Chapter Five:
Muller’s Meats
Moving Off the Farm
After graduating high school, my father intended to go to university. At the local high school he had won a prize as Best Air Cadet, which would have enabled him to go to Air Cadet School in British Columbia. But Opi (my grandfather) told him that he needed him in the business. Like the dutiful son he was, Henry entered the business with his father.
The Mullers divided the space above the store into several apartments. One of them was inhabited by Lilly Omama and Goldene Opapa. My parents lived in another one when they were first married, and they had their first two children there, Jerry and Alice.
My mother Bella graduated first in her high school class at Westdale Secondary School in Hamilton – her name is still engraved in marble in the rotunda there – and she intended to go to university and then medical school. However, when my parents got married, it was decided that she would join the Mullers in their meat business. She first went to work for another meat business, F. W. Fearman, to learn something about the industry. She worked as a secretarial assistant to the president.
Moving into Retail: Muller’s Meats – The Retail Store
Nandor and Henry worked in the retail meat store along with my grandmother, who took care of the cash register. After my mother started working there, she took care of the bookkeeping. At one point, however, my mother was needed to help in the store and she was operating the veal tenderizer. She got her hand stuck in the machine and had to be rushed to the hospital (along with the machine) to get her hand out. She recovered fully, but to this day she has marks on that hand from the machine’s knives.
Over time, the Mullers started selling meat wholesale to local restaurants as well. My father went to the restaurants in the morning and took orders, came back to the store, where he and Stu Lowry (our first non-family employee) would prepare the orders, and then they would make the deliveries in the afternoon.
Nandor drove to Toronto several times a week in an empty refrigerated panel truck and purchased beef carcasses from Canada Packers, the beef slaughterhouse located adjacent to the Ontario Stock Yards. Nandor would then drive these carcasses (cut into four: two fronts and two hinds) back to Niagara Falls, where they were unloaded onto a rail at Muller’s Meats.
Over the years, the restaurant business became bigger than the retail business. Some important customers at this time were Ontario Hydro, Prudhomme’s and the Niagara Parks Commission restaurants. Muller’s Meats began to outgrow the original premises. My father and grandfather started buying adjoining properties on Centre Street to expand. A former dry goods store became the meat freezer. The billiards parlor on the other side became a storage room for folded cardboard boxes.
Muller’s then applied for and received Federal Government Inspection which allowed them to sell beef to large companies like Gerber Foods, Campbell Soup, Chef Boyardee, and H. J. Heinz Co. as well as supermarkets such as Dominion Stores and Steinberg’s. By the mid-1960s, the business had about forty employees, deboning cattle as well as making sausages, hamburger patties and the like.
My father also successfully provided other food products to restaurants. Muller’s became distributors of Bridgford Bread and McCain French Fries. And importantly, over time, they bought and sold truckloads of food products as diverse as apricots and tomato paste.
Moving to the 420: Muller’s Meats – Wholesale Meat Packers
Ferdinand and Henry in Cooler #2 at Muller’s Meats, late 1960s
By 1967, the premises were far too small for the growing business. In 1967, Nandor and Henry bought the former N. C. Joseph factory at 5340 Portage Road on the 420 Highway and moved the business there. The premises were known in our family as “the plant” (as in meat packing plant) used in a sentence as “Dad is still not home from the plant” or “Dad had to go back to the plant”.
My first memories of working there date from 1969, when I helped Rosie Gopeil make hamburger patties. I was about eight years old, but very proud that I could contribute. The business was usually the topic of the discussion between my parents at our dinner table, and from a very young age, I was intently interested in every detail. For many years, I worked in the business after school and in the summers.
