General Mills of Minneapolis

Betty Crocker is the creation and property of General Mills, Inc., the world’s biggest flour millers. It is not quite accurate to say General Mills owns Betty body and soul, for Betty has no body. But Betty’s soul—or, more properly speaking, her well-bred personality—is one of the most important assets of General Mills. Conservative accountants list Betty on the balance sheet, along with other intangible property, at only $1. This is nonsense; Betty is worth a lot more than that. If she weren’t, General Mills could rightly be accused of throwing money away, for it has spent about $10 million to make Betty what she is today.

Betty’s corporate home is in Minneapolis, in the offices of General Mills. The offices are a fitting background for anyone as determinedly genteel as Betty Crocker. The walls are paneled in lovely, old-fashioned red mahogany. To the hushed rooms, stained-glass windows lend a cathedral air. Visitors are ushered in by a courteous, dignified Negro, who has grown gray in forty years of service.

With Betty in these stately offices dwells an assortment of only slightly less famous personalities. There are the Lone Ranger (clippety clop, “Hi yo, Silver!”), Jack Armstrong, the A-a-a-ll American Boy, and Valiant Lady, one of the long-suffering stars of soap opera. These other characters do not harmonize with the cloistral environment as well as Betty does, but all work together to make General Mills both famous and profitable. While Betty sells flour and soup, the Lone Ranger persuades children to gobble Cheerioats, Jack Armstrong speaks for Wheaties, and Valiant Lady markets heroic quantities of Softasilk cake flour.

---

The birth of Betty Crocker, queen of this strange hive, occurred in 1921. It was not premeditated. General Mills’ principal predecessor, Washburn Crosby Co., was running a sober recipe contest to sell its Gold Medal flour (“Eventually—Why Not Now?”). Several thousand entries came in. A vice president who kept an eye on advertising thought a woman should sign the mail; women would wonder at a man being mixed up in a recipe contest. A name was invented—Crocker for another vice president, Betty because it sounded cozy. Ultimately, Betty’s signature was standardized, with the calligraphy of a woman employee as the model. A number of other girls were taught to forge Betty’s new signature accurately.

Betty Crocker began recommending recipes and giving good housekeeping advice in Washburn Crosby newspaper and magazine advertisements, and in 1924 she went on the radio, with a recipe program over WCCO, Minneapolis. In 1926 the National Broadcasting Co. was organized and Betty became its third continuous commercial client. The radio made Betty; it is fair to say that it did for her career in commerce what it did for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s in politics. When General Mills took over Washburn Crosby and other companies in a 1928 merger, Betty went along.

On a searching tour of General Mills’ offices one can find pieces of Betty’s exceptionally composite personality. Part of it is Mrs. Marjorie Child Husted, director of home service, whose department is a blend of woman’s club, tearoom, cooking school, and business office. Here Mrs. Husted and her forty assistants think up new recipes and sound advice for Betty. Betty the scientist is Dr. Lela E. Booher, General Mills’ chief nutritionist. Part of Betty’s personality is formed by the girls in the mail room. They open the 4,000 letters Betty averages each working day and answer about 80 per cent of them with form letters (the rest go up to Mrs. Husted’s department for individual attention). Still another and very vivid piece of Betty lives in Chicago, where the Betty Crocker radio programs originate: that is Mrs. Betty Lutz Bucholz, Betty’s radio voice.

It is not quite accurate to say General Mills owns Betty body and soul, for Betty has no body. But Betty’s soul—or, more properly speaking, her well-bred personality—is one of the most important assets of General Mills.

Betty’s official portrait hangs on the wall of the advertising department’s reception room on the third floor. It was painted in 1936 by Neysa McMein; before then several pictures of Betty were in circulation with confusing differences between them. Miss McMein’s Betty is a serious, straightforward person, lovely in a dignified way, neither young nor old. Recently, because Betty’s outlines were a trifle fuzzy for good magazine reproduction, she was sent back to Miss McMein to be sharpened up a little.

