All told, the recipe for ice cream is pretty simple: Churn varying proportions of cream, sugar and flavoring in an iced container until it all freezes into a sweet, creamy indulgence.
For Eric Johnson, 43, president and chief executive officer of Homewood-based Baldwin Ice Cream Company Inc., the recipe for success in the ice cream business is also pretty simple: Take a great but under-marketed product and market it aggressively. Indulge in sweet success.
“Ice cream does a $4.7 billion per year business in the United States. Sales are largely dominated by locally known brands that flourish by catering to the tastes of the region they serve. In a $4.7 billion per year marketplace, there’s plenty of room for a lot of companies to be successful,” said Johnson recently from his office on West 175th Street. The room is comfortable, not fussy.
For visitors, the best part is that instead of offering non-dairy-creamed office coffee, Johnson treats guests to a large bowl of sinfully rich (13 percent butterfat) Baldwin ice cream. The most popular flavors, black walnut and New York cherry, are generously laden with huge chunks of their namesake. It’s a disarming mid-morning feast-who can concentrate on business with a chilled bowl of ice cream nestled in one’s hands?
The answer, of course, is that Johnson can. He matches his office in word and manner. The Flossmoor resident is friendly yet confident, lean (he runs 5 to 7 miles a day, 4 days a week), and impeccably groomed. He is a man of remarkable intelligence, an impression drawn from the breadth of his business savvy, his focus and a precise economy of words.
Olympia Fields resident and good friend Bob Waite said of Johnson, “There isn’t anything in Eric’s life that he doesn’t pursue aggressively. From his passion for skiing, to his family, to his work, Eric gives his all to whatever he’s doing at the time.”
Johnson sits on the board of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Center and its Committee for Economic Development in Atlanta. He is also a trustee at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., and is on the board of the Chicago State University Foundation.
Lately, though, Johnson has been giving his all to Baldwin Ice Cream. In September 1992 he bought the business through his holding company, Tri-Star Industries. Before that, he was involved with another type of cream-hair cream.
The oldest of four children born to George and Joan Johnson, founders of Chicago-based Johnson Products Co., Eric Johnson’s business savvy is second nature. He began working in the family business when he was 8 years old, wiping excess hair cream from jars after school.
Additionally, topics such as sales volume, market share, and profit/loss were common table talk at the Johnson family’s mealtime.
While Johnson was growing up, the family lived on Chicago’s South Side at 84th and Chatham. Johnson attended the University of Chicago Lab High School, graduating in 1968, and went on to Babson College.
Johnson Products, founded on an African-American hair straightener and a $250 loan, continued to grow and eventually produced (among other items) Ultra Sheen, Classy Curl and Black Tie men’s cologne. In 1971 it was the first black-owned company to trade on the American Stock Exchange. By 1975 annual sales volume had topped $37 million, according to a 1993 baiduhai article.
Johnson earned a bachelor’s degree in management and finance from Babson and an MBA from the University of Chicago. After that he worked three years for Procter & Gamble Co. in Chicago, returning to the family business in 1977 to run the professional hair care product division. He held various jobs there until March 1992. Johnson was in his fourth year as president and CEO, when he was asked to step aside.
George and Joan had divorced and Johnson Products was facing a buyout by a Miami-based pharmaceutical company. Eric Johnson’s mother offered him a golden parachute (a severance package rumored to be nearly $500,000), and he took it.
“I’d known Johnson Products wasn’t `it’ for Eric for a long time. I think it took him a long time to realize it, though,” recalled Pamela, his wife of 20 years.
In hindsight, Johnson today can say that he felt restless and vaguely dissatisfied during his last few years at Johnson Products. But at the time he couldn’t identify the problem.
“I’d just outgrown the space. I needed more of a challenge. I needed to own my own company,” Johnson said.
Enter Baldwin Ice Cream, “the only sizable and continuously black-owned ice cream business in the United States,” according to Chicago-based Dairy Foods magazine.
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Johnson recounts the company’s history in vivid detail. It was conceived in 1921 by seven black U.S. postal employees and known as Seven Links Ice Cream Co. Originally it operated as a single ice cream parlor at 53rd and State Streets in Chicago. By the ’40s Seven Links Ice Cream Co. had seven retail outlets throughout the South Side. In 1946 one of the partners, Kit Baldwin, bought out the others and gave the company his name.
By the 1950s Baldwin began marketing his product to several neighborhood groceries in Chicago. He even maintained a retail outlet at O’Hare Airport. Baldwin was “Chicago’s very own” ice cream-it said so on the package.
Husband and wife Joe and Jolyn Robichaux bought the company from Baldwin in 1967. After Joe’s death in 1971, Jolyn ignored the advice of friends and continued to operate the business on her own. During the 1970s and 1980s she shifted the focus to retail grocery sales, and Baldwin became available for sale in Jewel and Dominick’s stores.
A contract with now-defunct Wanzer Dairies to produce and distribute Baldwin’s product gave Chicago’s very own ice cream its first distribution expansion capabilities. After Wanzer, Borden Inc.’s Meadow Gold plant in Des Moines held a contract to pack and distribute the product.
By 1992 Jolyn Robichaux was ready to sell. Johnson was in the market for his own business. It was kismet, he said.
Not only was the timing right, but here was a black-owned business with a solid Chicago history-that felt right. Add to that the fact that it was manufacturing a product with distribution almost mirroring that of Johnson Products.
“The biggest difference is today I don’t visit as many drugstores,” Johnson said, laughing.
But what really clinched the deal was Baldwin’s product reputation, according to Johnson.