I recall one time when I came to the plant one Friday afternoon after school and was going to get a ride home with my father. It was already 5:00 p.m., which was the time the business usually closed. I was anxious to go home and was bugging my father to get going. My Dad said to just wait a few minutes as he had a few more things to finish up. Ten minutes later the phone rang and it was the buyer for Ponderosa, a huge budget steakhouse chain in the USA. I remember to this day the buyer’s name: it was Claus Linden. They talked about everything under the sun for ten minutes and then Mr. Linden asked my Dad what he had in rib eye inventory. It was the middle of winter, and my Dad had a huge rib eye inventory and was having a hard time getting it down. My Dad said he had forty tons of rib eyes, which was two truckloads. Mr. Linden asked him how much he wanted for them and my Dad responded $2.05 per pound. Mr. Linden replied, “Okay it’s a deal. Deliver both loads next week, here is your P.O. number.” The call ended, my Dad looked over at me, and said, “You see, Dudi, that’s what happens when you stay ten minutes late.” It was a great lesson for me to learn.
Understanding the Business
The following is a simple primer of the beef business presented here so that the reader can understand where Muller’s Meats fit into the schematic of the industry.
Male cattle are called steers and female cattle are called cows. Steers are raised for beef consumption. They are fed grass or corn on feedlots to fatten them up and then are slaughtered at the age of two or three years. The beef is juicy and tender, and it is from steers that one gets graded beef such as Select, Choice, and Prime.
By contrast, cows are raised for milk production. After many years, approximately seven to nine, they are too old to give milk any longer, and they are then sent to slaughter. The resulting beef is lean and dry, and much cheaper than beef from steers.
Muller’s Meats used the aged dairy cows. As a further delineation, within cows, there are three gradations. Utility cows are fatter cows which are closer to steers in terms of the possible uses of the meat. Canner cows are the very leanest of the cows whose meat has no fat in it. Cutter cows are in between. Muller’s Meats deboned all three types of cows but mainly canners and cutters.
With the exception of the rib eye, the beef from the front of the cow is too tough to eat as is; thus, it is used in the production of hamburger patties, beef sausages, and other remanufactured beef products, such as canned soup or canned dinners that have beef as an ingredient. The rib eye is served in budget restaurants such as a Ponderosa Steak House. In the hind quarter, the cow roasts are also tough; thus, they are sold either to companies that inject the roasts with brine solution (or in the case of one very innovative customer, sour cream) to make them softer, or they are sold to companies that dry the meats to make beef jerky. The striploin and the tenderloin (aka filet mignon) are sold to budget restaurant chains like Red Lobster, which would serve them in a surf and turf meal. The bones were sold to Campbell Soup, which cooked them to make beef broth.
The Boners at Muller’s Meats, circa mid-1980s
Butchers deboned the cow carcasses and separated the resulting beef into the various parts that would be sold to different customers. Even though it was a deboning operation, the employees were called boners – not deboners – much to the amusement of children who heard that word.
Muller’s Meats was in a really tough business for many reasons:
- The margins were very small because it was a commodity business.
- There were always issues with the quality of the products.
- There were always issues with the staff.
- There were always issues with stealing.
- There were always issues with government inspectors.
- There were always problems with the trucks and the refrigeration units.
Problem #1: Competition
When the business moved from Centre Street to the 420 Highway, its premises increased from 2,000 square feet to 25,000 square feet. Just as importantly, the deboning operation moved from one where the butchers were deboning on a stationary table to one where the table was a moving conveyor belt. This allowed for an enormous increase in production. That in turn meant that the business had to purchase many more cows for raw material, and at the same time had much more beef to sell at the other end of the conveyor line.
The first source of competition was on the buy side for raw material. Muller’s Meats was always competing with other cow deboning companies who wanted to buy the carcasses from the slaughterhouse, Canada Packers. In order to buy the carcasses that were required to keep the plant running and in order to entice Canada Packers to sell the carcasses to Muller’s Meats instead of to a competitor, we had to raise our bid price for the carcasses. Many times, that bid price had to be raised to the point where it was hardly worth buying them, but on the other hand, we always felt pressure to “keep our plant running.”