Betty gets the most painstaking attention from the General Mills advertising department, and the company lawyers are equally devoted to her. To strengthen her position as a trademark, they suggested that the company’s dehydrated soup be named Betty Crocker soup. And it is now the opinion of counsel that Betty’s position is so secure that no other Betty Crocker can muscle in on her audience, not even a live person born and baptized Betty Crocker. A “Betty Crocker policy,” drawn up by the advertising and legal departments, is a constant guide for the copywriters who compose what Betty says. Betty must be dignified: though her style may be altered according to the audience, it must always be that of a gentlewoman. Betty should be friendly but not intimate. She must stick to home economics and never discuss her private life, which would probably be rather dull anyway. Whenever possible Betty should say “we,” not “I,” for it would be unsound and perhaps illegal to represent Betty as a superwoman who thinks up all her own recipes and answers all her own mail. For some esoteric legal reason, “anything said by Betty or credited to Betty must be literally true with respect to some current member of the company’s home economics staff.”

According to a company survey, 91 per cent of the housewives of the U.S. know of Betty Crocker, and 56 per cent correctly identify her with General Mills. Recently sponsors of Betty Crocker’s principal rivals, Aunt Jenny of Lever Brothers’ Spry and Mary Lee Taylor of Pet Milk, must have been grinding their teeth: Betty was featured on a noncommercial program on wartime food problems undertaken in cooperation with OWI, OPA, and WFA. N.B.C. donated the time and General Mills proudly donated Betty.

---

Valiant Lady, unlike Betty Crocker, exposes her private life in a better-than-average soap opera in the interests of Softasilk cake flour. Three other soap operas, Today’s Children, Woman in White, and Guiding Light, also market General Mills products. There is also Light of the World, a continued Bible story that has been telling the story of the Old Testament for six years in a manner thoroughly approved by Catholics, Jews, and Protestants. Hymns of All Churches, which is explained by the title, also combines religion and commerce. For a semi-adult, semi-juvenile audience there is the Lone Ranger; and among the indisputably juvenile, as great a hero as any is Jack Armstrong, the A-a-a-ll American Boy.

Known to 91 per cent of housewives, Betty Crocker is also popular with men: ten lonely (or undernourished) males have written proposing to her.

General Mills handles its children’s programs with great care. Years ago a juvenile character called “Skippy,” which it sponsored, had to be taken off the air because his adventures were so bloodcurdling that they gave children the jumps. Now the Lone Ranger and Jack Armstrong are checked up on regularly by child psychologists (who have told General Mills that a reasonable amount of vicarious excitement is good for children) and their character is above reproach. Indeed, when Jack Armstrong was being thought up, Advertising Director Samuel C. Gale rejected the name first suggested—Red Jones, or something like that—because “Red” sounded tough. Gale suggested Jack Armstrong, a good American name, and that was accepted. Some trouble grew out of this, as there was a real Jack Armstrong in Minneapolis. Drunks and overenchanted children, in remote parts of the country, began telephoning the true Jack, occasionally collect. Once a letter offering Jack a job was absentmindedly but understandably delivered to General Mills. By the time Jack got the letter, the job had been offered to someone else. Jack talked about suing, but Providence was on General Mills’ side: Jack got a better job.

---

A very big Miller

Back of this engaging make-believe, General Mills is a very big milling company, more than twice as big as its nearest competitor, which is Pillsbury Mills, Inc. Grain for General Mills’ rollers comes from wherever grain grows, but principally from the great plains—spring wheat from North Dakota and Montana to be combined with winter wheat from Kansas and Colorado. The company has twenty-two elevators and 161 country grain stations of its own scattered across the land, but hundreds of independent elevators contribute to the 68 million bushels of wheat, oats, and rye that General Mills grinds up each year.

The company has twenty-three flour mills, from the Pacific Coast to New York, which can manufacture 80,000 barrels (15,680,000 pounds) of flour each day, about one-sixth of all U.S. capacity. It has seven feed mills, with a daily output of 5,800 tons. And it has four cereal mills, which can turn out 40,000 cases of cereals a day; these last make General Mills second only to Kellogg Co. in its output of ready-to-eat breakfast foods.

Livestock feed, the most important byproduct of a flour mill, General Mills may sell through dealers or direct to farmers through any of its 103 farm-service stores. Flour, breakfast foods, and dehydrated soups are marketed through sixty sales offices scattered across the country, which sell to wholesalers and jobbers, or direct to bakers. They handle a bewildering variety of brands—there are 240 brands of baker’s flour and some 250 brands of family flour alone. Some of these brands were popularized by General Mills’ corporate ancestors and it is difficult to drop them. But for bakers especially many brands are needed. Besides the brands for staple breads, for example, there must be one for Vienna bread, another for cracked wheat, still another for doughnuts.

