September 18, 2019 • 45 mins
It's easy to start a business empire with family money, and stolen(ish) land. At least it was for James Dole, The Pineapple King. It seems less likely that Dole pineapple would be on every grocery store shelf around the world, if James Dole's cousin Sanford hadn't essentially stolen Hawaii. In this episode of Bizography we examine the not-so-humble history of Dole Foods, the history of Hawaii, and the sweet and juicy goodness of right time, right place, right vision that allowed Dole to grow into what it is today.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The story of Dull Foods is kind of like the
story of Seinfeld. Seinfeld was a show about nothing that
turned into a huge, massive hit, and Dull food is
a story about fruit. It's a story about fruit and vegetables.
It's not that exciting, and yet it's a story of
a company that went from selling pineapples to being the
(00:20):
world's largest producer of fruits and vegetables. This is Bisiography,
the show where we dive into the strange but true
(00:41):
stories of iconic companies. Whether they're a current bright star,
in the midst of a massive dumpster fire, or settling
into the dust heap of history, they all have a
past worth knowing. I'm Dana Barrett. I'm a former tech executive,
an entrepreneur, and a TV and radio host, and over
the course of my career, I've interviewed thousands ofusiness leaders
and reported on the bright beginnings and massive flame outs
(01:03):
of the brands we know and love. Some of their
stories are unexpected, some are about constant innovation, and some
are just about being in the right place at the
right time. Biography is a production of I Heart Radio
and dB Media and is co hosted, as always by
my producer Nick Bean, Hey, Dana, Thanks, So I think
you're right. Dole is totally about timing. Right throughout its history,
(01:27):
Dole always seemed to be in the right place, whether
that's literally in the right place like geographically, or just
in the right business position to make the next big move.
It all happened exactly when it needed to. Yeah, And
to me, the story of Dole is also about sort
of finding a niche, creating demand, something that's not that
easy to do, and then owning and controlling and dominating
(01:50):
a market, and in controlling every piece of the business,
the entire supply chain, from soup to nuts, as they say.
But the story has to start somewhere, and for me,
the story starts with James Doll. So in eighteen seventy seven,
James Dole was born in Jamaica Plaine, Massachusetts. Now not
gonna lie. I had to do a little side research
on Jamaica Plane. Um, for people who live in that area,
(02:12):
you're probably like, Okay, we know the whole story of
Jamaica Plane, but it feels to me like it should
be Jamaica Plans, not Jamaica Plane. And so I had
to do a little research, uh, and apparently there's a
lot of potential stories about where the name came from
and why it's called Jamaica anything, because it really doesn't
have much to do with Jamaica as we think of
it anyway worth googling, just saying kind of interesting. And
there were I think there was a short period of
(02:33):
time on many maps where it was referred to incorrectly
as Jamaica Planes. So no correlation to the island, none
that I could face. Yeah. Um, In any case, getting
back to James Doll, who was born in Jamaica Plaine, Massachusetts,
which is like the Boston suburbs essentially. Um, he was
born there in eighteen seventy seven, and we don't know
a ton about his childhood, and some of our stories
we've been able to discern, like the personality of a
(02:55):
kid growing up, this story not so much. But we
do know that his family said old in America in
colonial times. Uh, they were Puritans, and we know that
there was like a strong clergy and ministry sort of
portion of the family, So his dad was a minister,
his maternal grandfather was a clergyman. We also know that
Dole James Doll State, and that area grew up in
(03:18):
the area of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, went to high school there,
and then in at the age of twenty two, he
gets his bachelor's degree in agriculture from the Bussy Institution
of Harvard University. Now, I think this is just noteworthy
because and a lot of our other stories are founders
were not educated, right there, usually someone who just had
a crazy idea. They worked their way from the bottom
(03:39):
as an office boy or something like that, right exactly. Yeah,
he's a Harvard Man. So that same year he's twenty
two years old, he accumulates sixteen thousand, two hundred and
forty dollars. This is eighteen nine. Um. Some of that
is his own saving up of money, and some of
it is air quotes, family donations, rich people in the bloodline.
(04:01):
Maybe well, you know, Dad gives you a hand out
of a mill, cool mill. I'm just saying the correlation
to modern times not at all. Nothing. Um. It is
absolutely worth noting that sixteen thousand dollars in is about
half a million dollars today, so definitely not chump change.
Not chump change. So he takes his winnings and he
(04:27):
moves to Honolulu, Hawaii. Now, remember this is eight Honolulu.
Hawaii is like a foreign land at that point. He
was going from Massachusetts to Hawaii. It's not like he
got on a delta flight. Yeah, he had to train
and then boat and carriage and all kinds of crazy
ways to travel, and you gotta wonder why would he
(04:48):
go there. It's also not anything to do with the
United States. It just happens to be nearby, but it's
not a United it's not a state, and so um.
Part of the reason is because Hawaii at the time
was governed by his cousin, Sanford Doll. Okay, so hang on,
I just I have to ask his cousin is the
(05:08):
governor of all right, how did how did we even
get there? Who is Sanford Dole? And how did he
even end up in charge of Hawaii? I know, it's
it's sort of it does seem odd because you're thinking,
like you're picturing Hawaii in that era, and at least
for me, I'm picturing like you know, lu woos and
like people in grass skirts and chiefs, kingdom of Hawaiian
(05:30):
kings and right, I'm not picturing like a guy in
a suit as the governor a running it or the
president white guy in a suit, a white guy, no less, Yeah,
whose family is like from a puritan clergy background. He's
a little off. So here's the deal. We'll start with. Like,
there's a little I did a little research here, but
there is a little primer on Hawaii. So basically, in
the seventeen eighties and seventeen nineties, Uh, Hawaii was run
(05:52):
by chiefs who were fighting for power. Uh. And there
were you know, at your point, there were kings and
that's sort of it was the Kingdom of Hawaii. Yeah,
and so um by s, the tribe sort of ended
up all subjugated under a single ruler, and that was
the King. He became known as the King. He was king.
(06:14):
And I don't know I'm gonna get this right because
there's a lot of hamahamas in here. All right, Wait
before I even try, Nick, do you know how to
pronounce this? Actually I do. Don't ask me why his
name is king? Comeha Maha the great? Oh? I remember
that now that you said it out loud, all right.
So he establishes the House of Command Maya, a dynasty
that actually stayed in power and ruled the Kingdom of
(06:36):
Hawaii until eighteen seventy two. So in that era, in
eighteen forty four, Sanford Dole, this man who were talking about,
cousin of James Dole, um, is born in Hawaii because
his parents were Protestant Christian missionaries from you know, the
same general area of the US that James Dole was born.
(06:57):
The clergy tie back to there you go during this
like kingdom of the House of Kamama. Uh, Sanford Dol
was born eighteen forty four. In eighteen seventy two, Um,
the you know, dynasty of Kamama had continued, but the
last king was a bachelor, no kids, and he dies
in eighteen seventy two, and there's nobody to take over.
(07:20):
So then they have a popular election and they picked
the next guy. He last a year. I'm not even
gonna try to pronounce his name because the only last
year also no air. Bad luck Hawaii. Yeah. So now
eighteen seventy four comes along and uh, they have an election,
but it's contested and it's kind of um almost like
(07:41):
some of the scenes we see going on now, there's riots,
people are mad. Um. It's sort of these two factions
fighting for power in Hawaii. And this is when the
Big Daddy United States and Britain get involved. They land
there and they restore the island to order, and uh,
they now move the king that they choose of these
(08:03):
two to sort of a very unofficial, like, you know,
ceremonial role, like the emperor of Japan. Now, yeah, okay,
you're the emperor, but you can't believe it's like the
British monarch to write like. It just becomes sort of
a ceremonial role. So they sort of pushed the king
out of a power roll into a ceremonial role. Meanwhile,
Sanford Dole, who has uh sort of grown up now
(08:24):
and he's got some education and he's gone away to
get educated. He's come back. He is commissioned as a
notary public in Honolulu. Uh, and then he wins the
elections in eighteen eighty four and eighteen eighty six to
be in the legislature of the Hawaiian Kingdom, and he's
a representative there. In eighteen eighty seven, Uh, the Hawaiians
(08:45):
essentially are forced to sign a new constitution. And this
is a constitution forced on them essentially by white businessmen
and lawyers, including Sanford Dole, and it strips the king
of all this is officially now paperwork, stripping the king
of all of his authority and establishing a new qualification
for voting. That we would be seriously pissed about today
in modern times, because this is like disenfranchising most Hawaiians,
(09:09):
most laborers, and favoring wealthier white people who have landed there. Yeah.
So in this constitution is signed under the threat of violence,
and because of that it becomes known as the Bayonet Constitution.
The king is reduced to a figurehead. He stays in
that role until his death. In his sister Queen, can
(09:30):
you pronounce her name? Queen? I'm gonna try it. I
think that's good. That's not too bad. That was pretty cool.
She succeeds him. She becomes the last monarch of Hawaii.
Um in three she announces plans for a new constitution
to proclaim herself absolute monarch. Not super successful because the
(09:52):
Euro American business leaders they don't want that. Yeah, they're
not having it. She's trying to take power back. The
white people are saying no. They formed this Committee of
Safety they call it, yeah, to essentially stage a coup
against the Hawaiian Kingdom and really completely take over. Now
they don't just want to kind of run the place
they want to take over. Now, Sanford Dole decides not
(10:15):
to join the Committee of Safety, but he does help
draft their declaration. And then once all of this goes down,
I'll shortcut it, but essentially he becomes first the territorial governor.
Well first he becomes president, and then it becomes a
territory of the US and he becomes territorial governor. And
it's in that era, in the late eighteen nineties that
(10:37):
James Dole arrives to kind of hang out where his
cousin's in charge and start his business. Fun fact, Sanford
Dole had this crazy, fuzzy, long white beard that like
came down to the middle of his chest kind of
split into two parts. Like he looked like he could
have gotten on a Harley and been really comfortable there. Yeah, exactly.
