Armour & Company was an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
slaughterhouseA slaughterhouse or abattoir is a facility where animals are killed for consumption as food products.Approximately 45-50% of the animal can be turned into edible products...
and
meatpackingThe meat packing industry handles the slaughtering, processing, packaging, and distribution of animals such as cattle, pigs, sheep and other livestock...
company founded in Chicago, Illinois, in 1867 by the Armour brothers, led by
Philip Danforth ArmourPhilip Danforth Armour, Sr. was an American businessman who founded Armour and Company, an American meatpacking firm.-Biography:...
. By 1880, the company was Chicago's most important business and helped make the city and its
Union Stock YardsThe Union Stock Yard & Transit Co., or The Yards, was the meat packing district in Chicago for over a century starting in 1865. The district was operated by a group of railroad companies that acquired swampland, and turned it to a centralized processing area...
the center of the American meatpacking industry. During the same period
its facilityThe Armour Packing Plant was a division of Armour and Company located at South 29th and Q Streets in South Omaha, Nebraska. The plant opened in 1897 and closed in 1968. The plant included several buildings, including a remarkable red brick administrative building, and a large, tall wall which...
in
Omaha, NebraskaOmaha is the largest city in the state of Nebraska, United States, and is the county seat of Douglas County. It is located in the Midwestern United States on the Missouri River, about 20 miles north of the mouth of the Platte River...
, boomed as well. That city's meatpacking industry was the top in the nation in 1959. In the 1980s, the Armour brand was split between shelf-stable meat products and refrigerated meat products. Today each is owned by different entities (see below).
The Armour Star (shelf-stable) brand includes meat-based lard and canned entrees, including hash, chili, stews, and potted meats. The rights to the Armour Star food brand are owned by
Pinnacle FoodsPinnacle Foods Group LLC is a leading packaged foods company headquartered in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, owned by The Blackstone Group. Pinnacle Foods is a key player in the shelf stable and frozen food categories and their products can be found in more than 85% of American households.The company...
. The Armour brand for refrigerated meats is now owned by
Smithfield FoodsSmithfield Foods, Inc. is the world’s largest pork producer and processor. Headquartered in Smithfield, Virginia, it runs facilities in 26 U.S. states, including the world's largest meat-processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, and has operations in Brazil, China, France, Mexico, Poland,...
of
Smithfield, VirginiaSmithfield is a town in Isle of Wight County, in the South Hampton Roads subregion of the Hampton Roads region of Virginia in the United States. The population was 8,089 at the 2010 census....
, through their affiliate, Armour Eckrich LLC. The Armour brand for use in the pharmaceutical industry is owned by
Forest LaboratoriesForest Laboratories is a pharmaceutical company headquartered in New York City, USA. Its revenues for the year ended 31 March 2007 were US$3.4 billion. The company's research and development spending has grown rapidly in recent years, and as of 2007, approached almost a billion US dollars a year,...
, Incorporated.
1867 to 1950
In its early years Armour sold every kind of consumer product made from animals: not only meats but
glueThis is a list of various types of glue. Historically, the term "glue" only referred to protein colloids prepared from animal flesh. The meaning has been extended to refer to any fluid adhesive....
, oil,
fertilizerFertilizer is any organic or inorganic material of natural or synthetic origin that is added to a soil to supply one or more plant nutrients essential to the growth of plants. A recent assessment found that about 40 to 60% of crop yields are attributable to commercial fertilizer use...
, hairbrushes, buttons, oleomargarine, and drugs made from slaughterhouse byproducts. Armour operated in an environment without labor unions, health inspections or government regulation. Accidents were commonplace. Armour was notorious for the low pay it offered its line workers. It fought unionization by banning known union activists and by breaking strikes in 1904 and 1921, employing
African AmericanAfrican Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
s and new immigrants as strikebreakers. The company did not become fully unionized until the late 1930s when the Meatpacking Union succeeded in creating an interracial industrial union as part of the
Congress of Industrial OrganizationsThe Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, proposed by John L. Lewis in 1932, was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required union leaders to swear that they were not...
(CIO).
During the
Spanish-American WarThe Spanish–American War was a conflict in 1898 between Spain and the United States, effectively the result of American intervention in the ongoing Cuban War of Independence...
(1898) Armour sold 500,000 pounds of beef to the US Army. An army inspector tested the meat two months later and found that 751 cases contained rotten meat. This resulted in the food poisoning of thousands of soldiers.
In the early 1920s Armour encountered financial troubles and the Armour family sold its majority interest to financier
Frederick H. PrinceFrederick Henry Prince was an American stockbroker, investment banker and financier.He was born in Winchester, Massachusetts, the son of Frederick O. Prince, former Mayor of the city of Boston and Helen Henry Prince. He studied at Harvard University, but left in his sophomore year to get an early...
. The firm retained its position as one of the largest American firms through the
Great DepressionThe Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
and the sharp increase in demand during
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. During this period, it expanded its operations across the United States; at its peak the company employed as many as 50,000 people.
In 1948, Armour, which had made soap for years as a by-product of the meatpacking process, developed a deodorant soap by adding the germicidal agent AT-7 to soap. This limited body-odor by reducing bacteria on the skin. The new soap was named "Dial" because of its 24-hour protection against the odor-causing bacteria. Armour introduced the soap with a full-page advertisement using scented ink in the Chicago Tribune.
After World War II Armour and Company's fortunes began to decline. In 1959 it closed its Chicago slaughterhouse operations.