General Mills’ biggest plants are at Buffalo, now the nation’s leading milling center. Minneapolis used to be first, has now dropped behind Buffalo and Kansas City. Buffalo overtook its competitors because it can draw grain from the West by low-cost Great Lakes carriers, and deliver its flour more economically in the eastern market.

Six million bushels of grain can be stored in the towering, gray elevators General Mills owns or leases at Buffalo. Still more grain can be stored in winter in the holds of lake freighters, which are broken out of the ice and towed to piers when needed. All grain goes first to the elevators to be tested (high protein, high gluten, etc.) and “filed” according to tests in huge tanks or bins.

The rambling, twelve-story mill each day requires as much grain as an average 5,000 acres can grow, and mills enough flour for six million loaves of bread. Grain, blended from several elevator bins, is first soaked with water (“tempered”) so that the wheat berries will not be too brittle. Then it goes through the milling rollers—as many as fourteen sets in some cases—which rub off microscopic sections of the berry. The mill is clean, brightly lighted, and full of varnished wooden cabinets, some housing the rollers, and some wiggling and jiggling like hula dancers as they sift the partly milled flour through silk screens. The whole mill is strangely lacking in people. To do all its work, General Mills employs 12,000 men and women but fewer than 5,000 are employed in the highly mechanized flour and cereal mills. But though milling requires relatively few workers, they must be good. A flour miller gets help from the laboratories, but he still depends on experience as well. Indeed, the mill he runs is like a piano: if it has been out of use for a while it must be tuned for an hour or so before it performs properly again.

The Buffalo cereal mill where Wheaties, Kix, and Cheerioats are made is of modernistic brick and glass. The puffed cereals, to the pleased amazement of most visitors, are actually shot from guns. Going into the forty guns—which look like heavy steel barrels—the cereals are damp and soggy. The barrels are clamped shut and revolved as the heat and pressure in them slowly rise. When the pressure has reached about one hundred pounds, a workman flips the gun over, aims it at a wire screen, and pulls a trigger. The gun goes boom! and a shower of Kix or Cheerioats hits the screen like hail. The screens deflect the flying breakfast food down to a conveyer belt, which carries it to the flashing battery of packaging machines.

---

The merger that produced General Mills in 1928 was part of a grand concentration movement that in the thirty years from 1909 to 1939 reduced the number of flour mills in the U.S. from 11,691 to 2,143. Unlike many 1928 and 1929 mergers in other industries, the General Mills merger turned out very well: it produced a blue-chip stock. Dividends have been earned and paid every year, and the regular dividend has not been reduced since 1929. (For a tabulation of sales and earnings, see below.) This record. General Mills boasts, has been equaled by only a handful of stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Possibly General Mills, which has paid out 75 per cent of its earnings to stockholders, has been too fond of its dividend record. The company’s current ratio (the ratio of current assets to current liabilities, which is an index of working-capital position), declined from 6.75 to 1 in 1940 to 2.26 to 1 in 1943. The cause of this has been the rapid expansion of operations and the soaring price of grain, which has increased enormously the investment in inventory. The company last year issued $10 million in 21/4 per cent debentures, which provided more working capital. The bonds are callable, and Board Chairman James F. Bell says they will be called when the money is no longer needed. This borrowed money, the company’s only funded debt, will not be used for postwar plant expansion. “I told the boys when the bonds were sold that my pockets were asbestos-lined,” he said. “If we need more money for fixed investment we will get equity capital.”

General Mills’ sales have varied from a mere $84 million in 1933 to a whopping $281 million last year. But curiously enough, some of this fluctuation is a matter of almost complete indifference to the company. Though some of the recent increase is explained by expanded wartime operations, year-to-year fluctuations result from changes in the price of grain. The flour miller’s dollar sales may vary enormously but, because the price of grain and the price of flour move up and down together, his margin per bushel of wheat or barrel of flour remains fairly constant. From this margin the earnings come—and while in the company’s history sales at their highest have been 238 per cent above sales at their lowest, highest earnings after taxes were only 80 per cent above the lowest. The present moment is indeed an exception; wartime operations would have inflated General Mills’ earnings if it were not for the brake of taxes.

---

The economics of razzle-dazzle

General Mills’ strange duality—fanciful sales promotion on the one hand and financial solidity on the other—is not so strange as it seems. On the contrary, it is very logical behavior for a firm half of whose sales are made up of—just flour.