Tough competitors included Erie Meat Company of Mississauga, All-Lean Beef of Burlington, Levinoff Meats, and Abbatoir du Nord of Montreal. Erie Meats was owned by Stanley Grossman and Syd Rosen. Syd was a colorful character who was also a stock promoter in addition to being in the meat business. All-Lean Beef was owned by Bill Galloway. Levinoff Meats was owned by three brothers: Philip, Lewis and Jackie Cola of Montreal. One time I joined my father for a dinner in Montreal with Philip and Jackie Cola. The dinner took place at Milos Restaurant. The goal was to collaborate on buying cows instead of competing; however, the proposed collaboration never took place.
The second source of competition was on the sell side. Muller’s competed on the selling end with these same companies who were providing the same products to customers. Because the finished products were commodity products with no product or brand differentiation, almost all of the competition was based on price. Muller’s Meats always had to sell its product at the same price as the lowest offeror in the industry. Because Muller’s Meats had no cost advantage over its competitors, either in raw material costs or in production costs, our margins were always razor thin.
As a consequence, the only way to eke out a living was to develop personal relationships with suppliers and especially with customers. This was necessary in order to get them to be a bit more lenient on the terms of business. This was one of the most important lessons my father and grandfather taught me: the importance of developing personal relationships with people one was doing business with. This was especially the case with customers. As mentioned, the business was a very tough, low-margin commodity business. My grandfather and father were able to cultivate customers whose business enabled our survival. It would not be a stretch to say that the business pretty much continued to exist by virtue of the largesse of these customers.
I believe the following illustrates this point well. This is a quote from a letter my mother sent me on April 24, 1979 while I was on my gap year:
“Sunday was a wasted day as far as I’m concerned. Daddy invited Kyle Wood and his wife and son to our house for brunch. Wood is the vice-president of F. G. Bradley Co. which is one of our customers from Toronto. We schlepped around with them all afternoon, and in the evening, we had to go to St. John’s Anglican Church for a service and social. They had invited themselves to our shul for one of our onegs, and now they had invited us back so we had to go. Can you think of a worse combination of activities on a beautiful spring Sunday?”
What she did not mention is that on Monday, he probably bought eight thousand pounds of tenderloins at a twenty-cent premium to the market!
Problem #2: Quality Issues
Quality issues plagued the business constantly.
First, there was the problem of freshness. As they say in this industry, you sell it or smell it. All of the meat coming off the assembly line had to be sold and sold quickly or it would literally go rotten. The alternative was freezing it, which meant that it would have to be sold at a loss.
Second, there was the problem of subjectivity. The main product, boneless beef, was packaged in two-thousand-pound cardboard containers called combo bins. There were twenty combo bins in one forty-foot tractor trailer. The customers, mainly the commissaries of McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King, could be as far as six hundred miles away, in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Columbus, or Chicago. When a trailer load of fresh boneless beef arrived at the customer’s door, Muller’s Meats was really totally at the whim of the customer. For example, the customer could, and many times did, say that the meat “smelled bad” and thus was being rejected. That meant that we owned a fresh load of meat six hundred miles from home, with a value of $100,000, that was not going to get better over time. When this happened, we had three choices: try to convince the buyer to keep it, offer him less money to keep it, or take it back and try to sell it to someone else, usually also at a discount, because we had to get rid of it quickly.
Third, there was the issue of specifications. As I mentioned, we deboned all different gradations of cows. In rib eyes, for example, the utility rib eyes, the fatter ones, could be sold to budget restaurant chains. The canner and cutter rib eyes were too chewy for these restaurants to use; they had to be sold to companies that sliced them very thin and made Philly Cheese Steaks. Utility rib eyes thus sold at a premium to the canner and cutter rib eyes. Sometimes, we would sell a load of utility rib eyes, and the customer would say that there were some cutter rib eyes mixed in with the load. There again, we would have a choice: convince the customer that there were so few cutter rib eyes mixed in that he should keep the load as is, offer a discount on the whole load so that the customer would keep it, or take the load back and try to sell it to someone else.
The types of incidents I am describing were not the exceptions; they happened day in and day out. As you can imagine, dealing with the customers was very stressful.
