Weaver Popcorn Company Inc

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Weaver Popcorn Company Inc

9850 West Point Drive, Suite 100
Indianapolis, Indiana 46256
U.S.A .
Telephone: (765) 934-2101
Toll Free: (800) 634-8161
Fax: (765) 934-4052
Web site: http://www.weaverpopcorn.com

Private Company
Incorporated: 1928
Employees: 375
Sales: $31.5 million (2005)
NAIC: 311910 Snack Food Manufacturing

ONE-MAN OPERATION BECOMES AN INTERNATIONAL COMPANY

INTENSE FOCUS ON QUALITY AND EMPLOYEE RESPONSIBILITY

ENTERTAINMENT SPENDING PUSHES UP POPCORN SALES INTERNATIONALLY

PRINCIPAL COMPETITORS

ONE-MAN OPERATION BECOMES AN INTERNATIONAL COMPANY

In 1928, the Reverend Ira E. Weaver began growing popping corn that he shucked and bagged and delivered himself in a horse-drawn wagon. His corn was high quality, and his business was an immediate success. Even during the Great Depression, people considered popcorn an affordable treat and were willing to spend a few extra cents for one of Weaver’s bags of kernels. Weaver adhered strictly to providing a quality product from the start. “No sale is complete if the customer isn’t satisfied,” was one of his favorite truisms, according to family lore.

In 1945, Weaver’s son, Welcome, joined the company, having first earned a Ph.D. in organic chemistry. Welcome Weaver introduced advances in harvesting and in methods of storing the popping corn. By the early 1950s, Weaver Popcorn had begun selling its product in foreign markets, initially to enterprising American servicemen and to foreign entrepreneurs who had discovered popcorn during visits to the United States. The company’s products quickly became popular in Scandinavia, where consumers treated popcorn as a salty snack. In Germany, France, and Great Britain, popcorn had less initial appeal; people viewed it as more of a confection than a snack food. According to Jim Labas, who later oversaw Weaver’s international expansion, “You don’t sit down and eat as much chocolate as you do a big tub of (salted) popcorn.”

Throughout the 1960s, the company continued to grow, and by the 1970s, progressive farmers were delivering truckloads of corn kernels to Weaver as opposed to the whole ears of corn they had earlier delivered. The company relied on gravity and sizing machines to shake the kernels to pan for misfits by weight and size. In 1972, Mike Weaver, Welcome Weaver’s son, joined the then-$6 million family business. Weaver had been drafted by the Chicago Bulls, but passed up that opportunity in order to earn a graduate degree in business. After eight years with the company, Mike Weaver assumed the presidency of Weaver in 1980. One of the company’s first new developments under Mike Weaver was the introduction of microwave popcorn in the early 1980s.

INTENSE FOCUS ON QUALITY AND EMPLOYEE RESPONSIBILITY

Another crucial juncture in Mike Weaver’s presidency came during the mid-1980s. One of the company’s Japanese customers, Shintoa Koeki Kaissha Ltd., complained about the quality of one of its largest shipments ever, one worth about $70,000; after sifting through the shipment by hand, the Japanese had decided that there was too much “foreign material” among the kernels and refused to accept it.

The complaint caused Mike Weaver to re-examine his stewardship of the company. He decided that he had not focused on Weaver’s “real purpose,” he admitted in a 1990 Inc. article. “We had slipped.” He wanted to be a more inspiring leader, one who set a clear direction for the business. After considering the option of reselling the shipment in Japan as feed or recleaning it overseas, Weaver decided to bring it back home to look at it himself.

Weaver shut down production and called a meeting of all his employees. Few understood the decision to take back the corn since it had met company specifications. Yet when a crew he had assigned to sift through the returned corn soon discovered that they “hadn’t realized how many dirt clods were in there,” this convinced Weaver of his decision. He met with his top advisers—Welcome Weaver, among them—to debate what to do to boost quality. They considered slowing down their machines or adding extra inspectors, and settled on purchasing optical scanners.

However, rather than compensating for the company’s lapses in quality, the scanners only exposed more of them. “With the [scanners] there, everybody began to see that it takes so much more than machines,” Weaver explained in the Inc. 2004 article. Those who accepted the incoming corn at the facility did not have the instruments to probe deeply enough to find contaminated kernels. The company discovered that it had never set a uniform minimum size for acceptable kernels. Moreover, even though specifications called for corn with a 17 percent moisture level, the company was accepting corn with moisture levels as high as 23 percent.

In the months to follow, Weaver became an aficionado of Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence. He visited companies he wanted his firm to emulate, and in 1986, he brought Peters in to speak to his employees. Weaver began to institute sweeping changes in 1989 in search of solutions. “We turned this place upside down,” he said in Inc. He launched a set of experiments that “pushed the responsibility [for] quality where it ought to be,” that is, with employees. “You just keep asking yourself, ‘How do you energize people to go beyond what they thought possible?’”