During the thousands of years that flour has been milled, the business has been a good example of what economists and Chairman Bell of General Mills call pure competition, which exists when sellers are numerous and the product of one seller is pretty much like that of any other. With flour, as with wheat or coal, you can always get an order or move your inventory by shading the price a bit—there are few quality differentials or peculiarities of taste or smell that develop loyalties or tie buyers to particular sellers. To get more customers sellers do shade prices, so under pure competition profits almost always are small.

The flour market has some peculiarities of its own. The demand cannot be increased greatly, and it is not much affected by hard times. If people eat at all, they eat bread; in hard times they may even eat more bread than usual because they cannot afford other foods. But for years the use of flour in the U.S. has been declining. In 1900 the average U.S. citizen consumed about 230 pounds a year; after World War I per capita consumption was down to about 200 pounds a year, and for the last ten years it has been stable at about 155 pounds. To be slender, women have been eating less bread, and as the standard of living rises all people eat more meat, dairy products, and vegetables.

In 1889, when the late James S. Bell, “the greatest merchant miller of all time,” became President of Washburn Crosby Co., he set out to break the shackles of pure competition—or at least the limitation on profits that it imposed. The middlings purifier, for making better flour, was developed in Europe, and in 1870 Washburn Crosby adopted it. With middlings-purified flour, it won a gold medal at the Millers’ International Exhibition at Cincinnati in 1880. Mr. Bell, with merchandising opportunism rare in those days, seized upon this event, when he became President of the company, to persuade buyers that all flour was not the same; that his flour was different and better. His new Gold Medal flour was first nationally advertised in one-inch advertisements in the Ladies’ Home Journal. By 1900 he was appropriating $40,000 a year for advertising, and some conservative millers were sure he had gone mad. General Mills now spends about $12 million a year on advertising through three agencies: Dancer-Fitzgerald-Sample, Chicago; Knox Reeves Advertising, Inc., Minneapolis; and Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, New York and Minneapolis.

Gold Medal’s slogan, “Eventually—Why Not Now?” was one of the first advertising slogans to become a national byword. That slogan was largely abandoned a dozen years ago because of a clever counterattack by the Pillsbury Mills, the leading competitor of General Mills. Pillsbury, manufacturer of Pillsbury’s Best flour, rented billboards next to those saying “Eventually—Why Not Now?” and plastered them with the answer: “Because Pillsbury’s Best!” But the old slogan had accomplished its purpose. Washburn Crosby flour had become a preferred product; people had been persuaded to ask for Gold Medal flour, not merely for flour. By advertising, James S. Bell had found he could partially exempt his company from the pure competition of which flour mills were the ancient victim. To distinguish one man’s flour from another’s and to develop customer loyalty took more and louder advertising than to distinguish (say) one man’s auto from another’s. A prosaic or humdrum product, far from calling for prosaic advertising, called for the maximum of imagination.

---

What General Mills learned about flour it has applied to breakfast cereals, and here it has found an even better opportunity for escaping from the costly and competitive uniformity of its product. Gold Medal flour was after all just first-rate flour. Wheaties, introduced in 1924, was something rather new in the field of ready-to-eat cereals; it was the first all-wheat cereal. But like flour, it required mass production, national distribution, national advertising, and good sales promotion.

Wheaties, which now has 12 per cent of the U.S. cereal market, was brought out before what passes for marketing science was well known, but elaborate tests were made in advance on Kix (4 per cent of the market) and Cheerioats (7 per cent). Even the names were selected with formidable care; highbrows who wince at them should know that they went through visual and auditory tests devised by psychologists. When the company’s oat cereal was ready, the choice of a name was narrowed down to Cheerioats or Fl-Oat-S. The tests revealed that Fl-Oat-S had an undesirable connotation; it reminded women of Ivory soap (“It floats”). Therefore the choice went to Cheerioats, safely reminiscent of nothing but joy and horses.

---

The forward-looking man

The man mostly responsible for all this planned and profitable ballyhoo is James Ford Bell, General Mills’ Board Chairman and largest stockholder (3 per cent of the common). He is the son of the James S. Bell who merchandised Gold Medal flour. Jim Bell, fifth generation in a milling family, became President of Washburn Crosby in 1925 and was the first President of General Mills. He became Board Chairman in 1934.

Mr. Bell is a tall, bald man with small, twinkling eyes, round cheeks, and a beaming manner. At sixty-five he has little interest in the past but a consuming curiosity about the present and future. He likes to talk in the technical language of the economist (his doctrine of pure competition is a version of the one given here), and he was one of the most important sponsors of the Twin Cities tax plan.