Problem #3: Staff Problem
As a result of low margins, the employees could not be – and were not – paid well. Added to that was the fact that the work was strenuous and repetitive. Several times, the workers organized to form a union. These were really stressful times for our family, especially during labor negotiations and subsequent strikes. Our lawyer was Phil Wolfenden and my father spent a lot of very unpleasant days with Phil at his side negotiating with the union.
To illustrate this, allow me to quote from a letter my mother sent me on September 18, 1981 while I was on my Junior Year Abroad:
“…As Dad told you, the men went out on strike on Wednesday morning, Sept. 9th. The only ones to come in are Bob Lowry, Gil Bellefleur, Bob Campion, Jim Campion, Les Pinsky (a new boner from Montreal who started a few days before the strike), all the drivers, and a new man who started that day. Since then we have lost two of the drivers, Louis and the new driver, Ed Franck. We don’t need the drivers now anyways, because as you can imagine, business is very slow. We are still bringing in cows and working them as best we can. The only two women on the picket line are Theresa and Maria Mayhew. Lydia and Diva called and said the other girls were afraid to come in because they said they would harm them and their families if they did. Also, one of the guys told me that they said they would blackball them from ever working in any union plant again if they come to work. They set up a picket line on both sides of the plant with about four or five guys on each side. They tried to prevent any trucks from coming in or out. Their most successful tactic as far as nuisance value is strewing nails through the driveways so that both Dad and I got nails in all of our tires. Fortunately, we are insured under vandalism and we had four new Michelins put on each of our cars. Things were not too bad although we brought everybody in by taxi (charged to us) with a police escort and home the same way. They were picketing around the clock at that time, taking turns. Then last Tuesday, Sept 15, they decided to beef up the lines with about 50 guys from Canadian Home Products and Abex, both of which are also on strike. That became very intimidating indeed and dad and I also were escorted through the picket lines with police protection. Wednesday, Sept 16, was the most frightening though. They brought on the goons who were hollering and yelling as the men were getting into the taxi. Five police cruisers were needed to get them out as they had also brought along cars and trucks to try to block off all the driveways. The taxi got through the Valley Way entrance but when the police left the taxi, a truck driven by one of the Canadian Home Products men followed them and crashed into the taxi three times at the corner of Main and Ferry and then took off. Fortunately, none of our people were hurt but the taxi was badly damaged and the next day Jim Campion did not come into work. Apparently, he was followed the night before and he was afraid to come into work. The taxi company owner charged the man who drove the truck and that must have sobered up some of the people because we have not had any further incidents other than broken windows since then. Today, Friday, there are just our own men picketing on either side and there was no trouble when the men left at two o’clock…”
Despite the intermittent labor strife, some of our employees stayed with us for a long time. Stu Lowry, who was the first non-family employee at the retail store, drove the fork lift at the plant. Gilles Bellefleur was the foreman. Gilles’ sons Michael and Gilles, Jr., also worked in the plant, as did Stu’s younger son, David Lowry. Bob Campion boxed the finished product and was a very loyal employee. He even volunteered his services to my father when my Dad ran the Thunderbolt game at the annual Lions Club Carnival. Bob’s son Jim Campion also worked for us. Office staff included Joan Holton, Audrey French, Carole Mannette, and Marie McMillan. Managers who worked for us over the years included Bruce Bell, Bob Lowry (Stu’s son) and Laurie Goldwater. Paul Yellin, my aunt Helen’s son, worked at the plant for a year after he got his master’s degree in history. He took care of the shipping docks. His wife Michelle did not like small-town living and after a year they moved back to Hamilton.
Another major problem was the Workers’ Compensation Board. This government insurance agency was very lenient toward repetitive motion injuries. Thus, at any given time, a significant number of our workers claimed that they had a repetitive motion injury. This claim is virtually impossible to disprove, and the employees would take off weeks or months at a time and would be paid by the WCB. In turn, the WCB would charge us, not only for the amount that they paid the employees, but also a fine for being a high offending employer. Thus the monthly invoice to Muller’s Meats from WCB was equal to or greater than almost all of the other expenses combined, including the payroll! In addition, on the occasions where we decided to fight the claim, we had legal fees to pay as well, although we stopped doing this over time because the fight was futile.