(10:58):
And he had this big, giant like white handlebar mustache
to match. And now modern times, the Hawaiian name for
a particular kind of pale hair like Spanish Spanish moss,
is called Umi umi o' dole, meaning Dole's beard. So
there you go. He forever remains sort of ingrained in
(11:18):
the history, like Hawaii's owned Santa Claus of Hawaii. So
obviously we digressed a bit, and we do need to
get back to the story of James Dole and how
he sort of became the pineapple King. We'll do that
right after this. So now we know sort of how
(11:39):
Dole even went from Massachusetts to Hawaii, and why he
was inspired to go there in the first place, and
why when he got there he sort of had the
favors he needed from his cousin to get started in business.
So James Dole lands in Hawaii with his you know,
equivalent of half a million dollars that he got from
(11:59):
himself saving and his family, and this is eight and
he purchases a sixty four acre government instead. It's all
making sense now, right in the central plains of the
island of Oahu. And he just knows. He went to school, remember,
for agriculture at Harvard, so he kind of knows what
(12:20):
he's doing. And he decides to start experimenting with some
different crops to see what what he can actually plant
there that's gonna be easy to plant, you know, affordable, sturdy,
all of that, so that he'll have a crop he
can sell. And he experiments with a few different kinds
of crops, ultimately landing on pineapple. So that's eighteen ninety nine.
You know, takes them a little while to get going.
(12:41):
In nineteen o one he officially founds the Hawaiian Pineapple Company.
And from nineteen o one to nine seven he is
just growing this company, growing um. And there's not a
lot of news from that era from the company. It's
it's just sort of he's he's getting it up and running.
He's getting the people in that he needs. He's selling
(13:03):
pineapple um locally and he's you know, beginning to sell
it into California nearby. He's got to do that by
ship um. And so you know, he's starting to make
that industry for him. And I can imagine a pineapple
tree probably takes a while to grow. There's that. Yeah,
well that's a really good question. Actually we should do
a little little side googling on how long it table. Yeah. Yeah,
(13:25):
you can go from history. It's not just bhisiography, the
history of iconic companies, it's also the biology. Uh. In
any case, things are going pretty well, and he is
seeing the writing on the wall in terms of what
other food companies are doing. So he constructs a canary
and packing plant in Hawaii. As this is moving along,
(13:45):
the um yields of the fruit and the popularity of
the product are sort of better than he expected. It's
a good problem. And so he keeps on growing new cannary,
new packing plant. And so he's got more than one plant, now,
more than one packing facility. Now he's got a lot
of product, and he's got to figure out where he's
going to sell it. So he does something that I think,
(14:07):
you know, was really modern thinking for those days, creates
the first ever nationwide consumer ad campaign in the United States,
really the first ever nationwide camp. So he went to
all the newspapers and everything else and put ads in
the he created you know, look, this is this is
before the days of mass media as we know it now.
(14:27):
Print was the medium. And he created these print ads
and placed them all over the United States. There are people, imagine,
of course, you know, in the East Coast and Northeast
who never saw a pineapple. Why would they know anything
about pineapple. Hawaii is a way far away, and they
weren't really growing pineapples and mass in Massachusetts, right, and
(14:49):
I can't I can also imagine. I wonder how many
people saw that first pineapple and went what is that? Exactly? Yeah,
that happens to me occasionally in the grocery store with
when they'll introduce some kind of new fruit and not
be like, what is that? Where did that come from?
But it piques your interest, right, Yeah, Well then I
get a little bit afraid and run the other direction.
But that's just me. But he he creates this national
ad campaign, and when you think about it, um, that
(15:13):
is a hard hill to climb. Like, I have a
brand new product that I have tons of over here
in Hawaii, and I want to try to convince people
all throughout the United States that this is something they need. Yeah,
that is really difficult to kind of create your own
market essentially because there was really no huge nationwide demand
for it, right, And we certainly see that now in
(15:34):
terms of technology. But in some cases, and in some
cases it works, in some cases it doesn't, right, And
then you know, I think maybe, and this is just
a guess here, but I think maybe with food it's
a little bit easier because if you can get people
to taste it and it tastes good, there's going to
be some interest. But remember I didn't say he started
(15:55):
a nationwide food sampling tasting campaign. That's not what he did.
This is print ad. That's got to be so wow.
I can't imagine that trying to introduce for the first
time and then convincing people to spend their hard earned
money on to buy it, right and there there weren't
Instagram influencers. There weren't you know, TV commercials with people
like celebrities eating canned pineapple saying this is delicious. Now.
(16:18):
The beauty of it, though, is that it was canned,
so it was able to ship and stay fresh. It's
not like he's trying to sell fresh pineapple at that time.
He's trying to sell canned pineapple, so a little bit different.
But nonetheless, I think that is sort of a massive
undertaking for the era, absolutely in that in that era
of media. Yeah, that's a that's a big jump to
the fact that that's also interesting that he picked the
(16:39):
pineapple the way he did and said, you know what,
we're just we're just gonna tell everybody it's great and
hope they buy in. Yeah, so pretty amazing. Anyway, from
seven to ninetleven, his ad campaign works, and the business
is growing, and demand for pineapple is growing. But now
they have a different problem, and that is that the
process to peel and core pineapples is mostly manual and
(17:02):
it's pretty slow, meaning the business is ripe for innovation.
See what I did there. Um, So look, this is
like the traditional in a way if you think about it,
challenges that growing businesses face because they've got a product,
there's demand for it. Now they have to keep up
(17:23):
with the demand. This is one of the topic you
here all the time. Um. In modern business, you're a startup,
you don't necessarily want to run right out and get
a giant client, because then you're gonna have to be
able to supply the demand that they have. Now, you know,
he created that giant client by going all over the
United States. But he's also a Harvard Man, so he's
up to the challenge. So nineteen eleven, James Dole hires
(17:46):
a Hawaiian engineer by the name of Henry Gabriel Janaka
to build him a machine that could make the canning
of pineapples more efficient. Janaka takes the job in he
finishes this machine and now instead of um, I forget
what was the original I think they were able to
peel like fifteen core and peel like fifteen pineapples. I
(18:07):
think that the best ones were able to do up
to fifteen an hour. Right, So Janaka creates this machine
that can do thirty five pineapples a Minute's quite an improvement. Yeah, so, um,
and I may not have those numbers exactly right, but
let's just say it this way. It was way faster. Now.
I know you did some looking into this, um, Jannaka machine.
(18:27):
What did you learn about? Right? So I learned that,
so you're right. The first one was thirty five per minute.
It ended up over the next couple of years getting
all the way up to a hundred per minute. And
I just had a curiosity. I couldn't find a lot
of actual details on the machine, but I found an
image of the original patent that was filed, and then
I found some modern day videos of this machine being
used in the Philippines. And it's the exact same machine.
(18:49):
I mean, the one he patented had a lot of
wood and stuff. The new ones are obviously all you know,
modern day steel, but it's the same exact machine for
over a hundred years. Fascinating. I mean, the machine is
known as the Jannaka machine, and uh, it eventually becomes
the industry standard, though sadly, Janaka doesn't live to see
all of that success. He died pretty young. He died
(19:11):
in California in he was only forty two years old,
and he died during the Spanish flu epidemic. So he
invents this things dead five years later, so he only
sees sort of the beginning of the success. And of
course his name lives on to this day, certainly at
least in that industry. And now I guess to the world,
thank you photography. But the Jennaka machine was a great invention,
(19:31):
and I thought this was really fascinating because you know,
nowadays we have um engineers that are creating new products
all the time, whether it's AI or robotics or just
technology we're using online, and it's the engineer who becomes
the celebrity, not the business man like the Elon Musk
right right or Zuckerberg people like that who created the product.
(19:53):
They're the engineer, they're the brains behind it, and they
sort of also become the businessman m which doesn't always
work right, doesn't always go well. But I thought this
was really interesting because for all intents and purposes, aside
from in the fruit industry. Janaka's name is somewhat lost
to history. Like it's not because it lives on in
that industry, but we don't celebrate Janaka as a great inventor, right,
(20:17):
And there's not really anything that kind of hearkens back
to him in any way besides the machine. Like you said,
there's not like a line of products that has his
name on it or anything like that. No, no, And
his story is sort of you know, you can't find
very much about him at all except when he was
born and how he died essentially, and that he created
this machine and so you know, and Dole is the
story that lives on and the name that lives on.
It's just sort of interesting, I thought, um there, but
(20:39):
you know, also just important in the story of Dole
Foods and that this was the innovation needed to really
um start to make this business you know global. The
ability for them to go global comes because of the
ability of this machine to make pineapples and put them
in cannot make them, but you know, can them as
fast as it did essentially, And that wasn't the only
innovation in the history of Dole Foods that made it
(21:03):
what it is today. There is a lot of innovation
that dol did in the supply chain side of things.
We'll get to that right after this. Like any product
based company, Dole as it tries to grow, has the
challenges of keeping all aspects of its business sort of
(21:26):
growing equally. So with the addition of the technology to
their business via the Janaka machine, now they have the
ability to core and peel pineapples and get them in
the can very quickly and get them out to this
demand that they created in the United States on the mainland.
But they also have to have enough fruit to send
to the canneries. You have to have enough trees, right.
(21:48):
So this is where they realize they need to start
having more land to grow on its two now. And
Dole goes back uh to the family network in Hawaii
and in Boston. Um, this is the equivalent of me
calling you know, mom and dad and asking for some
extra money to continue to grow the biz. Yeah. He
goes back to the family. He's like, look, things are
(22:09):
going really well. See I did this big ad campaign.
