DougGuy
03-15-2016, 01:25 PM
Fellas, THIS is a company full of purpose driven individuals who by their very actions show that they both BELIEVE in America, and DEFINE America. We as a nation could learn a LOT from companies (and families) like this. Let alone that fact that the modern Lodge cast iron products are top notch first rate pieces that look good and work even better!
PART ONE:
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/51bf0e35e4b010d205f86840/t/55e5b21ae4b0fe3e14c9d23a/1441116704524/_MG_4489.jpg?format=2500w
The Lucky Dogs of South Pittsburg
Among the most prized objects owned by Southern families are the cast-iron skillets passed down from generation to generation. The ones in your kitchen probably came from Lodge Manufacturing Co., in the tiny Tennessee town of South Pittsburg. Most of us know well the memories contained in those old skillets, but we know very little about the integrity of the people who make them. A visit to the Lodge foundry certainly has lessons to teach us about the South and its culture. But more importantly, Lodge also exemplifies something remarkably rare in today’s business world: a family-run company that has built a booming, global business without selling out its hometown.
Story by Chuck Reece (http://chuckreece.com/) | Photos by John Fulton (http://www.johnfultonphotography.com/)
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/51bf0e35e4b010d205f86840/t/56d872a5746fb9333bceb319/1457025731340/?format=300w
http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/v2/lg-share-en.gif (http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=300&pubid=ra-51febdf31f6976b4)
If you have spent time in small, once-industrial Southern towns, the house that sits at the corner of Magnolia Avenue and Third Street in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, would probably strike you as familiar.
The brick home just has that substantive, sturdy look of a place that once housed the most important family in town. The house was built in 1877 by one Joseph Lodge. You already know his name: It’s on the bottom of your black-iron skillets.
But unlike many such homes in similar towns, this is still very much the town father’s house. Today, its occupants are Lodge’s great-granddaughter, Carolyn Kellermann Millhiser, and her husband Bill. Joseph Lodge and his wife, Ann Elizabeth Harvey, had two children — a son, Les, born in 1883, and a daughter, Edith, born in 1881. Edith married Charles Richard Kellermann. Thus, the Lodge and Kellermann families have owned Lodge Manufacturing Co. throughout its 120-year life.
Millhiser calls herself the company’s “historian by default.”
“I have stuff,” she says. She looks at Mark Kelly, a Lodge marketing promotions manager who’s tagged along to introduce me to Carolyn.
“Does he want to look at my stuff?”
“Believe me,” Kelly says. “She has a hell of a collection.”
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/51bf0e35e4b010d205f86840/t/55e8829de4b0c6b7e925695a/1441301154337/?format=1500w
I definitely want to look at her stuff. She graciously guides me through the house and into its tiny kitchen.
“Right here is some of my stuff,” she says, and points to some shelves just outside the kitchen. “The dogs.”
The shelves are full of small dogs of various breeds, black and heavy, cast from iron In the Lodge company’s foundry a few blocks away. Their purpose was to be doorstops.
“These are the things they sold when the Great Depression was on,” Millhiser says. “They could sell doorstops when they couldn't sell skillets.”
There are dozens of other items in the house Millhiser remarks upon — all with delicious stories behind them, particularly the pan for cornbread sticks that the company had to discontinue because the finished cornbread didn’t come out looking like an ear of corn, as intended, but instead resembled … well … a man’s naughty bits.
But I am more interested in the other stories that these little dogs could tell. Stories about an independent, family-owned corporation that found a way to keep its employees working through the Great Depression and has now gone on global success. Today, after 120 years, Lodge Manufacturing’s brand reaches around the world. The company is constantly finding innovative ways to make more and better products, and it has sold millions of skillets — not just the black, cast-iron pans it has always made, but also lines of seasoned steel and enameled cast-iron cookware.
And for all those years, through all that growth, the company has never left South Pittsburg, its little hometown of 3,000 people on the Tennessee River west of Chattanooga. In the age of globalization, how did that happen? And why? With a business so big and still booming past its 120th birthday, surely the Wall Street investment bankers would have come calling, the management consultants would have parachuted in to do corporate mojo, and the whole business would have been broken up, with the town’s jobs shipped hither and yon. And South Pittsburg would have wound up like so many other small Southern towns that once thrived on heavy industry.
