The Tomato Philosopher

Hundreds of huge, two-trailered trucks chugged last week along the roads of Southern California, where from now until November they will shuttle constantly between ripened fields of tomatoes and bustling canneries. By season's peak, an awesome Niagara of tomatoes amounting to about 80 million lbs. weekly will be picked, stemmed, stewed and squashed, processed into juice, sauces, catsup and paste. What ever the style, most of them will bear the bright red label of Hunt Foods & Industries, Inc., the world's largest packer and distributor of tomato products and the corporate creation of a remarkable and enigmatic businessman.

Writing the Book. Running a tomato empire may seem a somewhat unusual occupation for a man who prides himself on being an intellectual, a patron of the arts and an enemy of orthodoxy in business. But Norton Simon, 56, the boss of Hunt Foods, is all of these. A well-groomed, soft-spoken man who is impatient with chitchat, Simon makes friends more quickly with ideas than with fellow businessmen, relentlessly questions the obvious, and declines to go by the book--he likes to write it himself. With a sort of business existentialism, he lives by what he calls the "philosophy of change"--a constant search for new situations that challenge him. "It's simply," says Simon not so simply, "a commitment to being." Sometimes the language gets a little difficult to follow, but Simon's fellow businessmen have no trouble understanding the results.

By whatever name it is called, Norton Simon's drive is impressive. Though tomatoes still account for nearly 25% of Hunt's sales, Simon has relentlessly expanded the company's horizons over the past decade, raised its sales from $82 million to $400 million. Hunt is now the largest refiner of cottonseed oil in the U.S. (Wesson Oil), the nation's second-biggest matchmaker (Ohio Match), the largest paint manufacturer and distributor in the West (W. P. Fuller), and the' West's second-largest maker of glass containers. It also owns important interests in areas as remote from the tomato as magazine publishing (McCall's) and steel (Wheeling).

Yale Seminar. Simon has often mystified the business community--and sometimes angered it--but his career has its own internal logic. He left the University of California before graduating to set up his own sheet metal business, used his profits to buy a bankrupt orange juice company in Fullerton, Calif. He sold it to an old-line private-label packer called Hunt Brothers, then quickly moved in on Hunt and took over. During the World War II food shortage, he made lasting enemies of many wholesalers and grocery chains by stopping Hunt's longtime private-label canning for them to push products under Hunt's own name. After the war, he decided that the best way to make Hunt known Nationally was to concentrate his advertising and promotion on a single item. He chose tomato sauce, and launched a major campaign that eventually captured half of the U.S. market for Hunt.

Since Hunt had distributed millions of tomato-sauce recipes printed on paper matchbooks, it seemed only natural to Simon to buy up the company that made the matches: Ohio Match. That led him into lumber investments, and at roughly the same time he logically acquired companies that could make his cans and bottles, lithograph his labels and use his tomatoes for catsup. His biggest merger came in 1960 with Wesson Oil & Snowdrift Co., and last year Simon took over W. P. Fuller. While studying rotogravure printing for Ohio Match, Simon got interested in McCall Corp., bought a 36% interest in the company. He has tripled McCall's profits largely by reorganizing its printing operations, and has helped make McCall's magazine a big-circulation success --though the magazine itself has yet to do as well financially as it does on the newsstands. Simon's latest move was to acquire a 7% interest in Wheeling Steel, where he now sits on the board.

Along the way, Simon picked up--and sometimes discarded--dozens of other companies, concentrating on those that had good book values but needed more aggressive management. By familiarizing himself carefully with each company before he moves in, Simon usually impresses new associates with his knowledge and suggestions. He is still feared as a tough and relentless fighter by many who remember his earlier dealings, but those who deal with him nowadays often find the reputation larger than the reality. Simon likes to have his own way, but he also likes his associates to challenge him. His staff meetings often sound like a seminar of graduate students at Yale, though presumably--to judge by the company's success--practical business also gets done.

Process of Becoming. Simon operates from offices in Los Angeles and a William Pereira-designed administration building in Fullerton. He works seven days a week, surrounded both at home and in his office by perhaps the best private art collection in California--from Rubens and Rembrandt to Picasso and Hans Hofmann. He serves on the University of California board of regents, and takes his intellectuality seriously, avoiding such normal business fare as cocktail parties and public functions. He and his wife like to give small dinners, at which the conversation is never as lowly as a tomato and the latest trends of philosophy provide the sauce. At home or at work, Norton Simon keeps busy at what he likes to call "the process of becoming."

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