When his plant manager resigned, Weaver put together a group of seven workers from different areas; these became his team leaders with whom he met weekly. The team came up with a Preferred Supplier Program to tighten specs on incoming corn by awarding bonuses to farmers who adhered to strict guidelines. He also replaced the manager of his trucking subsidiary with a “Gang of Four” and met with them on a regular basis.

Weaver also began to involve teams of employees in the interviewing process for new workers and established a peer evaluation system that assigned workers the responsibility for judging one another’s performance and determining one another’s bonus. Under Weaver’s profit-sharing plan, bonuses were based on performance, teamwork, and personal development, and employees decided how to divide up the bonus pool. “It reinforces our overall message that they are responsible, they are best at judging quality.”

COMPANY PERSPECTIVES

Reverend Weaver’s legacy still drives our company. In fact, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren carry on the legacy, and they believe in quality and customer satisfaction just as much as Ira Weaver did. No sale is complete if the customer isn’t satisfied, whether down the street or half way around the world. Just the way Ira Weaver would have wanted it.

ENTERTAINMENT SPENDING PUSHES UP POPCORN SALES INTERNATIONALLY

Weaver’s experiments proved successful, and the company’s Japanese business continued to grow. In 1988, the company purchased the assets of Consolidated Popcorn, once the nation’s largest popcorn manufacturer. By about 1990, Weaver controlled 60 percent of the Japanese popcorn market. Between 1990 and 1999, exports for the company more than doubled as a percentage of business to reach 25 percent, and Weaver’s international popcorn sales grew to include 65 countries. By 1999, Weaver controlled 37 percent of the popcorn market worldwide.

Precipitating this growth was spending on entertainment, alongside which international popcorn markets developed. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 2000, about 245 million pounds of popcorn were being exported to Canada, Mexico, Asia, and Europe. “We tripled our volume in tons from 1990 until now,” Labas, in charge of international expansion at Weaver, told the Associated Press in April 1999. “Exports have been a big contributor to that.” On an annual basis, Weaver’s international sales grew at rates ranging from 10 percent to 15 percent in the latter half of the 1990s.

The company’s domestic market share grew as well: by 7 percent from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s and at a rate of 4 percent from 1990 to 1999 despite the fact that domestic sales held steady from 1993 to 2000, according to the USDA. By 1999, the company controlled 70 percent of the popcorn market in Japan and was responsible for about 37 percent of the 1.4 billion pounds of popcorn sold annually worldwide. Weaver supplied six of every ten movie theaters worldwide and was the nation’s largest supplier of movie-house popcorn from 1990 onward.

To accommodate its growth, Weaver set up a processing plant in Forest City, Illinois, in 1995 in the midst of an area that produced 10 to 15 percent of the nation’s popping corn. It also added a plant in Rojas, Argentina, when an Argentine exporting firm came to the company wanting to help it develop the Brazilian popcorn market. In the mid-1990s, more and more Brazilians were discovering popcorn as a general economic expansion there was increasing disposable income.

By 2003, Weaver was exporting about 40 percent of its product to markets in Europe and elsewhere from its processing plants in Rojas. By 2004, the company employed 370 at its Van Buren operations with plans to hire another 50 people. That year, it entered the Russian market with bulk popcorn sales. “[I]t’s all about finding the right partners,” Weaver said of moving into a new foreign market in a 2004 Fort Wayne News-Sentinel article. “[W]e feel we’ve found a good partner [in Russia that] will understand the local tastes.” Initially it appeared that sweetened and cheesy flavors appealed especially to the Russian palate, although buttered popcorn also did well.

The weakening of the dollar in relation to other currencies created opportunities for the spread of popcorn internationally by helping to push exports in 2004. As Weaver explained in a 2004 Fort Wayne News-Sentinel article: “The dollar is more fairly valued against the Euro than it used to be, and that really helped manufacturers expand their export sales, and we’re no exception. ...We are anticipating very strong export growth in the next three to five years.”

The company held firm to its commitment to quality in the face of increased expansion. “If you really want to create a premiere company, you have to go further, further than machines, further with people,” Weaver explained to Inc. in 1990. “In the future, the companies that get far ahead will be the companies that go to any lengths to provide quality. We don’t have a chance otherwise. Quality only happens when people start caring.”

Carrie Rothburd

KEY DATES

1928:: Ira Weaver begins selling his homegrown popcorn.
1945:: Founder’s son, Welcome Weaver, joins the family business.
1972:: Mike Weaver, grandson of the founder, joins the company.
1980:: Mike Weaver becomes president of the company.
1988:: Weaver purchases the assets of Consolidated Popcorn.
1995:: Weaver sets up a processing plant in Forest City, Illinois; the company builds a plant in Rojas, Argentina.