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> > News Item
"Reprinted with permission from Horizon Air
Magazine, May 2003, copyright 2003 Paradigm
Communications Group, all rights
reserved. No part of this story may be
reproduced by any means, electronic
or otherwise, without the prior written
consent of the publisher."
KENT, WA
Eighty-five years of
good taste
Popular products have
made Oberto a long-standing success
For most regents, a
royal title is assumed at birth. But for Art
Oberto, chairman of Kent, Washington–based
Oberto Sausage Company, the title of “Jerky
King” was earned through hard work and an
imaginative sense of fun. The 75-year-old
entrepreneur often sports a red, white and
green tie that announces, “I’m Just Wild
About Jerky,” and his playful marketing
efforts include driving a colorful Jerky
Mobile around the streets of Seattle, which
is just 15 miles north of Kent. “I’m the
company carny,” he says. “I do all the
weirdo stuff, and everybody else does all
the other stuff.”
In Oberto’s case,
“everybody else” refers to his more than
1,000 employees, and “the other stuff” means
the production and distribution of nearly a
dozen different meat products to domestic
and international markets.
Although Oberto refers
to his offbeat marketing efforts—such as
regular sponsorship of a “pepperoni-powered”
hydroplane in Seattle’s Seafair races—as
“weirdo stuff,” the results have been
impressive. In the 85 years since the
company was founded in Seattle by Oberto’s
Italian immigrant parents, the Oberto
Sausage Company (www.oberto.com) has grown
into the largest producer of beef jerky in
the country, with four Northwest plants
incorporating more than 275,000 square feet
of production and manufacturing space.
Products include beef and turkey jerkies,
pepperoni sticks, bacon curls and salami.
Oberto’s role in the
company started early. In 1943, when Art was
only 16, his father died unexpectedly. With
his mother running the business and two
employees making the sausage, Art sold the
meat to stores in Seattle’s Italian
community. He and his wife, Dorothy, took
over the company in 1957, and several years
later debuted a new product: beef jerky.
By 1967 the company was
selling its products nationwide.
Today Oberto is still a
family-owned business. Art and Dorothy’s
four children are all active in the company,
and rotate positions on the board of
directors. But Oberto stresses that all
employees are integral to the company’s
success. Last year, when he turned 75, he
gave each employee $75. This gift cost
$75,000 altogether, but Oberto considers it
money well spent. “If you have happy,
content employees and happy, content
customers, and the numbers work out, you can
build a perpetual-motion machine [of
success],” he says.
As a privately owned
company, Oberto does not release financial
data. Last year, the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer reported that Oberto had
annual sales of around $150 million, and Art
Oberto acknowledges a yearly growth rate of
between
10 percent and 15
percent, and sometimes as high as 40
percent. After spending most of his life in
the business, he says that one key to growth
has been to remain constantly alert for
opportunities. For instance, growing demand
for low-fat foods prompted the development
of Oberto’s turkey jerky. “You keep your
antennae up, and when an opportunity comes,
you run with it,” he says. —Paul Clarke |
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