It is one of Mr. Bell’s conceits that he is not the executive bead of General Mills. He prefers to describe his $50,000-a-year job as “ambassador from the owners (stockholders) to the management.” Because he believes the owners of a company should do its planning, Mr. Bell has the company’s two “departments of the future,” research and public relations, report directly to him.

It takes more than one man to run a company like General Mills, but so far as General Mills is made in the image of one man, that man is James Ford Bell.

From 1934 to 1942 the President and executive head of the company was Donald Derby Davis, an austere man. One of his favorite phrases, “Facts—not opinions,” caused General Mills’ irreverent juniors to define a fact as “an opinion of the front office.” Mr. Davis took leave of absence from his $80,000-a-year job in 1942 to become one of WPB’s top men, and four months later General Mills elected a new President.

The new President (at $65,000 a year) is Harry Amos Bullis. He was executive Vice President at the time Mr. Davis stepped out. Mr. Bullis taught school to get money to attend the University of Wisconsin, and stayed there by selling sewing machines. At twenty-six, a Phi Beta Kappa, he was graduated, served in the World War I Army, then went to work for General Mills as an accountant. Instantly he began making friends. He rarely forgot the birthdays or anniversaries of his associates or the names of their children. In another man this might have been taken for shrewd company politics. General Mills people insist Mr. Bullis does nice things only because he likes everybody. Mr. Bullis is a nervous, voluble man. He does not smoke or drink. When Mr. Bullis became President he wrote out and distributed a ten-point platform. Its unimpeachable planks called upon all executives to “Build men—big men”; to “Follow the three R’s of creative business thinking—Realism, Research, and Resolute Reasoning”; to “Maintain the American Way of Life”; and, in conclusion, urged all to “Have faith in God.”

Mr. Bullis is flanked by Executive Vice President Leslie N. Perrin, who gets $40,000 a year, and sixteen Vice Presidents who get $24,000 to $35,000 a year. The young men among them are not Washburns, Crosbys, or Bells, for Mr. Bell says he opposes dynastic influences. He prefers instead to pick bright young men (there are seven Phi Beta Kappas in executive positions) with strong opinions. He encourages his young men to develop ideas and to fight them out. In theory, Mr. Bell steps in to settle arguments before they go too far.

---

It takes more than one man to run a company like General Mills, but so far as General Mills is made in the image of one man, that man is James Ford Bell. Certainly it is his image the outsider always sees, for Mr. Bell’s interest in public relations is as great as his interest in sales promotion. He wants agreeable relations with the public, stockholders, employees, other companies, and the government. Back in the middle thirties Mr. Bell and Mr. Davis used to send despairing letters to stockholders telling them that government debt and tax policies made it next to impossible for management to guarantee profitable operation. Later Mr. Bell apparently decided that the company should be able to accommodate itself to the New Deal, or didn’t have much choice. In 1940 he was sending a letter to all companies with which General Mills did business, telling them that fair standards, including fair labor standards, were what made business good.

General Mills also cultivates its stockholders assiduously. Chairman Bell was always sorry that the annual meeting in Delaware was attended only by two or three people bearing proxies. So in 1939 he toured the country, holding informal stockholders’ meetings in eight cities. A film, The Year’s Work, was shown, and questions were answered—if submitted in writing in advance. Mr. Bell shook hands with everybody attending, and then one and all sat down to a round of Wheaties with cream and sugar.

Three years ago, after a long search for an articulate public-relations man, Mr. Bell found thirty-four-year-old W. Howard Chase, for whom “articulate” is almost an understatement. A University of Iowa Phi Beta Kappa who did graduate work at the London School of Economics and Harvard, Mr. Chase was a Harvard instructor, an editorial writer, a lobbyist, and an editor of the Whaley-Eaton News Service before he came to General Mills. He describes General Mills as “a public utility, privately owned,” and has announced that he hopes not only to influence the public but General Mills as well: to insist, for example, that it have easily understandable financial reports, good labor relations, a sound pension system.

---

Where research leads

Even more important than advertising and public relations in Mr. Bell’s scheme of things is research. Advertising relieves the deadly uniformity of overly competitive products. But where advertising is a palliative, research is a cure. If successful, it might even get you brand-new products not closely competitive with anything. That is what Mr. Bell hopes. The research department costs about a million dollars a year; its personnel has been increased sevenfold since 1938, and after the war its space will be tripled.