People are like, in the pineapple thing I came up with, Um,
I need some more cash to grow this thing. And
so they give him some money and he goes back
to Hawaii and he buys an entire island. He bought
one of the Hawaiian islands. Yeah, so he buys this
(22:31):
island for the purposes of building a giant pineapple plantation,
the Island of Night. And it's not even the smallest one. Now,
it's a pretty good decent size this island. Yeah, and
it becomes the largest plantation over time, of course, in
the world, with over twenty acres devoted exclusively to growing pineapple.
(22:53):
I think he knew, probably all along as somebody who
was uh, you know educated at Harvard had this you know,
agriculture degree, but also a bit of the business you know,
learned along the way in school and out that he
couldn't just own one part of this process, that he
needed to own the whole thing, the land itself, the canneries,
(23:14):
the production facilities, the technology, the transportation. I mean, he
sort of saw that if he really wanted to be
successful in this, he was going to he wasn't going
to sort of rent out space on somebody else's plantation,
right or or you know, share some space in a
warehouse with somebody. He wanted to own and control as
much of it as he could and this was true
(23:35):
for the supply chain too, because one of the other
things slowing down the process was getting this delicious canned
fruit from Hawaii to the rest of the country. Right.
It came from us on a slow boat from Hawaii
to the western coast. Yeah, slow boat like that. So
in think about this era, right, Yeah, this is still
(23:58):
way before transport Asian as we know it, and much
of the technology that we now have, right, there's still
in the process of trying to rapidly expand the train
lines right, rail lines right, right, and it's kind of
hard to run those over to Hawaii a little bit,
just a whole lot of but a whole lot of
ground to do that all Son James Dole gets inspired
by Charles Lindbergh's successful transatlantic flight and he sees already
(24:22):
in nine seven that this air transportation thing is going somewhere.
He sees some potential and decides this could potentially play
a role in delivering his fruit. So Nick, what does
he doing? Okay, he sees this and goes, wow, I'm
going to try and find some folks that can you know,
transport my fruit via airplane. So he sponsors what ends
up being called the Dull Air Race, and he markets
(24:46):
this all over the place, in Hawaii and in mostly California,
but the western part of the US. And he puts
up a prize of twenty five thousand dollars in nineteen
seven money. It's a lot, twenty five thousand dollars for
the first airplane to fly from Oakland, California, all the
way to Honolulu. And he also puts up a second
place prize of ten thousand dollars. All right, Dana, let
(25:09):
me just ask you, all right, how many people do
you think end up entering this thing in total? Well,
I have to I don't know the math here, but
if if in the like early, you know, twenty years
before that, we said sixteen thousand dollars was like half
a million, so I would argue that twenty five thousand dollars,
I mean, this is a lot of money for those
times million, it's more right. I mean, because if sixteen
(25:31):
was half a million ten years before, you know, okay, yeah,
so it's twenty five thousand, it's it's more than half
a million equivalent of today you can buy a lot
with twenty five dollars. So I feel like there's probably
a lot of people inspired to do this. Now a
lot of people who are also like dare devilish because
flying was like it wasn't like you were again getting
on adulta flight. This is the era of the barn stormers.
(25:52):
You're right, yeah, I mean this is like people were
you know, we saw those like black and white films
of people trying to make flying machines and crashing into
stuff and yeah, so this was a scary time. It
was for flight. So you asked me, what how many
how many people do you think? All right, I'm gonna
say close a dozen people enter the race, and the
top two prizes go to the only two airplanes that
(26:15):
survive the flight, not the one that gets there first
and the one that gets their second. The only two
that even made it at all, the only two that
didn't die, right, because the other tin planes crashed and
the other tin contestants died while they were attempting to
do this. Can you imagine the scandal if this was
like a reality show today, Like it's like Survivor, but
(26:37):
it's literally survivor, Like we will give the prize money
to the people who literally survive. Everyone will be dead
at the end of the end. Yeah. And this is
also remember like this, they all essentially went Amelia Earhart
like they crashed and that was it. Never were heard
from again. It was nuts. But see the thing is
now he knows it's possible. Maybe not the greatest odds,
(26:57):
but it's possible. And another interesting aspect is this not
only helps his supply chain, but an interesting tidbit is
that this kind of makes Hawaii the tourist destination of
America for a little while, because used to you had
to have a lot of money to get on a
boat and come to Hawaii. Well, now that people with
all the money said, I'll take a plane. It's faster.
(27:18):
So these ships that for a long time would take
people from the coast of California to Hawaii are losing
their top customers. They had to bring prices way down,
which meant the average American could hop on a boat
and go to Hawaii. Interesting. Yeah, so it helped the
entire state essentially. It's kind of fascinating that the rich
people weren't like terrified to get on the planes. You know,
it's sort of like the rich people who want to
(27:39):
go to space today. Well it's right, let's be fair,
and the rich people who want to go to space
today or what thirty forty, So I'd like that, and
the folks that don't are generally older, probably the same
thing the eighty year old rich folks back then. So
I'll just take a boat. But the younger folks said,
let's hop on this new fangled flying invention and go
out to Hawaii. Pretty interesting, fascinating, all right. So look
at this point, you know, James Dole is making investments
(28:01):
in land with the island, in mechanization with the Janaka machine,
in air transportation in this post Lindbergh era, and from
nine thirteen to ninety seven, the combination of those things
result in a decrease in the price of pineapples and
actually kind of puts the company in somewhat of a
vulnerable position because now all of a sudden, you know, they're, uh,
(28:25):
there's so much of it, prices going down. We almost
kind of hurt himself in a way, right with all
of this like goodness, sort of sort of hurts himself,
makes the company a little bit vulnerable. Um. Also, growth
always means the influx of capital, and if you're not
careful about where your capital is coming from, you could
be in trouble. And that's kind of what happens to
Dole next. So in y two, a real estate company
(28:49):
named Castle and Cook that had actually been around since
the eighteen fifties becomes a majority owner of the Hawaiian
Pineapple Company, James Dole's company. Now, how did they do that? Well,
they'd already owned another Hawaiian agriculture company that had made
a thirty three percent investment in Hawaiian pineapple. So Castle
and Cook and Dole, the human beings had been interacting,
(29:10):
they knew each other. And then in Castle and Cook,
because they're a real estate company, they've got money, they
come along and they pick up an additional of the
stock and they now own of James Dole's Hawaiian Pineapple company. So, Nick,
what happens when you lose the majority control of your business?
I'll tell you what doesn't happen. You don't get the
(29:32):
call the shots anymore. Yeah, I would say, what happens
when you lose majority interest in your company? Is nothing
good for you? Yeah, that's what I would say. So,
of course, predictably, the purchase of those shares causes hard
feelings between Dole and Castle and Cook, and after the reorganization.
You know, they're trying to make nice, so they make
(29:53):
Doll the chairman of the board, but they immediately send
him on a quote earned rest. Go on vacation, dude,
take a break. You've worked hard to build this company.
You got that jaknaka machine going, you got the island
over here, Lena I. You know you're tired. Take a break.
(30:13):
Don like a good job, and guess what, don't come back. Yeah, yeah,
because they never called him back. They said, go on
a break, take as long as you need. We'll call
you when we need you. They never called it. Yeah,
So a year later he decided to come back on
his own. N three, He goes to his office and
finds that it's been moved to a storeroom and his
position as president of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company has been filled. Yeah,
(30:37):
he got fired and didn't even get told he got fired, right,
So essentially he's out now, and while the company ultimately
retained the name Doll, Doll the man pretty much done
from that point forward. The company, though, continues to grow
and innovate and grow and innovate and thrive. And we'll
talk about how they did that right after this. So
(31:04):
by ninety three, James Dole is out. He started the
company what thirty years prior, give or take, uh thirty
four years priorty three, thirty two years prior, and by
this point he's out, But his name UM actually becomes
more prevalent once he's gone. Up to then, he was
one of the few guys, it seems like, from that
(31:26):
era who didn't feel like he had to name everything
after himself because a lot of the other photography episodes
we talked about the companies are named for the men.
So he had Wells and Fargo, you had Sears. I mean,
these are all people's names, even Ben and Jerry much
later and they went with first names. Good still UM
joking obviously about them. But but he didn't really feel that.
(31:47):
I mean, he used his last name for other things
he did, so it was stamped on things in large part,
I think because the Doll family name was so well
known in Hawaii, Sanford and his crazy Beard and all
of that. Um. But the company up until this point
had been Hawaiian Pineapple Company. And so after he's gone
(32:07):
in three, that's when Castle and Cook first say, like,
you know why people like the name. They know the
name it's popular here, We're just going to use that,
and we'll have that be the name becomes the first
year that they actually stamped the word doll on the
cans of pineapple and pineapple juice that they are selling.
A low blow. You kick him out and then name
the company after him, right, yeah, And then if this
(32:30):
were modern times, like if he tried to do anything
else with his own name, they would like sue him
and not let him use his own name. I don't
think that actually happened, but it would if it was today.
You know. Uh, in any case, that kicks off essentially,
what is thirty years of just solid business on the
part of Castle and Cook running now Dole Foods and um.
(32:53):
It was quiet for those thirty years for the company.
This is also something you don't really think about in
modern time. The company was private throughout this era, so
they weren't reporting to shareholders. They weren't under any particular
pressure to have massive amounts of growth. But they were
a solid, profitable pineapple company canning pineapple and pineapple juice
(33:15):
and selling it, you know, certainly all throughout North America.
Unclear exactly when they began to sell into other markets.
