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Oscar Gottfried Mayer was born on March 10, 1888 in Chicago, Illinois. He was the son of Oscar Ferdinand Mayer and Louise Christine Greiner, both German immigrants. In 1883 his father established the small Chicago meat market and sausage factory that became Oscar Mayer and Company. (The company has always been a family business. ) At the age of six Mayer learned to link sausages, standing on an upturned butter tub to reach the counter.
Mayer graduated from Robert Waller High School in Chicago in 1905, and in 1909 from Harvard, where he studied engineering methods that he later put to use in the company. He also developed broad cultural interests at Harvard and wrote for the Harvard Advocate.
Beginning as assistant superintendent in 1909, Mayer advanced rapidly in his father's company, becoming secretary, director, and general manager in 1912. From the beginning Mayer concentrated on industrial operations, and under his leadership Oscar Mayer and Company pioneered methods of processing and packaging prepared meats that were adopted throughout the industry. He also realized that future success depended upon expansion of markets beyond the western Great Lakes area. In 1919 the company acquired a farmers' cooperative packing plant in Madison, Wis. , which soon became its biggest operation. Other plants were acquired after World War II in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Davenport, Iowa, and in 1961 controlling interest in a Caracas, Venezuela, packing house was purchased. In 1921 Mayer became vice-president in charge of operations, and in 1928, when his father retired, he succeeded him as president of the firm. At that time the company employed 900 and had annual sales of $21. 5 million. By 1955, when Mayer retired as president, the company employed 8, 500 and annual sales were $220. 2 million. In 1929 the company introduced wieners with a band around every fourth wiener, and in 1944 its engineers developed Kartridg-Pak, a machine that automatically banded wieners. The sausages were then distributed with a strong advertising campaign"Look for the yellow band on every wiener" designed to build confidence in "a wiener with a conscience. " Other techniques developed by the company included a linker, which wrapped sausages automatically and twisted them into standard lengths; a stripper, which removed the cooking casing of wieners and made possible the skinless wiener; a tube machine, which encased liver sausage in a plastic tube, pinched each tube to a proper length, and closed it with a metal ring; and the Slice-Pak, which vacuum-packed sliced meats in plastic. All of this equipment was manufactured by subsidiaries of Oscar Mayer and Company, and leased to other meat-packing companies. Mayer retired as president of the firm in March 1955, but he remained chairman of the board until his death. In 1960 the company introduced a vacuum-sealed package for sausage and wieners after spending six years and $1. 5 million to develop it. Such investment was possible because 85 percent of the company's stock was owned by family members and thus more than half the profits could be plowed back into capital expansion and research. Profit margins are notoriously low in the meat-packing industry.
Oscar Gottfried is known as chairman and president of Oscar Mayer, the processed-meat firm founded by his father. Mayer had invented several devices, including a lard-tub washer and a casing flusher, and had introduced the packaging of sausage in cardboard cartons. In 1959 the American Meat Institute honored him for fifty years of service to the industry in which he was one of the great pioneers. He also established and headed the Oscar Mayer Foundation, which aided many medical and educational institutions.
Mayer's company success was due in large measure to his leadership and his understanding of the implications of new retailing developments. For example, when supermarkets were introduced, Mayer realized that customers were distressed by the loss of the neighborhood butcher, who had advised them on meat selection. He thus saw that the manufacturer would have to replace the butcher, and that a company's success would depend on customers' confidence in easily identified brands.
Although Oscar Mayer and Company was ninth in volume among American packers, it was first in profit margin in Mayer's last years. This was largely due to its computerized market research, through which it was able to predict the demand for its products with remarkable accuracy and to pursue its "vacuum policy, " which deliberately kept production slightly less than demand in order to eliminate the need to unload "distress merchandise. " The company also developed local distribution centers, with refrigeration facilities sufficient to maintain an adequate inventory and with resident sales staffs who were required to maintain prices set by the company. In 1956, Mayer published A Plan for Living, originally an address to Beloit College students, in which he expressed his personal credo: "Lifelong personal development, generous consideration for others, due service to society. " His career included extensive involvement in public and philanthropic activities. Mayer's career is a record of farsighted and progressive leadership in his industry, a steady willingness to take calculated risks and to accept responsibility for the quality of his product, and a recognition that the success of his company was always related to the welfare of the consumer. He died in Evanston, Ill.
Mayer married Elsa Stieglitz on May 10, 1913; they had four children.