But it didn’t. It thrives. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore.
The story I’m most curious about is why it did happen here: how this global company has remained family-owned, controlled by 40-odd members of the Kellermann and Lodge families.
Carolyn Millhiser is one of those shareholders, and since she has already owned up to being the company’s “historian by default,” I decide to ask her.
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/51bf0e35e4b010d205f86840/t/55e88188e4b09f87636610db/1441300879243/?format=1500w
Carolyn Millhiser
“One of the things that's immediately striking about Lodge,” I say to Millhiser, “is that, typically, when you have a company that's making a product that is so widely consumed, sold in different countries, usually what happens is investment bankers from Wall Street show up.”
“They've tried,” Millhiser replies, the faintest air of disdain in her tone.
“Well, how did the family resist?” I ask. “What was it that made everyone want to keep running the company as a family company?”
“I don't know,” she says. “We just …” She pauses for a moment, then says, “It was in our ethic. Not only are we fourth-, going on fifth-generation owners, but the employees are also third- and fourth-generation employees. You know, we're part of the fiber of this town. We're the only real business that's been here for a long time. We're the only one that's really left, and I don't think we've ever thought about selling. It's made a living for the people that were working here and those of us who lived away and have some ownership through stock. It hasn't been a necessity.”
She pauses again, then asks me, “Do you know what I'm trying to say?”
I think I do. Millhiser is trying to say that for five generations, her family has been more interested in this question …
What will it do to South Pittsburg?
… than it has been in this one:
How much money can we make?
Don’t get me wrong. I am sure the members of the Lodge and Kellermann families live well, and I’m not naive enough to think there haven’t been squabbles among the members over the past 120 years as they discussed those two questions. But throughout their company’s history, the family, as a group, chose its hometown over the gleaming, Wall Street vision of wealth, in which too much is never enough.
I had intended to come to South Pittsburg to write a story about the peculiar romance Southerners have with their cast-iron skillets — how these inexpensive, utilitarian objects are handed from one generation of family cooks to the next with a reverence typically accorded only to objects of much greater economic value. But the truth is, I’m not sure I could capture that better than these two sentences from John T. Edge’s 2002 book, “A Gracious Plenty (http://amzn.to/1QJCNc8)”:
“Each time a Southern cook hefts a skillet to the stovetop, he or she is not alone. Trapped within the iron confines of these skillets and stewpots are the scents and secrets of a family’s culinary history.”
And anyway, when I asked Carolyn Millhiser about the skillet-as-heirloom thing, she pretty much nailed it in one line: “That's because of the good food that the cooks made in it.”
So I decided to tell a different story. For about five years of my life, I wrote about big corporations as a journalist, and for another 15 or so, I worked as a writer or consultant for quite a few of them. I’ve written about CEOs, and I’ve written for CEOs. I’m no master, but I know enough about how big corporations work to see another story to be told: the one about how two families could grow a global business in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, across five generations, all the while resisting the lure of Wall Street because selling out would kill their hometown.
I know enough about big business to know this: What Lodge Manufacturing Co. has achieved, in today’s business world, is just a damned miracle.
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/51bf0e35e4b010d205f86840/t/55e87d71e4b0ef23d8d8286b/1441299839734/?format=2500w
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/51bf0e35e4b010d205f86840/t/56d872fc8259b55e8b1d18e8/1457025796563/?format=1500w
The first thing you need to know about Lodge, as a business, is that the company is just as dedicated to — and just as successful at — innovation, efficiency and quality control as any big publicly traded company. In fact, I find myself wondering if all those management consultants — with all their Six Sigmas and “lean manufacturing processes” and whatnot — might do well to visit South Pittsburg. They might learn a thing or two.
After you get over being wowed by the thousands of flying sparks that result from any operation involving streams of molten metal, the first thing you notice when you walk into Lodge’s foundries is two giant piles of raw materials: One pile is raw pig iron, but the other one confuses me a bit. It’s a giant pile of unseasoned cast-iron skillets.