They didn't actually start to grow in other markets un
till somewhat later, um, but not much. At the end
of that thirty year period, UM, they start making some
news again. So nineteen sixty one, finally Castle and Coke
decides to buy up the remaining shares of the Hawaiian
(33:37):
Pineapple Company and UM, which is now again the product
is dull and UM. They by nineteen sixty three realized
that they can you know, move product around more easily
if it's not all coming from Hawaii, and so they
start uh going international from a fruit growing perspective. And
the first time they do that is nineteen sixty three
when they start up Dole Philippines. So that was kind
(33:59):
of a big year. The nineteen sixty four they decide
to diversify with a whole other fruit and officially they
go bananas. I couldn't help it. I was waiting all
episode for the go bananas joke. Yeah, there you go.
Nine doll gets into the banana business. Castle and Cook
purchases of a company called the Standard Fruit and Steamship Company,
(34:24):
which is based out of New Orleans, and uh that
is how they get into bananas. In the sixties and
early seventies and that gets them into places like Costa
Rica and Nicaragua and they're basically becoming a global company.
At interesting fact, I want to drop in here. Do
you know that this actually is where the term banana
(34:44):
republic comes from? No, not the store for clothes, but
like you've heard countries called banana republics. It's because it's
Castle and Cook Standard Fruit Doll had so much power
over these countries because they owned so much land that
the government have a policy or something they wanted to
in state, and the presidents of these companies could go no,
(35:05):
and the presidents of these countries would go, okay, well
you know, Castle and Cook said no, so we can't.
Banana republics controlled by companies. That's where it came from.
And in fairness to this story where you buy clothes,
they got their name from the idea the banana republics
because you know the story of banana republic just you know,
for people who don't realize this. When they first started
selling clothes, they were all based on like safari looking right,
(35:27):
clothes from those kinds of places like Nicaragua and all
of that. Right. So um in any case, really interesting
because I didn't realize that that was why that was.
I never really understood why it was a banana republic,
like I understood what a banana republic was, that it
was beholden to that the leaders weren't really the leaders
they were. But I always thought it was because, like
the leaders were sort of bananas. But right, No, it's
(35:48):
because countries like Costa Rica and Nicaragua have some pretty
terrible stuff in their history thanks to companies like Standard Fruit. Yikes. Yeah.
Also wait, companies forcing heads of countries to do things
that they don't maybe wouldn't otherwise do. Also sounding kind
of familiar. Um. In any case, we digress. So, you know,
(36:10):
the sixties and seventies was really about um globalization and growth.
And one of the things I think is interesting about
Castle and Cook can we just call them doll Foods
at this point? I feel like their name. Eventually it
became Dold Foods, but for years the company was Hawaiian
Pineapple Company, and it was still Castle and Cook in
some ways. And we're just gonna go with dol Foods
across the board. Um, but they were um, they were
(36:33):
careful in their growth, and a lot of other companies
we talked about certainly in that era in the six
season seventies. You know, we're talking about seventies, they were
just buying up and acquiring any company if the numbers
looked good. So we talked about our c A in
an earlier episode of Bosiography, and they were buying up
all kinds of random companies that had nothing to do
(36:53):
with their core business. Sears did the same thing, and
ultimately some of those purchases were successful, but many weren't, right,
and the losses are usually big losses, right. But in
nineteen seventy two, the leaders of Dole Foods, Castle and
Cook at that time, UH decide that rather than just
buying up companies because the numbers like, they are going
to use what they call planned diversification, and they're gonna
(37:16):
buy companies in fast growing niches of the food market.
Only they're going to stick to food and really not
only stick to food, but really they decided to stick
to produce, to fruits and vegetables, and so that was
sort of their growth strategy from then on. They got
into California based lettuce and celery in the late nineteen seventies. UH.
(37:37):
In the eighties, they got into Europe and their fruit
markets with bananas, with citrus, with other deciduous fruits. I
just want to say deciduous. It is um. And that's
really how they continue to grow. And from an innovation standpoint,
they continue to innovate the way that they were selling fruits,
so they got in and vegetables, and so they got
into frozen um and even in modern time times things
(38:00):
like the steam bags and like, they've just continued to
elevate what they're doing, right, And I think that's a
great point. That's one thing I think most of us
when we hear doll, we think of fruit, and that's
an invention they came out with in the nineties was
kind of the the steaming bags of vegetables. You're frozen vegetable.
Frozen vegetables in general was their idea. And I think
we forget we think so much of fruit, but really
(38:22):
dull castle and cook, like you said, diversified big time
into all kinds of stuff. Yeah. Absolutely, and they listen,
they got into you name the fruit. Basically, they're in
that business over time and this is going on really
to modern times. And so the other thing that's interesting
is there's a lot of pressure I think in for
companies nowadays to reach a certain size and then go public,
have their I p O and go public. And we
(38:43):
see this across all kinds of companies, not just technology. Right,
here's a new one in the news every week, big
I p O from so and so. And you certainly
see it in the food business, because we just saw
it with beyond Burger, right, So that's nothing to do
with technology, and they're going public with a food product.
But this is something that Castle and cook a k.
Dull Foods resisted. They did ultimately go public and then
(39:05):
went back private, and then went public and then went
back private. And this is all in much more recent years.
In the last twenty years this happened. They went went
private again two or three times. A guy named David
Murdock sort of became the key player in the company
in the dreds like I think around the sixties seventies
time frames when he got involved. But the point is
he was like in seventeen, he's in his late nineties,
(39:26):
mid nineties, and he's still the chairman of the board
and still making decisions about you know, public private And
it was under his reign that they went public, pulled back,
went private, went public again, pulled back and actually thought
about it again in twenty seventeen, but didn't do it
as far as I can find. So. Um, it's really
interesting because I think every time you go into the
(39:47):
public markets, you realize you're then beholden to this quarterly
growth number, and it can force you into making some
bad decisions. Right. It's almost like a conflict between common
modern day business since and this kind of foundation laid
by Castle and Cook you know, so many years ago, right,
was this smart, slow, methodical diversification. Like it's it's like
(40:09):
a contrast of ideas that the core of the company says, no,
that's not how we do business, even though the whole
business world says to do it this way and kind
of shutting the normal business thought has worked pretty good
for him, right. Yeah. And in a way in their
own niche of you know, fruit of fruits and vegetables,
they are amazon Ish in the sense that they really controlled,
(40:31):
if not owned, so much of the business from the
farms and the land to the you know, the warehouses
and the canneries and the production plants, uh, and the
supply chain itself. They you know, innovated in air travel
uh and and moving the goods around and so not
quite the level of Amazon in that regard, but nonetheless,
(40:51):
but the one thing I think that's really interesting in
that regard, like you said, is they're literally so invested
in having that full control top to bottom of what
they're doing in their business. Right now, they have nine
team container ships that are the doll whatever, and they've
installed on the ships their own crane on the boat,
so they don't even need a port if we need to,
(41:12):
we can pull up wherever with the ship and take
our stuff off and landed. We don't even need your
port to transport our product. That's crazy. Yeah, So that
is very Amazon Like. It's just not we don't hear
about it because they're not delivering packages to our front door,
right um. But it is really pretty fascinating how they
sort of understood that in a way that a lot
of other companies have not years ago and continued to
(41:34):
this day. And you know, I want to kind of
swing back around as we start to um, you know,
come to the end of the story of Dole Foods
to this idea that we tossed out in the very
beginning about being in the right place at the right time.
It's not entirely a story of a person just sort
of being in the physical right place at the right time.
It's also about, you know, James Dole and Castle and
(41:56):
cook Um and really even Sanford Dole to some extent,
being in the right place in history. It's sort of
they you know, if they were born in a different era,
even ten years before or after, they might not have
been able to do the things they did. Right. So
the technology of the Jannaka machine was not around in
nineteen hundred, but it was in nineteen thirteen when he
(42:17):
made it. Right. So if you know, if he's born,
you know, in the mid nineteen hundred instead of the
late eighteen hundreds, somebody's already invented that, he doesn't get
to be the guy right. And so you know, also
just the way the world was going. Colonialization of land
of countries was sort of starting to wane in the
mid you know, early nineteen hundreds, right, and globalization from
(42:39):
a business perspective was starting to become a thing. They
were part of that trend, and they were part of both.
That's the craziest part. We talked about Hawaii. One of
the reasons all those business owners wanted America to annlex
Hawaii was no tariffs. We know all about that with
the news cycle today. So doll benefits from that part
of it, and then they benefit from the globalization company
wise down the road. It's just so much of the
(43:00):
right place, right time for this company right, and to
be fair, you have to be able to seize the
moment that you know, just there were lots of other
people that were born at that same time who didn't,
you know, even people that had family money. There were
other pineapple companies that didn't make it right, and there
were other you know, missionaries who went places and established
colonies or took over or whatever and didn't turn into
(43:22):
the world's largest anything. And so there is something about
both the right place, the right era, the right person,
the right vision um and the perseverance behind it all.
So there's a lot I think that makes up what
made Dull Foods have the staying power that it ultimately had.
Um that I think is going to be hard for
(43:42):
anyone to reproduce at modern times. It's sort of that
um that it just has. Everything has to ligne up
perfectly right. Yeah, and you've got to have so much
of the capital and then know how things are so
all just so complex anymore versus back then, James dulwent,
you know what, I'm gonna buy some air planes and
we're kinna we're gonna ship this stuff ourselves. It's not
(44:03):
that simple anymore. Yeah, although I would also say possibly
another sort of moral of the story is if you
do have a great product, maybe you can make that
uphill climb and find a market for it. Yeah. Maybe
the market doesn't know what needs it yet. That's right.
Maybe your idea, that little idea in your brain is
going to be the next dol fits. On that note,
(44:24):
we are done for today. This has been Photiography. We'll
see you next time. Phisography is a production of I
Heart Radio and dB Media. I'm your host Dana Bara,
My co host is Nick Bean, our producer is Tory Harrison,
and our executive producer is Jonathan Strickland. Have questions I
want to give us feedback or have a company you'd
(44:44):
like us to cover. Email us at info at Phisiography
dot Show, or contact us on social. I'm at d
Danta Barrett on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or just search
for me on LinkedIn. Thanks for your support and Da
The story of Dull Foods is kind of like the
story of Seinfeld. Seinfeld was a show about nothing that
turned into a huge, massive hit, and Dull food is
a story about fruit. It's a story about fruit and vegetables.
