A Baker's Millions

Ten years ago, the bespectacled little boss of a three-man wholesale bakery in Chicago was laughed out of the head offices of a Midwest supermarket chain for suggesting that the chain sell his coffee cakes at 79-c- apiece instead of the then standard 29-c-. Today, the boss of a 584-man concern that grosses more than $30 million a year, the little baker is so busy selling his high-priced goods that he is currently equipping his major food brokers with computers to process an endless torrent of orders from customers across the nation--including the once skeptical supermarket chain.

The jovial hero of this Horatio Alger story is Charles W. Lubin, 58, president of the Kitchens of Sara Lee. Like all Alger heroes, Lubin ascribes his success to a simple formula: Lubin makes what Lubin likes. What stocky Charley Lubin likes are diet-defying coffee cakes, cheesecakes, chocolate cakes and pound cakes--all loaded with calorie-packed butter and topped wherever possible with sugar icings and pecans. And Lubin's taste for rich, high-quality baked goods is clearly widely shared. Now the most profitable subsidiary of Chicago's Consolidated Foods Corp. (other brands: Monarch, Hires), Sara Lee last year accounted for 6% of Consolidated's sales--and better than 17% of its $8,000,000 net.

Foil & Freeze. Since he dropped out of high school to begin working in bakeries, Lubin has never strayed far from the oven door. In 1935 he and his brother-in-law raised $1,500 to buy three little retail bakeries in Chicago. Sixteen years later, with a chain expanded to seven stores and a hot-selling cream-cheese cake named Sara Lee (after his daughter), Lubin decided to set up shop as a wholesale baker. By developing the technique of baking his cakes in an aluminum foil pan. then freezing and shipping them in the same container, he soon had a national business.

Five years ago, despite his fast-growing fortune, Lubin realized that he was still financially vulnerable. ''If anything happened to me, my whole estate was my business," he recalls. So he merged Sara Lee into Consolidated Foods, the food-processing, wholesaling, and retailing Goliath being assembled by Canadian-born Entrepreneur Nathan Cummings, 65. Cummings paid Lubin 170,000 shares of Consolidated stock--then worth nearly $3,000,000--and was shrewd enough to let the master baker continue to run his own shop.

Mechanical Quality. Lubin's shop is an automated showplace in suburban Chicago where cakes seem to shoot off the assembly line by magic. Sara Lee is the nation's biggest commercial user of cream cheese, fresh bananas and butter, which Lubin fanatically insists must always be 93-score AA--the best grade produced. Pumped or carted from huge storage areas, these ingredients are squeezed and squirted into an endless line of aluminum foil pans that winds through an oven at the rate of 2,400 an hour and finally out to the shipping room. But Lubin's goal in automating is not the usual one of saving labor costs; instead it is to build the undeviating accuracy of machines into the quality of his cakes.

Success has been so rapid-fire that Sara Lee has had to move to larger quarters five times. Next month Lubin will break ground for another $12 million plant. Lubin wanders tirelessly through his expanding complex, occasionally allowing himself the childish delight of snitching a generous fingerful of cheesecake mix or brownie batter from a monster mixing bowl. When he thinks back to the simple days of his three-man bake shop, Charley Lubin is awestruck by his present plant. "Even when I go there every day,'' says he. "I just don't believe it."

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