So I ask Larry Raydo, the technical services manager who is walking me through the foundry, why the skillets are part of the raw materials. He takes the opportunity to explain Lodge’s quality-control process to me. Here’s how it works: After the individual skillets come out of their black-sand molds, each one is hung by a hook on a system of conveyor chains. As the pans move through the rest of the manufacturing process, any Lodge employee — even if that person’s job isn’t in the foundry — has the right to pull a skillet off its hook and dump it in the scrap heap, right up to the second when someone in the packaging operation pulls the pan off the hook and slides it into a cardboard box. Even the slightest imperfection can doom a skillet and send it back to the raw-material pile.
I ask Raydo what percentage of each day’s production gets recycled as raw material. He tells me the answer is somewhere north of 10 percent, and that on some days the number can go as high as 14 percent. I wonder aloud why that makes business sense. Then he tells me the Lodge’s customer-return rate. Out of all the Lodge skillets shipped to retailers worldwide, customers return only 0.03 percent. That means, for every 33,333 Lodge skillets that leave the foundry, only one of those skillets will be returned. Your chance of being struck by lightning in your lifetime is about 100 times greater than your chance of buying a faulty Lodge skillet.
Empowered employees equal better quality control and greater efficiency. It’s a gospel management gurus like to preach. Lodge has it down cold.
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/51bf0e35e4b010d205f86840/t/55e8847ee4b09880734e19a4/1441301633281/?format=1500w
The second thing you need to know about Lodge, as a business, is that in 2002, the company scored a major innovation when it figured out how to send cast-iron skillets out of the factory already “seasoned.” Anyone who bought a Lodge product in the 20th century knew the process of seasoning that new skillet was fairly laborious, and a variety of methods were offered. Some said to crank your oven to the highest possible temperature, to coat the skillet with a light film of cooking oil and place it upside down on the oven rack, and to leave it there you smelled smoke. Lots of grandmothers said to cook cake after cake of cornbread in it until the gray of the freshly cast iron turned into that luscious, shimmering black you see on a well-seasoned pan. And speaking to Rita Stephens, who has been running the Lodge Factory Store in South Pittsburg for a couple decades, I learn that there are countless variations. She knows every one of them.
But when Lodge figured out how to season the pans in the factory, meaning that every new cast-iron skillet would go out the door completely ready to cook in, it set off another wave of growth. Sales soared, and by 2007, every product left the foundry pre-seasoned.
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/51bf0e35e4b010d205f86840/t/55e880b7e4b03bba84ee7e0a/1441300666431/?format=2500w
I got to see the seasoning process at work, but it’s proprietary. If told you what I saw, somebody from South Pittsburg would probably bring a skillet down from the mountains and hit me over the head with it. But I am free to tell you a story about how such innovation can produce unexpected consequences. After Lodge switched to in-factory seasoning, the company began to see customer-return rates go up. If you’ve ever seasoned your own skillet, using the smoking-oven method described earlier, you might remember a drop or two of brown, caramelized oil clinging to the rim — the last remnants of the oil you used to begin the process.
Lodge worked out the whole process so that seasoning would leave only one tiny drop of caramelized oil, precisely at the lowermost point of each hanging skillet. A customer would take the skillet home and usually never notice that tiny droplet until one day, when the rim of the skillet would bump up against another hard object — maybe the wall of a kitchen sink — and the droplet would break off. The broken droplet would then look brown, like exactly what it was made of: caramelized oil.
Some consumers, however, interpreted the brown spot as rust, and they’d return the skillet to the store. That’s why today, at the very end of the Lodge manufacturing line, right before the skillets roll into the packaging department, there sits a lone man or woman with a blowtorch. That person’s job is simply to apply the blowtorch to that last, little bubble of browned oil and burn it away. Result: a perfect, flawlessly seasoned, unblemished cast-iron skillet.