It's not that exciting, and yet it's a story of
a company that went from selling pineapples to being the
(00:20):
world's largest producer of fruits and vegetables. This is Bisiography,
the show where we dive into the strange but true
(00:41):
stories of iconic companies. Whether they're a current bright star,
in the midst of a massive dumpster fire, or settling
into the dust heap of history, they all have a
past worth knowing. I'm Dana Barrett. I'm a former tech executive,
an entrepreneur, and a TV and radio host, and over
the course of my career, I've interviewed thousands ofusiness leaders
and reported on the bright beginnings and massive flame outs
(01:03):
of the brands we know and love. Some of their
stories are unexpected, some are about constant innovation, and some
are just about being in the right place at the
right time. Biography is a production of I Heart Radio
and dB Media and is co hosted, as always by
my producer Nick Bean, Hey, Dana, Thanks, So I think
you're right. Dole is totally about timing. Right throughout its history,
(01:27):
Dole always seemed to be in the right place, whether
that's literally in the right place like geographically, or just
in the right business position to make the next big move.
It all happened exactly when it needed to. Yeah, And
to me, the story of Dole is also about sort
of finding a niche, creating demand, something that's not that
easy to do, and then owning and controlling and dominating
(01:50):
a market, and in controlling every piece of the business,
the entire supply chain, from soup to nuts, as they say.
But the story has to start somewhere, and for me,
the story starts with James Doll. So in eighteen seventy seven,
James Dole was born in Jamaica Plaine, Massachusetts. Now not
gonna lie. I had to do a little side research
on Jamaica Plane. Um, for people who live in that area,
(02:12):
you're probably like, Okay, we know the whole story of
Jamaica Plane, but it feels to me like it should
be Jamaica Plans, not Jamaica Plane. And so I had
to do a little research, uh, and apparently there's a
lot of potential stories about where the name came from
and why it's called Jamaica anything, because it really doesn't
have much to do with Jamaica as we think of
it anyway worth googling, just saying kind of interesting. And
there were I think there was a short period of
(02:33):
time on many maps where it was referred to incorrectly
as Jamaica Planes. So no correlation to the island, none
that I could face. Yeah. Um, In any case, getting
back to James Doll, who was born in Jamaica Plaine, Massachusetts,
which is like the Boston suburbs essentially. Um, he was
born there in eighteen seventy seven, and we don't know
a ton about his childhood, and some of our stories
we've been able to discern, like the personality of a
(02:55):
kid growing up, this story not so much. But we
do know that his family said old in America in
colonial times. Uh, they were Puritans, and we know that
there was like a strong clergy and ministry sort of
portion of the family, So his dad was a minister,
his maternal grandfather was a clergyman. We also know that
Dole James Doll State, and that area grew up in
(03:18):
the area of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, went to high school there,
and then in at the age of twenty two, he
gets his bachelor's degree in agriculture from the Bussy Institution
of Harvard University. Now, I think this is just noteworthy
because and a lot of our other stories are founders
were not educated, right there, usually someone who just had
a crazy idea. They worked their way from the bottom
(03:39):
as an office boy or something like that, right exactly. Yeah,
he's a Harvard Man. So that same year he's twenty
two years old, he accumulates sixteen thousand, two hundred and
forty dollars. This is eighteen nine. Um. Some of that
is his own saving up of money, and some of
it is air quotes, family donations, rich people in the bloodline.
(04:01):
Maybe well, you know, Dad gives you a hand out
of a mill, cool mill. I'm just saying the correlation
to modern times not at all. Nothing. Um. It is
absolutely worth noting that sixteen thousand dollars in is about
half a million dollars today, so definitely not chump change.
Not chump change. So he takes his winnings and he
(04:27):
moves to Honolulu, Hawaii. Now, remember this is eight Honolulu.
Hawaii is like a foreign land at that point. He
was going from Massachusetts to Hawaii. It's not like he
got on a delta flight. Yeah, he had to train
and then boat and carriage and all kinds of crazy
ways to travel, and you gotta wonder why would he
(04:48):
go there. It's also not anything to do with the
United States. It just happens to be nearby, but it's
not a United it's not a state, and so um.
Part of the reason is because Hawaii at the time
was governed by his cousin, Sanford Doll. Okay, so hang on,
I just I have to ask his cousin is the
(05:08):
governor of all right, how did how did we even
get there? Who is Sanford Dole? And how did he
even end up in charge of Hawaii? I know, it's
it's sort of it does seem odd because you're thinking,
like you're picturing Hawaii in that era, and at least
for me, I'm picturing like you know, lu woos and
like people in grass skirts and chiefs, kingdom of Hawaiian
(05:30):
kings and right, I'm not picturing like a guy in
a suit as the governor a running it or the
president white guy in a suit, a white guy, no less, Yeah,
whose family is like from a puritan clergy background. He's
a little off. So here's the deal. We'll start with. Like,
there's a little I did a little research here, but
there is a little primer on Hawaii. So basically, in
the seventeen eighties and seventeen nineties, Uh, Hawaii was run
(05:52):
by chiefs who were fighting for power. Uh. And there
were you know, at your point, there were kings and
that's sort of it was the Kingdom of Hawaii. Yeah,
and so um by s, the tribe sort of ended
up all subjugated under a single ruler, and that was
the King. He became known as the King. He was king.
(06:14):
And I don't know I'm gonna get this right because
there's a lot of hamahamas in here. All right, Wait
before I even try, Nick, do you know how to
pronounce this? Actually I do. Don't ask me why his
name is king? Comeha Maha the great? Oh? I remember
that now that you said it out loud, all right.
So he establishes the House of Command Maya, a dynasty
that actually stayed in power and ruled the Kingdom of
(06:36):
Hawaii until eighteen seventy two. So in that era, in
eighteen forty four, Sanford Dole, this man who were talking about,
cousin of James Dole, um, is born in Hawaii because
his parents were Protestant Christian missionaries from you know, the
same general area of the US that James Dole was born.
(06:57):
The clergy tie back to there you go during this
like kingdom of the House of Kamama. Uh, Sanford Dol
was born eighteen forty four. In eighteen seventy two, Um,
the you know, dynasty of Kamama had continued, but the
last king was a bachelor, no kids, and he dies
in eighteen seventy two, and there's nobody to take over.
(07:20):
So then they have a popular election and they picked
the next guy. He last a year. I'm not even
gonna try to pronounce his name because the only last
year also no air. Bad luck Hawaii. Yeah. So now
eighteen seventy four comes along and uh, they have an election,
but it's contested and it's kind of um almost like
(07:41):
some of the scenes we see going on now, there's riots,
people are mad. Um. It's sort of these two factions
fighting for power in Hawaii. And this is when the
Big Daddy United States and Britain get involved. They land
there and they restore the island to order, and uh,
they now move the king that they choose of these
(08:03):
two to sort of a very unofficial, like, you know,
ceremonial role, like the emperor of Japan. Now, yeah, okay,
you're the emperor, but you can't believe it's like the
British monarch to write like. It just becomes sort of
a ceremonial role. So they sort of pushed the king
out of a power roll into a ceremonial role. Meanwhile,
Sanford Dole, who has uh sort of grown up now
(08:24):
and he's got some education and he's gone away to
get educated. He's come back. He is commissioned as a
notary public in Honolulu. Uh, and then he wins the
elections in eighteen eighty four and eighteen eighty six to
be in the legislature of the Hawaiian Kingdom, and he's
a representative there. In eighteen eighty seven, Uh, the Hawaiians
(08:45):
essentially are forced to sign a new constitution. And this
is a constitution forced on them essentially by white businessmen
and lawyers, including Sanford Dole, and it strips the king
of all this is officially now paperwork, stripping the king
of all of his authority and establishing a new qualification
for voting. That we would be seriously pissed about today
in modern times, because this is like disenfranchising most Hawaiians,
(09:09):
most laborers, and favoring wealthier white people who have landed there. Yeah.
So in this constitution is signed under the threat of violence,
and because of that it becomes known as the Bayonet Constitution.
The king is reduced to a figurehead. He stays in
that role until his death. In his sister Queen, can
(09:30):
you pronounce her name? Queen? I'm gonna try it. I
think that's good. That's not too bad. That was pretty cool.
She succeeds him. She becomes the last monarch of Hawaii.
Um in three she announces plans for a new constitution
to proclaim herself absolute monarch. Not super successful because the
(09:52):
Euro American business leaders they don't want that. Yeah, they're
not having it. She's trying to take power back. The
white people are saying no. They formed this Committee of
Safety they call it, yeah, to essentially stage a coup
against the Hawaiian Kingdom and really completely take over. Now
they don't just want to kind of run the place
they want to take over. Now, Sanford Dole decides not
(10:15):
to join the Committee of Safety, but he does help
draft their declaration. And then once all of this goes down,
I'll shortcut it, but essentially he becomes first the territorial governor.
Well first he becomes president, and then it becomes a
territory of the US and he becomes territorial governor. And
it's in that era, in the late eighteen nineties that
(10:37):
James Dole arrives to kind of hang out where his
cousin's in charge and start his business. Fun fact, Sanford
Dole had this crazy, fuzzy, long white beard that like
came down to the middle of his chest kind of
split into two parts. Like he looked like he could
have gotten on a Harley and been really comfortable there. Yeah, exactly.
