Background
Margaret Rudkin Fogarty was born in New York City, the daughter of Joseph J. Fogarty, an Irish-born truckman, and Margaret Healy. When she was twelve, the Fogarty family moved to Flushing, N. Y.
Margaret Rudkin Fogarty was born in New York City, the daughter of Joseph J. Fogarty, an Irish-born truckman, and Margaret Healy. When she was twelve, the Fogarty family moved to Flushing, N. Y.
She graduated from high school in 1915 in Flushing, N. Y.
During the next four years Rudkin worked at a bank in Flushing, first as a bookkeeper and then as a teller. In 1919 she became a customer's representative with the brokerage firm of McClure, Jones and Company. Between 1923 and 1929 the Rudkin lived a prosperous life in New York City. Then she moved to Fairfield, Connecticut, where she bought 125 acres of farmland and constructed a Tudor-style mansion. Dubbing her estate Pepperidge Farm after the pepperidge, or black gum, trees on the property, the Rudkin enjoyed a comfortable country life while also experimenting with ways to make money from the estate, beginning with homegrown apples and turkeys.
In the summer of 1937, Margaret Rudkin accidentally launched a new enterprise. After a doctor suggested that her youngest son's asthmatic condition was being aggravated by the chemical additives in commercially baked goods, she developed a special diet for him built upon natural foods. Although lacking any baking experience, Rudkin began to bake her own whole-wheat bread from stone-ground flour, grinding the wheat in a kitchen coffee mill and devising her own recipe, which made generous use of butter, whole milk, honey, and molasses. Before long she was turning out good-tasting bread for her family and friends. When her son's condition seemed to improve after eating the bread, his allergist asked her to make bread for several other of his patients, and this generated a sizable mail-order business.
In August 1937, Rudkin sold her first batch of loaves wholesale to a grocer in Fairfield, and soon after, she persuaded the manager of Charles and Company, a specialty grocer in New York City, to order twenty-four loaves a day. By this time Rudkin had hired some neighbor women to assist her, had converted the estate's stable and part of the garage into her bakery, and was also baking white bread made from unbleached flour for people who could not tolerate much roughage in their diet.
From this beginning, Pepperidge Farm, as Rudkin christened her business, emerged, providing bakery products for people who wanted the quality of homemade food and were willing to pay for it. Despite the high price she charged for her bread (twenty-five cents a loaf compared to ten cents a loaf for commercially baked bread) because of the use of expensive ingredients, she was selling 4, 000 loaves a week within a year.
Word of mouth prompted many orders, as did the favorable publicity Rudkin received in the New York press, especially an article in the New York Journal and American (Nov. 20, 1937). Similar articles in national magazines followed, leading to a number of standing orders from customers throughout the United States and in foreign countries. As her business mushroomed, Rudkin acquired a fleet of trucks to keep stores stocked with her products, contracted with two old water-powered gristmills to grind the top-grade wheat she bought, and added melba toast and pound cake to her roster of products.
In 1940 she transferred her operations to rented buildings in nearby Norwalk, giving her the capacity to bake 50, 000 loaves a week. Determined to keep the firm under family control, Rudkin financed most of the expansion from earnings and kept its management in her and her husband's hands. Gradually, her husband, who served as chairman of the board, relinquished his Wall Street connections to direct Pepperidge Farm's finances and marketing activities, while Rudkin, as president, oversaw the personnel and production side of the business.
After World War II, Pepperidge Farm continued to grow. In 1947, Rudkin moved her bakery into a new plant in Norwalk that she had designed herself. It initially had the capacity to produce 4, 000 loaves an hour. In 1949 she opened a second bakery in Pennsylvania, and in 1953, a third in Illinois. At the same time, Rudkin deftly utilized television to sell her bread. Often she appeared in homespun commercials herself as "Maggie" Rudkin, basing her sales appeal on the nation's nostalgic yearning for "homey" and nutritious food. She also added new products, including a line of delicate luxury cookies, a frozen pastry line, and brown-and-serve rolls. Notwithstanding the growth of Pepperidge Farm and the mass production of her bread, Rudkin remained committed to the high-quality baking ingredients and the practices she had first adopted in 1937. She still used only stone-ground wheat, eschewed commmercial shortenings, mixed the dough in small batches, and cut and kneaded it by hand.
To ensure freshness, Rudkin decreed that bread not sold after two days on a store shelf must be returned and then solved the problem of what to do with the returned bread by making it into poultry stuffing and selling it at a good profit. By the late 1950's, Pepperidge Farm employed 1, 000 workers, the majority of whom were women, owing to Rudkin's belief that women were more adept than men at baking bread.
A stern perfectionist, Rudkin closely supervised all aspects of her bakery to see that everything was done according to her exacting standards, and she demanded a full day's work from her employees. In return, she paid higher wages than the industry level and instituted bonus and insurance plans. In 1960, with profits totaling $1. 3 million on annual sales of $32 million, Rudkin sold Pepperidge Farm to the Campbell Soup Company for Campbell stock worth $28 million. She became a director of Campbell Soup while continuing to run Pepperidge Farm as an independent subsidiary. Two years later Rudkin turned over the presidency of the company to one of her sons and replaced her husband as chairman. She held this position until her retirement in September 1966. Rudkin died in New Haven, Connecticut.
(cook book)
On April 8, 1923, Margaret married Henry Albert Rudkin, a partner in the brokerage house. They had three children.