Sitting in a chair with a blowtorch all day isn’t the most favored job in the factory, so the workers take turns with it. Whoever winds up with the job gets a one-day nickname: Bubble Boy or Bubble Girl. Not only is Lodge Manufacturing a family-run company, it seems its people operate like a family, too.
PART ONE:
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/51bf0e35e4b010d205f86840/t/55e5b21ae4b0fe3e14c9d23a/1441116704524/_MG_4489.jpg?format=2500w
The Lucky Dogs of South Pittsburg
Among the most prized objects owned by Southern families are the cast-iron skillets passed down from generation to generation. The ones in your kitchen probably came from Lodge Manufacturing Co., in the tiny Tennessee town of South Pittsburg. Most of us know well the memories contained in those old skillets, but we know very little about the integrity of the people who make them. A visit to the Lodge foundry certainly has lessons to teach us about the South and its culture. But more importantly, Lodge also exemplifies something remarkably rare in today’s business world: a family-run company that has built a booming, global business without selling out its hometown.
Story by Chuck Reece (http://chuckreece.com/) | Photos by John Fulton (http://www.johnfultonphotography.com/)
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/51bf0e35e4b010d205f86840/t/56d872a5746fb9333bceb319/1457025731340/?format=300w
http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/v2/lg-share-en.gif (http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=300&pubid=ra-51febdf31f6976b4)
If you have spent time in small, once-industrial Southern towns, the house that sits at the corner of Magnolia Avenue and Third Street in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, would probably strike you as familiar.
The brick home just has that substantive, sturdy look of a place that once housed the most important family in town. The house was built in 1877 by one Joseph Lodge. You already know his name: It’s on the bottom of your black-iron skillets.
But unlike many such homes in similar towns, this is still very much the town father’s house. Today, its occupants are Lodge’s great-granddaughter, Carolyn Kellermann Millhiser, and her husband Bill. Joseph Lodge and his wife, Ann Elizabeth Harvey, had two children — a son, Les, born in 1883, and a daughter, Edith, born in 1881. Edith married Charles Richard Kellermann. Thus, the Lodge and Kellermann families have owned Lodge Manufacturing Co. throughout its 120-year life.
Millhiser calls herself the company’s “historian by default.”
“I have stuff,” she says. She looks at Mark Kelly, a Lodge marketing promotions manager who’s tagged along to introduce me to Carolyn.
“Does he want to look at my stuff?”
“Believe me,” Kelly says. “She has a hell of a collection.”
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/51bf0e35e4b010d205f86840/t/55e8829de4b0c6b7e925695a/1441301154337/?format=1500w
I definitely want to look at her stuff. She graciously guides me through the house and into its tiny kitchen.
“Right here is some of my stuff,” she says, and points to some shelves just outside the kitchen. “The dogs.”
The shelves are full of small dogs of various breeds, black and heavy, cast from iron In the Lodge company’s foundry a few blocks away. Their purpose was to be doorstops.
“These are the things they sold when the Great Depression was on,” Millhiser says. “They could sell doorstops when they couldn't sell skillets.”
There are dozens of other items in the house Millhiser remarks upon — all with delicious stories behind them, particularly the pan for cornbread sticks that the company had to discontinue because the finished cornbread didn’t come out looking like an ear of corn, as intended, but instead resembled … well … a man’s naughty bits.
But I am more interested in the other stories that these little dogs could tell. Stories about an independent, family-owned corporation that found a way to keep its employees working through the Great Depression and has now gone on global success. Today, after 120 years, Lodge Manufacturing’s brand reaches around the world. The company is constantly finding innovative ways to make more and better products, and it has sold millions of skillets — not just the black, cast-iron pans it has always made, but also lines of seasoned steel and enameled cast-iron cookware.
And for all those years, through all that growth, the company has never left South Pittsburg, its little hometown of 3,000 people on the Tennessee River west of Chattanooga. In the age of globalization, how did that happen? And why? With a business so big and still booming past its 120th birthday, surely the Wall Street investment bankers would have come calling, the management consultants would have parachuted in to do corporate mojo, and the whole business would have been broken up, with the town’s jobs shipped hither and yon. And South Pittsburg would have wound up like so many other small Southern towns that once thrived on heavy industry.