(10:58):
And he had this big, giant like white handlebar mustache
to match. And now modern times, the Hawaiian name for
a particular kind of pale hair like Spanish Spanish moss,
is called Umi umi o' dole, meaning Dole's beard. So
there you go. He forever remains sort of ingrained in
(11:18):
the history, like Hawaii's owned Santa Claus of Hawaii. So
obviously we digressed a bit, and we do need to
get back to the story of James Dole and how
he sort of became the pineapple King. We'll do that
right after this. So now we know sort of how
(11:39):
Dole even went from Massachusetts to Hawaii, and why he
was inspired to go there in the first place, and
why when he got there he sort of had the
favors he needed from his cousin to get started in business.
So James Dole lands in Hawaii with his you know,
equivalent of half a million dollars that he got from
(11:59):
himself saving and his family, and this is eight and
he purchases a sixty four acre government instead. It's all
making sense now, right in the central plains of the
island of Oahu. And he just knows. He went to school, remember,
for agriculture at Harvard, so he kind of knows what
(12:20):
he's doing. And he decides to start experimenting with some
different crops to see what what he can actually plant
there that's gonna be easy to plant, you know, affordable, sturdy,
all of that, so that he'll have a crop he
can sell. And he experiments with a few different kinds
of crops, ultimately landing on pineapple. So that's eighteen ninety nine.
You know, takes them a little while to get going.
(12:41):
In nineteen o one he officially founds the Hawaiian Pineapple Company.
And from nineteen o one to nine seven he is
just growing this company, growing um. And there's not a
lot of news from that era from the company. It's
it's just sort of he's he's getting it up and running.
He's getting the people in that he needs. He's selling
(13:03):
pineapple um locally and he's you know, beginning to sell
it into California nearby. He's got to do that by
ship um. And so you know, he's starting to make
that industry for him. And I can imagine a pineapple
tree probably takes a while to grow. There's that. Yeah,
well that's a really good question. Actually we should do
a little little side googling on how long it table. Yeah. Yeah,
(13:25):
you can go from history. It's not just bhisiography, the
history of iconic companies, it's also the biology. Uh. In
any case, things are going pretty well, and he is
seeing the writing on the wall in terms of what
other food companies are doing. So he constructs a canary
and packing plant in Hawaii. As this is moving along,
(13:45):
the um yields of the fruit and the popularity of
the product are sort of better than he expected. It's
a good problem. And so he keeps on growing new cannary,
new packing plant. And so he's got more than one plant, now,
more than one packing facility. Now he's got a lot
of product, and he's got to figure out where he's
going to sell it. So he does something that I think,
(14:07):
you know, was really modern thinking for those days, creates
the first ever nationwide consumer ad campaign in the United States,
really the first ever nationwide camp. So he went to
all the newspapers and everything else and put ads in
the he created you know, look, this is this is
before the days of mass media as we know it now.
(14:27):
Print was the medium. And he created these print ads
and placed them all over the United States. There are people, imagine,
of course, you know, in the East Coast and Northeast
who never saw a pineapple. Why would they know anything
about pineapple. Hawaii is a way far away, and they
weren't really growing pineapples and mass in Massachusetts, right, and
(14:49):
I can't I can also imagine. I wonder how many
people saw that first pineapple and went what is that? Exactly? Yeah,
that happens to me occasionally in the grocery store with
when they'll introduce some kind of new fruit and not
be like, what is that? Where did that come from?
But it piques your interest, right, Yeah, Well then I
get a little bit afraid and run the other direction.
But that's just me. But he he creates this national
ad campaign, and when you think about it, um, that
(15:13):
is a hard hill to climb. Like, I have a
brand new product that I have tons of over here
in Hawaii, and I want to try to convince people
all throughout the United States that this is something they need. Yeah,
that is really difficult to kind of create your own
market essentially because there was really no huge nationwide demand
for it, right, And we certainly see that now in
(15:34):
terms of technology. But in some cases, and in some
cases it works, in some cases it doesn't, right, And
then you know, I think maybe, and this is just
a guess here, but I think maybe with food it's
a little bit easier because if you can get people
to taste it and it tastes good, there's going to
be some interest. But remember I didn't say he started
(15:55):
a nationwide food sampling tasting campaign. That's not what he did.
This is print ad. That's got to be so wow.
I can't imagine that trying to introduce for the first
time and then convincing people to spend their hard earned
money on to buy it, right and there there weren't
Instagram influencers. There weren't you know, TV commercials with people
like celebrities eating canned pineapple saying this is delicious. Now.
(16:18):
The beauty of it, though, is that it was canned,
so it was able to ship and stay fresh. It's
not like he's trying to sell fresh pineapple at that time.
He's trying to sell canned pineapple, so a little bit different.
But nonetheless, I think that is sort of a massive
undertaking for the era, absolutely in that in that era
of media. Yeah, that's a that's a big jump to
the fact that that's also interesting that he picked the
(16:39):
pineapple the way he did and said, you know what,
we're just we're just gonna tell everybody it's great and
hope they buy in. Yeah, so pretty amazing. Anyway, from
seven to ninetleven, his ad campaign works, and the business
is growing, and demand for pineapple is growing. But now
they have a different problem, and that is that the
process to peel and core pineapples is mostly manual and
(17:02):
it's pretty slow, meaning the business is ripe for innovation.
See what I did there. Um, So look, this is
like the traditional in a way if you think about it,
challenges that growing businesses face because they've got a product,
there's demand for it. Now they have to keep up
(17:23):
with the demand. This is one of the topic you
here all the time. Um. In modern business, you're a startup,
you don't necessarily want to run right out and get
a giant client, because then you're gonna have to be
able to supply the demand that they have. Now, you know,
he created that giant client by going all over the
United States. But he's also a Harvard Man, so he's
up to the challenge. So nineteen eleven, James Dole hires
(17:46):
a Hawaiian engineer by the name of Henry Gabriel Janaka
to build him a machine that could make the canning
of pineapples more efficient. Janaka takes the job in he
finishes this machine and now instead of um, I forget
what was the original I think they were able to
peel like fifteen core and peel like fifteen pineapples. I
(18:07):
think that the best ones were able to do up
to fifteen an hour. Right, So Janaka creates this machine
that can do thirty five pineapples a Minute's quite an improvement. Yeah, so, um,
and I may not have those numbers exactly right, but
let's just say it this way. It was way faster. Now.
I know you did some looking into this, um, Jannaka machine.
(18:27):
What did you learn about? Right? So I learned that,
so you're right. The first one was thirty five per minute.
It ended up over the next couple of years getting
all the way up to a hundred per minute. And
I just had a curiosity. I couldn't find a lot
of actual details on the machine, but I found an
image of the original patent that was filed, and then
I found some modern day videos of this machine being
used in the Philippines. And it's the exact same machine.
(18:49):
I mean, the one he patented had a lot of
wood and stuff. The new ones are obviously all you know,
modern day steel, but it's the same exact machine for
over a hundred years. Fascinating. I mean, the machine is
known as the Jannaka machine, and uh, it eventually becomes
the industry standard, though sadly, Janaka doesn't live to see
all of that success. He died pretty young. He died
(19:11):
in California in he was only forty two years old,
and he died during the Spanish flu epidemic. So he
invents this things dead five years later, so he only
sees sort of the beginning of the success. And of
course his name lives on to this day, certainly at
least in that industry. And now I guess to the world,
thank you photography. But the Jennaka machine was a great invention,
(19:31):
and I thought this was really fascinating because you know,
nowadays we have um engineers that are creating new products
all the time, whether it's AI or robotics or just
technology we're using online, and it's the engineer who becomes
the celebrity, not the business man like the Elon Musk
right right or Zuckerberg people like that who created the product.
(19:53):
They're the engineer, they're the brains behind it, and they
sort of also become the businessman m which doesn't always
work right, doesn't always go well. But I thought this
was really interesting because for all intents and purposes, aside
from in the fruit industry. Janaka's name is somewhat lost
to history. Like it's not because it lives on in
that industry, but we don't celebrate Janaka as a great inventor, right,
(20:17):
And there's not really anything that kind of hearkens back
to him in any way besides the machine. Like you said,
there's not like a line of products that has his
name on it or anything like that. No, no, And
his story is sort of you know, you can't find
very much about him at all except when he was
born and how he died essentially, and that he created
this machine and so you know, and Dole is the
story that lives on and the name that lives on.
It's just sort of interesting, I thought, um there, but
(20:39):
you know, also just important in the story of Dole
Foods and that this was the innovation needed to really
um start to make this business you know global. The
ability for them to go global comes because of the
ability of this machine to make pineapples and put them
in cannot make them, but you know, can them as
fast as it did essentially, And that wasn't the only
innovation in the history of Dole Foods that made it
(21:03):
what it is today. There is a lot of innovation
that dol did in the supply chain side of things.
We'll get to that right after this. Like any product
based company, Dole as it tries to grow, has the
challenges of keeping all aspects of its business sort of
(21:26):
growing equally. So with the addition of the technology to
their business via the Janaka machine, now they have the
ability to core and peel pineapples and get them in
the can very quickly and get them out to this
demand that they created in the United States on the mainland.
But they also have to have enough fruit to send
to the canneries. You have to have enough trees, right.
(21:48):
So this is where they realize they need to start
having more land to grow on its two now. And
Dole goes back uh to the family network in Hawaii
and in Boston. Um, this is the equivalent of me
calling you know, mom and dad and asking for some
extra money to continue to grow the biz. Yeah. He
goes back to the family. He's like, look, things are
(22:09):
going really well. See I did this big ad campaign.
People are like, in the pineapple thing I came up with, Um,
I need some more cash to grow this thing. And
so they give him some money and he goes back
to Hawaii and he buys an entire island. He bought
one of the Hawaiian islands. Yeah, so he buys this
(22:31):
island for the purposes of building a giant pineapple plantation,
the Island of Night. And it's not even the smallest one. Now,
it's a pretty good decent size this island. Yeah, and
it becomes the largest plantation over time, of course, in
the world, with over twenty acres devoted exclusively to growing pineapple.
