Robert J. Vlasic Dies at 96; Made a Fortune by Making Pickles Funny

Robert J. Vlasic, who by combining a eager sense for enterprise with a fair keener humorousness turned his household enterprise into the nation’s largest purveyor of pickles, gherkins, sauerkraut and a number of different briny condiments, died on Might 8 at his house in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. He was 96.

His son Invoice, a former Detroit bureau chief for The New York Occasions, confirmed the loss of life.

Folks have been pickling greens for hundreds of years, and the preserving observe has lengthy been common in North America; George Washington is alleged to have collected 476 totally different sorts of pickles.

Nonetheless, when Mr. Vlasic was rising up in Detroit, the son of a Croatian immigrant who ran a dairy distributor, People consumed simply 1.8 kilos of pickles per capita per yr, in response to the U.S. Division of Agriculture.

If that seems like rather a lot, take into account that by the point Mr. Vlasic bought his firm, Vlasic Pickles, to the Campbell Soup Firm in 1978, that quantity had greater than quadrupled, to eight kilos per capita. Vlasic managed a few quarter of the market, far outpacing its closest and far bigger rival, H.J. Heinz.

The corporate’s success was attributable largely to Mr. Vlasic’s administration acumen. An engineer by coaching, he insisted that his managers preserve their reviews to a single web page, the higher to focus their consideration on what mattered.

However he mixed that hard-nosed boardroom conduct with a laid-back, lighthearted strategy to his merchandise. He cherished pickle jokes and ultimately collected them in a pamphlet, “Bob Vlasic’s 101 Pickle Jokes,” the duvet of which featured a gunslinging, cowboy-hatted gherkin and this salty knee-slapper: “Who’s the hardest pickle in Dodge Metropolis? Marshall Dill.”

Vlasic Pickles entered the American pop-culture pantheon in 1974 with the debut of its mascot, the Vlasic stork. Improbably bedecked in a bow tie, pince-nez glasses and a mailman’s hat, he held a pickle like a cigar and cracked sensible in a voice borrowed from Groucho Marx.

“Now that’s the best-tasting pickle I ever hoid!” went one in all his tag traces, delivered with a pleasant leer and a wag of his pickle. “Ham up your ham! Make your toikey poiky!” went one other.

If the hen’s sartorial particulars have been odd, at the least the selection of spokesman made sense: By the mid-Seventies the child growth was busting, and with birthrates down, it adopted {that a} stork would possibly want a brand new line of labor. And the corporate had already run advertisements taking part in on the assumption that pregnant ladies crave pickles.

“Sweetie, it’s time on your 4 o’clock pickle,” a husband tells his spouse in a single early Vlasic print commercial. It was Mr. Vlasic’s type of humor.

“We determined that pickles are a enjoyable meals,” Mr. Vlasic advised The New York Occasions in 1974. “We determined we didn’t need to take ourselves or our enterprise too severely.”

Robert Joseph Vlasic was born on March 9, 1926, in Detroit. His grandfather, Frank, was a Croat who introduced his household from the city of Livno, in what’s now Bosnia and Herzegovina, to Michigan in 1912.

Frank Vlasic opened a creamery with the cash he had saved from working at an auto physique plant. His son Joseph, Bob’s father, expanded the corporate into distribution, and shortly had the biggest dairy distributor within the state. Bob’s mom, Marie (Messinger) Vlasic, was a homemaker.

Mr. Vlasic graduated with a level in engineering from the College of Michigan in 1949. After serving within the Navy throughout World Battle II, he returned to Michigan and joined the household enterprise.

By the early Nineteen Forties, the corporate had begun increasing into fruit and veggies, and had landed on the concept of placing pickles in jars so that they have been simpler to move and retailer. They have been successful: Pickles have been the right meals for wartime America, the place each scrap of meals was saved.

As he rose within the firm, Mr. Vlasic determined to maneuver it away from distribution to manufacturing. He purchased a sauerkraut plant in Imlay Metropolis, about an hour north of Detroit, and added equipment to make pickles. He signed contracts with cucumber and cabbage farmers, and he expanded into close by states and ultimately the remainder of the nation.

Vlasic initially bought pickles in simply three types: plain, Polish and kosher, the final being essentially the most closely spiced. At its peak, it was promoting almost 100 merchandise, from basic spears and stackers to fancy relishes.

When Mr. Vlasic bought his firm to Campbell Soup, he insisted on a seat on the Campbell board of administrators. Not solely did he get one; he went on to function chairman of the board from 1989 to 1993. (The Vlasic label is now owned by Conagra Manufacturers.)

Mr. Vlasic married Nancy Reuter in 1950. She died in 2016. Alongside together with his son Invoice, he’s survived by 4 different sons, Jim, Rick, Mike and Paul; 17 grandchildren; and 5 great-grandchildren.

After promoting his household enterprise, Mr. Vlasic based and ran a know-how firm, O/E Automation. However he spent increasingly of his time serving on nonprofit and charity boards round Michigan. He acted as a monetary adviser to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit, and he was the primary individual exterior the Ford household to steer the board of the Henry Ford Hospital.

It was, his son mentioned, the kind of work he relished.