1950-2000
During the 1950s Dial became the best-selling deodorant soap in the US. The company adopted the slogan "Aren't you glad you use Dial? Don't you wish everybody did?" in 1953. In the 1960s, Armour expanded the Dial line with deodorants and shaving creams. During this period the young
Dale CarnegieDale Breckenridge Carnegie was an American writer, lecturer, and the developer of famous courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking, and interpersonal skills...
became the company's highest-selling salesman in their South Omaha sales region.
Chicago-based bus company
Greyhound CorporationGreyhound Lines, Inc., based in Dallas, Texas, is an intercity common carrier of passengers by bus serving over 3,700 destinations in the United States, Canada and Mexico, operating under the well-known logo of a leaping greyhound. It was founded in Hibbing, Minnesota, USA, in 1914 and...
acquired Armour and Co. and its Dial brand in 1970. Greyhound kept the company's meatpacking (Armour Foods) and consumer products operations (Armour-Dial) and sold the rest of its assets. In 1971, Greyhound moved Armour-Dial's headquarters from
ChicagoChicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
to
Phoenix, ArizonaPhoenix is the capital, and largest city, of the U.S. state of Arizona, as well as the sixth most populated city in the United States. Phoenix is home to 1,445,632 people according to the official 2010 U.S. Census Bureau data...
, to a newly-built $83 million building.
Greyhound's rapid diversification and frequent unit restructurings led to erratic profitability. In 1981, John Teets was appointed chairman of Greyhound and began selling unprofitable subsidiaries. After meatpackers struck at Armour Food meat-packing plants in the early-1980s, Teets shut 29 plants and sold its meatpacking operation to ConAgra, Inc. (now ConAgra Foods, Inc.), but kept its canned meat business. Greyhound's Armour-Dial unit continued to manufacture the canned meat products while licensing the Armour-Star brand name.
A similar labor feud at Greyhound led to the sale of the bus operations in 1987. Armour-Dial acquired the household products business Purex Corporation in 1985. Two years later it introduced Liquid Dial soap as well as acquiring the
Twenty-Mule-Team Borax20 Mule Team Borax is a brand of cleaner manufactured by the U.S. soap firm Dial Corporation. The product is named after the 20-mule teams that were used by William Tell Coleman's company to move borax out of Death Valley, California, to the nearest rail spur between 1883 and 1889.Mule teams were...
laundry products business. In 1990, the company acquired the Breck's hair products line.
To reflect its changing focus, the company changed its name to The Dial Corporation in 1991. When it sold Greyhound Line, Inc and then Motor Coach Industries to the public in 1993, it exited the US bus industry altogether. Also that year Dial bought Renuzit air fresheners from S. C. Johnson. The company introduced the Nature's Accents line of skin care products in 1995.
In late 1995, management of parent Dial Corporation announced their intent to split the company and spin off the consumer products segment. In 1996, the remaining company became the Viad Corporation, consisting of financial and leisure products. The consumer business was reborn as a new Dial Corporation, soon relocating its corporate offices to
Scottsdale, ArizonaScottsdale is a city in the eastern part of Maricopa County, Arizona, United States, adjacent to Phoenix. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, as of 2010 the population of the city was 217,385...
, adjacent to its long-time research and development facility. That same year, John Teets and Andrew S Patti were both ousted from their respective roles as CEO and President and replaced by Malcolm Jozoff, a former P&G manager, whose tenure included major layoffs in the fall of 1996 and then a series of financially disastrous acquisitions the following four years. In 2000, Jozoff was fired and replaced by Herbert Baum, with a mandate from the board of directors to find a suitable buyer for the company.
2000 to present
The Dial Corporation was acquired by
Henkel KGaAHenkel AG & Co. KGaA is an multinational company headquartered in Düsseldorf, Germany.The company operates in three business areas: Home Care , Personal Care ,...
of Düsseldorf, Germany, in March 2004. The food-related brands of the Dial Corporation—including the shelf-stable meat products sold under the Armour-Star brand, which encompassed foods such as chili, hash, potted meat, sloppy joe sauce, sliced dried beef, Treet, and Vienna sausages—were sold to Pinnacle Foods Group in March 2006, so that the company could focus on its personal care, laundry, and professional products businesses. Dial's Cream corn starch and Appian Way boxed pizza products were also part of the deal. Under Pinnacle's ownership, over 150 meat products are sold under the Armour-Star label, and are now manufactured by Smithfield Foods (having acquired ConAgra's refrigerated meat business in late 2006; this represented somewhat of a reuniting, as ConAgra had bought the Armour refrigerated meat business in 1982). Pinnacle Foods was acquired by The Blackstone Group, a New York City-based private equity firm, in April 2007.
Armour's most well-recognized product is Armour hot dogs,and also,Armour LunchMakers,which compete with Oscar Meyers Lunchables,and Armour Vienna Saussages, which are today owned by Smithfield Foods through their Armour Eckrich LLC affiliate.
See also
- Armour Refrigerator Line
The Armour Refrigerator Line was a private refrigerator car line established in 1883 by Chicago meat packer Philip Armour, the founder of Armour and Company....
- Dial Corporation
- Harriet Quimby
Harriet Quimby was an early American aviator and a movie screenwriter. In 1911 she was awarded a U.S. pilot's certificate by the Aero Club of America, becoming the first woman to gain a pilot's license in the United States. In 1912 she became the first woman to fly across the English Channel...
- Swift and Company
- The Jungle
The Jungle is a 1906 novel written by journalist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair wrote the novel with the intention of portraying the life of the immigrant in the United States, but readers were more concerned with the large portion of the book pertaining to the corruption of the American meatpacking...