(22:53):
I think he knew, probably all along as somebody who
was uh, you know educated at Harvard had this you know,
agriculture degree, but also a bit of the business you know,
learned along the way in school and out that he
couldn't just own one part of this process, that he
needed to own the whole thing, the land itself, the canneries,
(23:14):
the production facilities, the technology, the transportation. I mean, he
sort of saw that if he really wanted to be
successful in this, he was going to he wasn't going
to sort of rent out space on somebody else's plantation,
right or or you know, share some space in a
warehouse with somebody. He wanted to own and control as
much of it as he could and this was true
(23:35):
for the supply chain too, because one of the other
things slowing down the process was getting this delicious canned
fruit from Hawaii to the rest of the country. Right.
It came from us on a slow boat from Hawaii
to the western coast. Yeah, slow boat like that. So
in think about this era, right, Yeah, this is still
(23:58):
way before transport Asian as we know it, and much
of the technology that we now have, right, there's still
in the process of trying to rapidly expand the train
lines right, rail lines right, right, and it's kind of
hard to run those over to Hawaii a little bit,
just a whole lot of but a whole lot of
ground to do that all Son James Dole gets inspired
by Charles Lindbergh's successful transatlantic flight and he sees already
(24:22):
in nine seven that this air transportation thing is going somewhere.
He sees some potential and decides this could potentially play
a role in delivering his fruit. So Nick, what does
he doing? Okay, he sees this and goes, wow, I'm
going to try and find some folks that can you know,
transport my fruit via airplane. So he sponsors what ends
up being called the Dull Air Race, and he markets
(24:46):
this all over the place, in Hawaii and in mostly California,
but the western part of the US. And he puts
up a prize of twenty five thousand dollars in nineteen
seven money. It's a lot, twenty five thousand dollars for
the first airplane to fly from Oakland, California, all the
way to Honolulu. And he also puts up a second
place prize of ten thousand dollars. All right, Dana, let
(25:09):
me just ask you, all right, how many people do
you think end up entering this thing in total? Well,
I have to I don't know the math here, but
if if in the like early, you know, twenty years
before that, we said sixteen thousand dollars was like half
a million, so I would argue that twenty five thousand dollars,
I mean, this is a lot of money for those
times million, it's more right. I mean, because if sixteen
(25:31):
was half a million ten years before, you know, okay, yeah,
so it's twenty five thousand, it's it's more than half
a million equivalent of today you can buy a lot
with twenty five dollars. So I feel like there's probably
a lot of people inspired to do this. Now a
lot of people who are also like dare devilish because
flying was like it wasn't like you were again getting
on adulta flight. This is the era of the barn stormers.
(25:52):
You're right, yeah, I mean this is like people were
you know, we saw those like black and white films
of people trying to make flying machines and crashing into
stuff and yeah, so this was a scary time. It
was for flight. So you asked me, what how many
how many people do you think? All right, I'm gonna
say close a dozen people enter the race, and the
top two prizes go to the only two airplanes that
(26:15):
survive the flight, not the one that gets there first
and the one that gets their second. The only two
that even made it at all, the only two that
didn't die, right, because the other tin planes crashed and
the other tin contestants died while they were attempting to
do this. Can you imagine the scandal if this was
like a reality show today, Like it's like Survivor, but
(26:37):
it's literally survivor, Like we will give the prize money
to the people who literally survive. Everyone will be dead
at the end of the end. Yeah. And this is
also remember like this, they all essentially went Amelia Earhart
like they crashed and that was it. Never were heard
from again. It was nuts. But see the thing is
now he knows it's possible. Maybe not the greatest odds,
(26:57):
but it's possible. And another interesting aspect is this not
only helps his supply chain, but an interesting tidbit is
that this kind of makes Hawaii the tourist destination of
America for a little while, because used to you had
to have a lot of money to get on a
boat and come to Hawaii. Well, now that people with
all the money said, I'll take a plane. It's faster.
(27:18):
So these ships that for a long time would take
people from the coast of California to Hawaii are losing
their top customers. They had to bring prices way down,
which meant the average American could hop on a boat
and go to Hawaii. Interesting. Yeah, so it helped the
entire state essentially. It's kind of fascinating that the rich
people weren't like terrified to get on the planes. You know,
it's sort of like the rich people who want to
(27:39):
go to space today. Well it's right, let's be fair,
and the rich people who want to go to space
today or what thirty forty, So I'd like that, and
the folks that don't are generally older, probably the same
thing the eighty year old rich folks back then. So
I'll just take a boat. But the younger folks said,
let's hop on this new fangled flying invention and go
out to Hawaii. Pretty interesting, fascinating, all right. So look
at this point, you know, James Dole is making investments
(28:01):
in land with the island, in mechanization with the Janaka machine,
in air transportation in this post Lindbergh era, and from
nine thirteen to ninety seven, the combination of those things
result in a decrease in the price of pineapples and
actually kind of puts the company in somewhat of a
vulnerable position because now all of a sudden, you know, they're, uh,
(28:25):
there's so much of it, prices going down. We almost
kind of hurt himself in a way, right with all
of this like goodness, sort of sort of hurts himself,
makes the company a little bit vulnerable. Um. Also, growth
always means the influx of capital, and if you're not
careful about where your capital is coming from, you could
be in trouble. And that's kind of what happens to
Dole next. So in y two, a real estate company
(28:49):
named Castle and Cook that had actually been around since
the eighteen fifties becomes a majority owner of the Hawaiian
Pineapple Company, James Dole's company. Now, how did they do that? Well,
they'd already owned another Hawaiian agriculture company that had made
a thirty three percent investment in Hawaiian pineapple. So Castle
and Cook and Dole, the human beings had been interacting,
(29:10):
they knew each other. And then in Castle and Cook,
because they're a real estate company, they've got money, they
come along and they pick up an additional of the
stock and they now own of James Dole's Hawaiian Pineapple company. So, Nick,
what happens when you lose the majority control of your business?
I'll tell you what doesn't happen. You don't get the
(29:32):
call the shots anymore. Yeah, I would say, what happens
when you lose majority interest in your company? Is nothing
good for you? Yeah, that's what I would say. So,
of course, predictably, the purchase of those shares causes hard
feelings between Dole and Castle and Cook, and after the reorganization.
You know, they're trying to make nice, so they make
(29:53):
Doll the chairman of the board, but they immediately send
him on a quote earned rest. Go on vacation, dude,
take a break. You've worked hard to build this company.
You got that jaknaka machine going, you got the island
over here, Lena I. You know you're tired. Take a break.
(30:13):
Don like a good job, and guess what, don't come back. Yeah, yeah,
because they never called him back. They said, go on
a break, take as long as you need. We'll call
you when we need you. They never called it. Yeah,
So a year later he decided to come back on
his own. N three, He goes to his office and
finds that it's been moved to a storeroom and his
position as president of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company has been filled. Yeah,
(30:37):
he got fired and didn't even get told he got fired, right,
So essentially he's out now, and while the company ultimately
retained the name Doll, Doll the man pretty much done
from that point forward. The company, though, continues to grow
and innovate and grow and innovate and thrive. And we'll
talk about how they did that right after this. So
(31:04):
by ninety three, James Dole is out. He started the
company what thirty years prior, give or take, uh thirty
four years priorty three, thirty two years prior, and by
this point he's out, But his name UM actually becomes
more prevalent once he's gone. Up to then, he was
one of the few guys, it seems like, from that
(31:26):
era who didn't feel like he had to name everything
after himself because a lot of the other photography episodes
we talked about the companies are named for the men.
So he had Wells and Fargo, you had Sears. I mean,
these are all people's names, even Ben and Jerry much
later and they went with first names. Good still UM
joking obviously about them. But but he didn't really feel that.
(31:47):
I mean, he used his last name for other things
he did, so it was stamped on things in large part,
I think because the Doll family name was so well
known in Hawaii, Sanford and his crazy Beard and all
of that. Um. But the company up until this point
had been Hawaiian Pineapple Company. And so after he's gone
(32:07):
in three, that's when Castle and Cook first say, like,
you know why people like the name. They know the
name it's popular here, We're just going to use that,
and we'll have that be the name becomes the first
year that they actually stamped the word doll on the
cans of pineapple and pineapple juice that they are selling.
A low blow. You kick him out and then name
the company after him, right, yeah, And then if this
(32:30):
were modern times, like if he tried to do anything
else with his own name, they would like sue him
and not let him use his own name. I don't
think that actually happened, but it would if it was today.
You know. Uh, in any case, that kicks off essentially,
what is thirty years of just solid business on the
part of Castle and Cook running now Dole Foods and um.
(32:53):
It was quiet for those thirty years for the company.
This is also something you don't really think about in
modern time. The company was private throughout this era, so
they weren't reporting to shareholders. They weren't under any particular
pressure to have massive amounts of growth. But they were
a solid, profitable pineapple company canning pineapple and pineapple juice
(33:15):
and selling it, you know, certainly all throughout North America.
Unclear exactly when they began to sell into other markets.
They didn't actually start to grow in other markets un
till somewhat later, um, but not much. At the end
of that thirty year period, UM, they start making some
news again. So nineteen sixty one, finally Castle and Coke
decides to buy up the remaining shares of the Hawaiian
(33:37):
Pineapple Company and UM, which is now again the product
is dull and UM. They by nineteen sixty three realized
that they can you know, move product around more easily
if it's not all coming from Hawaii, and so they
start uh going international from a fruit growing perspective. And
the first time they do that is nineteen sixty three
when they start up Dole Philippines. So that was kind
(33:59):
of a big year. The nineteen sixty four they decide
to diversify with a whole other fruit and officially they
go bananas. I couldn't help it. I was waiting all
episode for the go bananas joke. Yeah, there you go.