But it didn’t. It thrives. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore.
The story I’m most curious about is why it did happen here: how this global company has remained family-owned, controlled by 40-odd members of the Kellermann and Lodge families.
Carolyn Millhiser is one of those shareholders, and since she has already owned up to being the company’s “historian by default,” I decide to ask her.
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/51bf0e35e4b010d205f86840/t/55e88188e4b09f87636610db/1441300879243/?format=1500w
Carolyn Millhiser
“One of the things that's immediately striking about Lodge,” I say to Millhiser, “is that, typically, when you have a company that's making a product that is so widely consumed, sold in different countries, usually what happens is investment bankers from Wall Street show up.”
“They've tried,” Millhiser replies, the faintest air of disdain in her tone.
“Well, how did the family resist?” I ask. “What was it that made everyone want to keep running the company as a family company?”
“I don't know,” she says. “We just …” She pauses for a moment, then says, “It was in our ethic. Not only are we fourth-, going on fifth-generation owners, but the employees are also third- and fourth-generation employees. You know, we're part of the fiber of this town. We're the only real business that's been here for a long time. We're the only one that's really left, and I don't think we've ever thought about selling. It's made a living for the people that were working here and those of us who lived away and have some ownership through stock. It hasn't been a necessity.”
She pauses again, then asks me, “Do you know what I'm trying to say?”
I think I do. Millhiser is trying to say that for five generations, her family has been more interested in this question …
What will it do to South Pittsburg?
… than it has been in this one:
How much money can we make?
Don’t get me wrong. I am sure the members of the Lodge and Kellermann families live well, and I’m not naive enough to think there haven’t been squabbles among the members over the past 120 years as they discussed those two questions. But throughout their company’s history, the family, as a group, chose its hometown over the gleaming, Wall Street vision of wealth, in which too much is never enough.
I had intended to come to South Pittsburg to write a story about the peculiar romance Southerners have with their cast-iron skillets — how these inexpensive, utilitarian objects are handed from one generation of family cooks to the next with a reverence typically accorded only to objects of much greater economic value. But the truth is, I’m not sure I could capture that better than these two sentences from John T. Edge’s 2002 book, “A Gracious Plenty (http://amzn.to/1QJCNc8)”:
“Each time a Southern cook hefts a skillet to the stovetop, he or she is not alone. Trapped within the iron confines of these skillets and stewpots are the scents and secrets of a family’s culinary history.”
And anyway, when I asked Carolyn Millhiser about the skillet-as-heirloom thing, she pretty much nailed it in one line: “That's because of the good food that the cooks made in it.”
So I decided to tell a different story. For about five years of my life, I wrote about big corporations as a journalist, and for another 15 or so, I worked as a writer or consultant for quite a few of them. I’ve written about CEOs, and I’ve written for CEOs. I’m no master, but I know enough about how big corporations work to see another story to be told: the one about how two families could grow a global business in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, across five generations, all the while resisting the lure of Wall Street because selling out would kill their hometown.
I know enough about big business to know this: What Lodge Manufacturing Co. has achieved, in today’s business world, is just a damned miracle.
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/51bf0e35e4b010d205f86840/t/55e87d71e4b0ef23d8d8286b/1441299839734/?format=2500w
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/51bf0e35e4b010d205f86840/t/56d872fc8259b55e8b1d18e8/1457025796563/?format=1500w
The first thing you need to know about Lodge, as a business, is that the company is just as dedicated to — and just as successful at — innovation, efficiency and quality control as any big publicly traded company. In fact, I find myself wondering if all those management consultants — with all their Six Sigmas and “lean manufacturing processes” and whatnot — might do well to visit South Pittsburg. They might learn a thing or two.
After you get over being wowed by the thousands of flying sparks that result from any operation involving streams of molten metal, the first thing you notice when you walk into Lodge’s foundries is two giant piles of raw materials: One pile is raw pig iron, but the other one confuses me a bit. It’s a giant pile of unseasoned cast-iron skillets.
