sea, for the same company's new film, So Proudly We Hail. One of her many headaches: when Anderson bakers are sent from California's Imperial Valley up to Climax, they have to change their habits all around because high altitudes affect the baking.

>Cleveland's Factory Stores Inc. chose that peculiar name 24 years ago because no one knew what it meant and everyone wanted to know. Catering mainly to the steel industry, it now feeds 31,000 men daily at Carnegie-Illinois's Gary plant alone, concentrates on 25-c- carry-out lunches (spaghetti, macaroni, pork & beans, chop suey) because steel mills do not lend themselves to in-the-plant munching. It has had to turn down millions in new war business, already operates 80 branches chiefly in the Ohio-Illinois-Indiana steel belt and grosses $5,000,000-$6,000,000 a year.

> Boston's Crotty Bros, is probably the largest factory feeder anywhere, with almost 500,000 workers in 68 corporations from Maine to Florida and west to Des Moines daily eating out of its hand. This year Crotty expects to gross $15,000,000 (v. $9,500,000 in 1941), though its president Andrew Crotty says that its profits are still figured "in pennies."

>Chicago's up & coming Canteen Food Service, less than three years in the business, is already grossing $2,500,000 a year. Business is terrific for factory feeders, but so are their headaches: high prices, labor problems, food shortages and equipment and maintenance shortages. These make caterers' chief peacetime problems--practical jokers and snitchers--seem almost academic. But at least one big factory feeder still remembers with horror the day when a workman slipped some potassium cyanide he had pinched from the production line into some of its sandwiches. Before the "joke" was discovered, one man had died and another had had a close call.

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