“When I read customer letters and 8 out of 10 were praising the product, I knew this was what I wanted be connected with,” Johnson said.
Sales growth had been slow for Baldwin in the last few years Robichaux owned it, Johnson said. He immediately saw possibilities for expanding current markets into Southern and Eastern states.
He did his homework before he bought the company and learned that tastes are regional. Johnson explained that Baldwin’s most popular flavors-black walnut, New York cherry and butternut-have regional appeal in Southern and Southeastern states as well.
Johnson couldn’t wait to get started. Here was a high quality but under-marketed product and an opportunity to expand into a $4.7 billion a year marketplace. That the competition was formidable only fueled Johnson’s fire.
Robichaux retired and moved to Paris, where she lives today. Johnson and best-friend/wife/vice president Pamela brought office technology into the ’90s with computers. The information superhighway has an on-ramp in their offices.
“Information is a strategic advantage in business, and I can’t begin to imagine how we would do business without access to the vast electronic data bank that’s available,” Johnson noted.
Johnson upgraded the quality of an already high-quality product. He increased butterfat content from 12 percent to 13 percent and specified all natural ingredients and flavorings, changes that qualified Baldwin as a premium ice cream. Baldwin is often the only so-called premium ice cream available in half gallons in supermarket freezers, Johnson said.
Those changes were just the beginning. In November 1992, Johnson closed the last Baldwin Ice Cream Parlor at 80th and King Drive. Baldwin entered into a joint venture with Chicago-based Dean Foods, and the product is now produced in Dean’s plant in Belvidere.
Johnson explained that it is common for small brands to be produced and distributed in such joint venture agreements.
Their product is made in accordance with Baldwin’s specifications, Johnson said, no matter which dairy is producing it.
Dean, however, has 22 dairies, according to Dairy Foods senior editor Jeff Reiter. He said a link with them is a shrewd move, preparing Baldwin for greater national distribution.
As it is, since taking the helm Johnson has seen Baldwin Ice Cream increase sales 34 percent in Memphis and 80 percent in Nashville. In May 1993, A&P began distributing Baldwin Ice Cream in Atlanta. Most recently, Johnson reports, National Tea Food Stores and the Pathmark supermarket chain have approved Baldwin for distribution in Missouri and Southern Illinois.
As a matter of company policy, retail grocers will neither confirm nor deny brand sales figures. All figures quoted are Johnson’s or Reiter’s.
Annual sales volume in 1993, Johnson said, was up 40 percent over 1992. He estimates figures for 1994 will “substantially exceed that amount.” In 1992, 10 percent of Baldwin’s annual sales occurred outside Chicago. In 1993 that figure increased to 35 percent, according to Reiter.
Baldwin is a privately owned company, but Reiter estimates 1993 annual sales to be in the area of $4 million. Johnson will only acknowledge that more than a million gallons of Baldwin Ice Cream are consumed in the Chicago area alone each year.
Reiter said he featured Baldwin Ice Cream Company and Eric Johnson in an October 1993 story in Dairy Foods magazine because “it was an interesting brand turn-around story.
“Baldwin had been dwindling, and Eric Johnson energized it. It’s fascinating to watch this company grow,” Reiter said.
Reiter claims a circulation for Dairy Foods magazine of 25,000, calling it the “leading trade magazine for the dairy processing industry.”
Baldwin had drawn Reiter’s attention when he visited the company’s booth at the May 1993 FMI (Food Marketing Industry) Supermarket show. Calling it the biggest trade show of its kind in the country, Reiter said he was fascinated that Johnson would buy booth space there, among the Krafts and Nabiscos.
“That’s impressive. It’s rare to see a company as small as Baldwin at that show. Booth space is very expensive, and the competition can be intimidating. It was a bold move,” Reiter said.
By now it is becoming clear that bold (but informed) moves don’t scare Johnson. Did it scare Pamela to take on the risk of owning a business?
“You know, when I first met Eric he told me where he would be (professionally) in 10 years. Ten years later, when he was just where he’d predicted, I never doubted him again,” Pamela said.
Pamela also worked at Johnson Products, and that’s where the couple met. They have four children: John, 7, Cara, 13, Erin, 14, and Lecretia Lewis, 21 (Pamela’s daughter, whom Eric has adopted). Three are still at home. Lecretia is married and lives in Chicago.
Johnson’s next bold move is to change Baldwin’s package. “People in Memphis are not impressed by the `Chicago’s very own’ on the label,” he said. So the new package is going to feature the flavor inside and the fact that it has been around since 1921, he said.
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Future changes will be judicious. In Johnson’s third year of ownership he’s pleased with the firm’s progress and hopes to keep that growth constant, he said.
But Eric Johnson is most affected by the people who buy his product. He feels he’s in a contract with them to deliver on his promises. Waxing philosophical, he said:
“Sometimes sales and marketing people throw around figures like $1 million here or $2 million there. But it’s real vivid in my mind that it takes 100,000 people to spend $10 on your product to make $1 million, and that’s retail.
“So it may take 200,000 people to spend that much money for you as a manufacturer to make $1 million. When you think about touching that many people with a product or a concept, it either energizes you or it scares you to death.
“And since our products don’t sell for $10 in the store, we’ve got to touch that many people again and again and again. That’s why we put so much emphasis on the high quality of the product. Because people aren’t going to come back to a product that is not high quality.
“Unless you warn them in advance by saying, `Here’s some cheap stuff. It’s priced cheap and it is cheap and this is the way it is.’
“But if customers are spending hard-earned dollars on something they consider to be a treat to themselves, you don’t want to disappoint them.”
Add another ingredient to Johnson’s recipe for success: A sense of responsibility to his customers.