So I ask Larry Raydo, the technical services manager who is walking me through the foundry, why the skillets are part of the raw materials. He takes the opportunity to explain Lodge’s quality-control process to me. Here’s how it works: After the individual skillets come out of their black-sand molds, each one is hung by a hook on a system of conveyor chains. As the pans move through the rest of the manufacturing process, any Lodge employee — even if that person’s job isn’t in the foundry — has the right to pull a skillet off its hook and dump it in the scrap heap, right up to the second when someone in the packaging operation pulls the pan off the hook and slides it into a cardboard box. Even the slightest imperfection can doom a skillet and send it back to the raw-material pile.
I ask Raydo what percentage of each day’s production gets recycled as raw material. He tells me the answer is somewhere north of 10 percent, and that on some days the number can go as high as 14 percent. I wonder aloud why that makes business sense. Then he tells me the Lodge’s customer-return rate. Out of all the Lodge skillets shipped to retailers worldwide, customers return only 0.03 percent. That means, for every 33,333 Lodge skillets that leave the foundry, only one of those skillets will be returned. Your chance of being struck by lightning in your lifetime is about 100 times greater than your chance of buying a faulty Lodge skillet.
Empowered employees equal better quality control and greater efficiency. It’s a gospel management gurus like to preach. Lodge has it down cold.
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/51bf0e35e4b010d205f86840/t/55e8847ee4b09880734e19a4/1441301633281/?format=1500w
The second thing you need to know about Lodge, as a business, is that in 2002, the company scored a major innovation when it figured out how to send cast-iron skillets out of the factory already “seasoned.” Anyone who bought a Lodge product in the 20th century knew the process of seasoning that new skillet was fairly laborious, and a variety of methods were offered. Some said to crank your oven to the highest possible temperature, to coat the skillet with a light film of cooking oil and place it upside down on the oven rack, and to leave it there you smelled smoke. Lots of grandmothers said to cook cake after cake of cornbread in it until the gray of the freshly cast iron turned into that luscious, shimmering black you see on a well-seasoned pan. And speaking to Rita Stephens, who has been running the Lodge Factory Store in South Pittsburg for a couple decades, I learn that there are countless variations. She knows every one of them.
But when Lodge figured out how to season the pans in the factory, meaning that every new cast-iron skillet would go out the door completely ready to cook in, it set off another wave of growth. Sales soared, and by 2007, every product left the foundry pre-seasoned.
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/51bf0e35e4b010d205f86840/t/55e880b7e4b03bba84ee7e0a/1441300666431/?format=2500w
I got to see the seasoning process at work, but it’s proprietary. If told you what I saw, somebody from South Pittsburg would probably bring a skillet down from the mountains and hit me over the head with it. But I am free to tell you a story about how such innovation can produce unexpected consequences. After Lodge switched to in-factory seasoning, the company began to see customer-return rates go up. If you’ve ever seasoned your own skillet, using the smoking-oven method described earlier, you might remember a drop or two of brown, caramelized oil clinging to the rim — the last remnants of the oil you used to begin the process.
Lodge worked out the whole process so that seasoning would leave only one tiny drop of caramelized oil, precisely at the lowermost point of each hanging skillet. A customer would take the skillet home and usually never notice that tiny droplet until one day, when the rim of the skillet would bump up against another hard object — maybe the wall of a kitchen sink — and the droplet would break off. The broken droplet would then look brown, like exactly what it was made of: caramelized oil.
Some consumers, however, interpreted the brown spot as rust, and they’d return the skillet to the store. That’s why today, at the very end of the Lodge manufacturing line, right before the skillets roll into the packaging department, there sits a lone man or woman with a blowtorch. That person’s job is simply to apply the blowtorch to that last, little bubble of browned oil and burn it away. Result: a perfect, flawlessly seasoned, unblemished cast-iron skillet.
Sitting in a chair with a blowtorch all day isn’t the most favored job in the factory, so the workers take turns with it. Whoever winds up with the job gets a one-day nickname: Bubble Boy or Bubble Girl. Not only is Lodge Manufacturing a family-run company, it seems its people operate like a family, too.