Nine doll gets into the banana business. Castle and Cook
purchases of a company called the Standard Fruit and Steamship Company,
(34:24):
which is based out of New Orleans, and uh that
is how they get into bananas. In the sixties and
early seventies and that gets them into places like Costa
Rica and Nicaragua and they're basically becoming a global company.
At interesting fact, I want to drop in here. Do
you know that this actually is where the term banana
(34:44):
republic comes from? No, not the store for clothes, but
like you've heard countries called banana republics. It's because it's
Castle and Cook Standard Fruit Doll had so much power
over these countries because they owned so much land that
the government have a policy or something they wanted to
in state, and the presidents of these companies could go no,
(35:05):
and the presidents of these countries would go, okay, well
you know, Castle and Cook said no, so we can't.
Banana republics controlled by companies. That's where it came from.
And in fairness to this story where you buy clothes,
they got their name from the idea the banana republics
because you know the story of banana republic just you know,
for people who don't realize this. When they first started
selling clothes, they were all based on like safari looking right,
(35:27):
clothes from those kinds of places like Nicaragua and all
of that. Right. So um in any case, really interesting
because I didn't realize that that was why that was.
I never really understood why it was a banana republic,
like I understood what a banana republic was, that it
was beholden to that the leaders weren't really the leaders
they were. But I always thought it was because, like
the leaders were sort of bananas. But right, No, it's
(35:48):
because countries like Costa Rica and Nicaragua have some pretty
terrible stuff in their history thanks to companies like Standard Fruit. Yikes. Yeah.
Also wait, companies forcing heads of countries to do things
that they don't maybe wouldn't otherwise do. Also sounding kind
of familiar. Um. In any case, we digress. So, you know,
(36:10):
the sixties and seventies was really about um globalization and growth.
And one of the things I think is interesting about
Castle and Cook can we just call them doll Foods
at this point? I feel like their name. Eventually it
became Dold Foods, but for years the company was Hawaiian
Pineapple Company, and it was still Castle and Cook in
some ways. And we're just gonna go with dol Foods
across the board. Um, but they were um, they were
(36:33):
careful in their growth, and a lot of other companies
we talked about certainly in that era in the six
season seventies. You know, we're talking about seventies, they were
just buying up and acquiring any company if the numbers
looked good. So we talked about our c A in
an earlier episode of Bosiography, and they were buying up
all kinds of random companies that had nothing to do
(36:53):
with their core business. Sears did the same thing, and
ultimately some of those purchases were successful, but many weren't, right,
and the losses are usually big losses, right. But in
nineteen seventy two, the leaders of Dole Foods, Castle and
Cook at that time, UH decide that rather than just
buying up companies because the numbers like, they are going
to use what they call planned diversification, and they're gonna
(37:16):
buy companies in fast growing niches of the food market.
Only they're going to stick to food and really not
only stick to food, but really they decided to stick
to produce, to fruits and vegetables, and so that was
sort of their growth strategy from then on. They got
into California based lettuce and celery in the late nineteen seventies. UH.
(37:37):
In the eighties, they got into Europe and their fruit
markets with bananas, with citrus, with other deciduous fruits. I
just want to say deciduous. It is um. And that's
really how they continue to grow. And from an innovation standpoint,
they continue to innovate the way that they were selling fruits,
so they got in and vegetables, and so they got
into frozen um and even in modern time times things
(38:00):
like the steam bags and like, they've just continued to
elevate what they're doing, right, And I think that's a
great point. That's one thing I think most of us
when we hear doll, we think of fruit, and that's
an invention they came out with in the nineties was
kind of the the steaming bags of vegetables. You're frozen vegetable.
Frozen vegetables in general was their idea. And I think
we forget we think so much of fruit, but really
(38:22):
dull castle and cook, like you said, diversified big time
into all kinds of stuff. Yeah. Absolutely, and they listen,
they got into you name the fruit. Basically, they're in
that business over time and this is going on really
to modern times. And so the other thing that's interesting
is there's a lot of pressure I think in for
companies nowadays to reach a certain size and then go public,
have their I p O and go public. And we
(38:43):
see this across all kinds of companies, not just technology. Right,
here's a new one in the news every week, big
I p O from so and so. And you certainly
see it in the food business, because we just saw
it with beyond Burger, right, So that's nothing to do
with technology, and they're going public with a food product.
But this is something that Castle and cook a k.
Dull Foods resisted. They did ultimately go public and then
(39:05):
went back private, and then went public and then went
back private. And this is all in much more recent years.
In the last twenty years this happened. They went went
private again two or three times. A guy named David
Murdock sort of became the key player in the company
in the dreds like I think around the sixties seventies
time frames when he got involved. But the point is
he was like in seventeen, he's in his late nineties,
(39:26):
mid nineties, and he's still the chairman of the board
and still making decisions about you know, public private And
it was under his reign that they went public, pulled back,
went private, went public again, pulled back and actually thought
about it again in twenty seventeen, but didn't do it
as far as I can find. So. Um, it's really
interesting because I think every time you go into the
(39:47):
public markets, you realize you're then beholden to this quarterly
growth number, and it can force you into making some
bad decisions. Right. It's almost like a conflict between common
modern day business since and this kind of foundation laid
by Castle and Cook you know, so many years ago, right,
was this smart, slow, methodical diversification. Like it's it's like
(40:09):
a contrast of ideas that the core of the company says, no,
that's not how we do business, even though the whole
business world says to do it this way and kind
of shutting the normal business thought has worked pretty good
for him, right. Yeah. And in a way in their
own niche of you know, fruit of fruits and vegetables,
they are amazon Ish in the sense that they really controlled,
(40:31):
if not owned, so much of the business from the
farms and the land to the you know, the warehouses
and the canneries and the production plants, uh, and the
supply chain itself. They you know, innovated in air travel
uh and and moving the goods around and so not
quite the level of Amazon in that regard, but nonetheless,
(40:51):
but the one thing I think that's really interesting in
that regard, like you said, is they're literally so invested
in having that full control top to bottom of what
they're doing in their business. Right now, they have nine
team container ships that are the doll whatever, and they've
installed on the ships their own crane on the boat,
so they don't even need a port if we need to,
(41:12):
we can pull up wherever with the ship and take
our stuff off and landed. We don't even need your
port to transport our product. That's crazy. Yeah, So that
is very Amazon Like. It's just not we don't hear
about it because they're not delivering packages to our front door,
right um. But it is really pretty fascinating how they
sort of understood that in a way that a lot
of other companies have not years ago and continued to
(41:34):
this day. And you know, I want to kind of
swing back around as we start to um, you know,
come to the end of the story of Dole Foods
to this idea that we tossed out in the very
beginning about being in the right place at the right time.
It's not entirely a story of a person just sort
of being in the physical right place at the right time.
It's also about, you know, James Dole and Castle and
(41:56):
cook Um and really even Sanford Dole to some extent,
being in the right place in history. It's sort of
they you know, if they were born in a different era,
even ten years before or after, they might not have
been able to do the things they did. Right. So
the technology of the Jannaka machine was not around in
nineteen hundred, but it was in nineteen thirteen when he
(42:17):
made it. Right. So if you know, if he's born,
you know, in the mid nineteen hundred instead of the
late eighteen hundreds, somebody's already invented that, he doesn't get
to be the guy right. And so you know, also
just the way the world was going. Colonialization of land
of countries was sort of starting to wane in the
mid you know, early nineteen hundreds, right, and globalization from
(42:39):
a business perspective was starting to become a thing. They
were part of that trend, and they were part of both.
That's the craziest part. We talked about Hawaii. One of
the reasons all those business owners wanted America to annlex
Hawaii was no tariffs. We know all about that with
the news cycle today. So doll benefits from that part
of it, and then they benefit from the globalization company
wise down the road. It's just so much of the
(43:00):
right place, right time for this company right, and to
be fair, you have to be able to seize the
moment that you know, just there were lots of other
people that were born at that same time who didn't,
you know, even people that had family money. There were
other pineapple companies that didn't make it right, and there
were other you know, missionaries who went places and established
colonies or took over or whatever and didn't turn into
(43:22):
the world's largest anything. And so there is something about
both the right place, the right era, the right person,
the right vision um and the perseverance behind it all.
So there's a lot I think that makes up what
made Dull Foods have the staying power that it ultimately had.
Um that I think is going to be hard for
(43:42):
anyone to reproduce at modern times. It's sort of that
um that it just has. Everything has to ligne up
perfectly right. Yeah, and you've got to have so much
of the capital and then know how things are so
all just so complex anymore versus back then, James dulwent,
you know what, I'm gonna buy some air planes and
we're kinna we're gonna ship this stuff ourselves. It's not
(44:03):
that simple anymore. Yeah, although I would also say possibly
another sort of moral of the story is if you
do have a great product, maybe you can make that
uphill climb and find a market for it. Yeah. Maybe
the market doesn't know what needs it yet. That's right.
Maybe your idea, that little idea in your brain is
going to be the next dol fits. On that note,
(44:24):
we are done for today. This has been Photiography. We'll
see you next time. Phisography is a production of I
Heart Radio and dB Media. I'm your host Dana Bara,
My co host is Nick Bean, our producer is Tory Harrison,
and our executive producer is Jonathan Strickland. Have questions I
want to give us feedback or have a company you'd
(44:44):
like us to cover. Email us at info at Phisiography
dot Show, or contact us on social. I'm at d
Danta Barrett on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or just search
for me on LinkedIn. Thanks for your support and Da
Bizography with Dana Barrett News
Hosts And Creators
Dana Barrett
Nick Bean
Show Links
About BizographyRSSPopular Podcasts
1. Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
2. Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
3. Crime Junkie
If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people.