Mr. Bell is fond of saying that “one must go where research leads.” Research has led General Mills into some fields where no one would expect to find a milling company. Ten years ago the company’s then-modest research department developed a way to make vitamin D by the activation process. In 1938 General Mills joined with the Eastman Kodak Co., whose physicists had developed molecular distillation of vitamins, to organize what is now known as Distillation Products, Inc.

In 1941 General Mills established a special commodities division, and assigned to it the vitamin-D operations, manufacture of wheat starch (used for paper sizing), monosodium glutamate (a flavoring agent), and amino acids. The aminos are regarded as especially promising; they are about where vitamins were a dozen years ago.

In three years before starting production General Mills spent $750,000 on fats and oils, and early in 1945 opened a soybean-extraction plant. Ahead, maybe, is the hydrogenation of oils, and conceivably the manufacture of margarine, salad dressing, and shortenings, as well as some interesting byproducts such as polyamide resin.

---

Next to Betty Crocker, General Mills’ most remarkable departure from orthodox milling is its mechanical division. About seventy-five persons used to figure out new processing and packaging machinery, including some excellent mechanics, engineers, and designers equipped with good machine tools. In 1940 Harry Bullis, then executive Vice President, decided war was inevitable and that a mere flour mill would lose its engineers and mechanics. To keep these men there had better be some war work. The company therefore bid on parts for six-inch guns. More contracts came for torpedo directors, gun-sights, and fire-control devices, and the mechanical department outgrew its quarters and had to be moved to a larger building. Now it employs 1,400 to 1,600 persons on the most demanding high-precision work. An offshoot of the mechanical department is a prism factory, developed because a packing-department employee was an amateur astronomer who had learned how to grind his own lenses.

Now, as a result of its war work, General Mills has a fine plant, a million dollars worth of new, high-precision machine tools, about 1,500 skilled employees, and a great need for some new postwar lines. These have been supplied, in part at least, by Morris H. Graham, a professional inventor, who came in one day to see Arthur D. Hyde, Vice President in charge of the research department and the mechanical division. Graham suggested that General Mills might make household appliances, and said he had some new ideas. General Mills now has shop models of an electric iron, a coffee maker, a kitchen mixer, and a pressure cooker.

When reconversion is permitted, General Mills’ mechanical department will turn happily to these household gadgets and to processing and packaging machinery for other plants as well as its own. Roscoe Imhoff, an experienced appliance sales manager recently hired by General Mills, has said the gadgets will be of high quality, not inexpensive, and none will be given away as premiums. Regular appliance jobbers will handle the items; they will not be a sideline for flour salesmen.

---

For all its adventures in new fields, General Mills is still basically a flour-milling company. At present, 42 per cent of its profits still come from bakery and family flour. Commercial and mill feeds, byproducts of flour manufacture, contribute another 26 per cent; packaged cereals and dehydrated soup, about 15 per cent; and the 103 farm-service stores, about 6 per cent. Thus nearly 90 per cent of General Mills’ profits still come from what might be called its old-line products. By comparison the new divisions are small: the mechanical division supplies only about 5 per cent of the profits; the chemical division, 1.5 per cent; and the new fats and oils division, no profit at all as yet.

But the new adventures are more important than their profits today. Though demand for gadgets and for vitamins and aminos is as unpredictable as the demand for flour is stable, the margin of profit is high. So General Mills is engaged in mating a stable, low-margin business with a variety of risky enterprises where the margins are wide. The result of the cross, the company very reasonably hopes, will be a hybrid vigor possessed by neither of the parents.

Not that breaking into the new lines will be easy. As Mr. Bell is well aware, though they take him away from the lean margins of pure competition they are not an escape from competition. In its new fields, instead of the constant erosion of prices and margins by smaller competitors, General Mills will have to contend with the rugged slugging of the giants. In fats and oils it will be up against the mighty Procter & Gamble; in its household gadgets it will have to contend with General Electric and Westinghouse—and also a host of concerns which, like General Mills itself, are looking for work for their war-bloated machine shops. But General Mills feels it has some advantages in this type of warfare. It has the ubiquitous Betty Crocker, who, no doubt, can be counted upon to endorse her corporation’s appliances. And it has the General Mills name—which the company is already at work enhancing. It is spending nearly $1 million a year now on institutional advertising; and, where the name General Mills was formerly subordinated to the company’s brand names, it is now being featured over the radio and in newspaper and magazine advertisements.

“I wouldn’t attempt to predict,” says President Bullis, “what General Mills will be ten years from now. No—not even five years from now.”