Problem #4: Employee Theft
Employee theft was a very big problem.
The plant was configured in a way that made it very easy to steal meat. Most factories, and certainly meat factories, are configured so that one enters the building into an office section. From the office, there is one door that leads to the processing room. To get in or out of the processing room, one must use that door, which is locked and under surveillance. In the case of the Muller’s Meats plant, there were many doors to the building and they all opened directly into the meat processing room; there were no barriers that one had to go through to get to the beef. Furthermore, there was no closed-circuit television system to be used to watch the doors. Employees thus stole meat through the front door on Portage Road, through the side door where the cattle were received on Valley Way and through the back door where the shipping docks faced Stanley Avenue. Also, the windows in the men’s room and the laundry room opened directly to the outside, and employees would pass beef though those windows to accomplices waiting outside.
As my father used to say, if one owns a hardware store and the employees are stealing nails and taking them home, eventually they will have a house full of nails and will not steal any more. For an employee of a meat plant, by contrast, if one has a restaurant as a customer for the stolen meat, one can steal forever because one has an open-ended customer for the finished stolen product. And as my grandfather used to say when someone asked him if he thought his employees were stealing, “Well I can assure you that they are not bringing any extra meat into the plant”, meaning yes, they were stealing.
This problem was compounded by the fact that my father had an extreme soft spot for the down and out and liked giving people a second chance. Several plant employees were ex-convicts to whom my Dad gave a second chance.
Problem #5: Government Inspection
Another source of extreme stress was the U.S. Department of Agriculture Import Inspection. Much of our business involved exporting fresh beef to the U.S. The USDA inspected beef at the border, on a random selection basis. When a given load was chosen for inspection, the truck was stopped and its entire load was unloaded. Then a USDA import inspector inspected the beef to ascertain if the beef was fit for consumption in the USA. The inspection criteria were extremely erratic and whether or not a given load passed or failed was truly up to the vagaries of the inspector, or what kind of a mood he was in that day. A load could be rejected for any of many minor reasons. When a load was rejected, it had to come back to Canada to our plant for reworking or sale in Canada. The problem was that our customer was expecting the fresh meat – twenty tons – to be at his back door the next morning and he needed it for his production. Some of my worst memories are of calling the customer at 6 p.m. at home to let him know that he was not getting his delivery the next day. This happened dozens of times.
In addition to the daily stress of the import inspection, there was also the constant worry of the audits by Agriculture Canada auditors from Ottawa. Some of these were scheduled audits and some were surprise audits. The auditors had the power to shut down the operation if they found deficiencies that were egregious enough to warrant a shutdown. The problem for us of course was that their determination was subjective. Every auditor found issues – that is their job. Then, negotiations would ensue between the auditors and my father over how bad the issues were deemed to be. Usually the auditors would give us a specified period of time in which to come into compliance. These issues could be as large as requiring us to refinish the walls with steel plates instead of paint, so they often involved huge expenditures, which the business could ill afford.
Henry and Bella Pose In Front of New Muller’s Meats Trailer, mid-1980s
Problem #6: Trucks and Refrigeration Units
The trucks were always breaking down, and in particular, the refrigeration units, or Thermo Kings as they were known. At any time of the day and night, we would get calls from our drivers saying their refrigeration unit had broken. When that happened, it meant there were twenty tons of fresh meat (worth $100,000) on the highway, starting to spoil. As I mentioned, the customers were extremely strict about the temperature of the meat. When our truck arrived, they would open the doors and immediately take the temperature of the meat. If it was above their upper limit, they would simply reject the entire load. Then the load belonged to us and we had to find somewhere else to sell it, and fast, because if it were not sold and processed within 24 to 48 hours, we would have to write off the entire truck’s load as a total loss. What I am describing happened all the time. Furthermore, all of the company phone lines rang into our home, so the drivers could – and did – reach us at all hours.