The Cornelius Years
Compared to the millions of pounds of products Reser's prepares and distributes today, Mildred and Earl's operation was strictly small potatoes. A big production day was 200 pounds of potato salad. Mildred made the salad and Earl sold it to butcher shops and grocery stores.
"Mother used to cook potatoes in a galvanized tub on a wood stove," Lois Reser Romaine remembers. "The eggs and potatoes were cooked at night, and we peeled them before school. We all worked." Workers included next-door-neighbor, Ida Vandehey.
Lois also recalls a major turning point in the business. One day Mildred stopped by the Safeway in Hillsboro and asked if she could provide the store's potato salad. Safeway asked if she could supply not just the Hillsboro store but all the Safeway stores in Oregon. Mildred said "yes."
With the Safeway account in 1951, Mrs. Reser's Salads outgrew the farmhouse kitchen. Mildred and Earl moved to a two-story, 20'x50' building in Cornelius. Office and dry storage took up the front 10 feet, and production took up the rest. Mildred and Earl lived in the apartment above. When the donut shop next door closed, they took over that space and the company continued to grow. When Dixon Cleaners, another business in the building closed, Mildred and Earl added another 20 feet to their operation.
President Al Reser remembers working summers during high school helping his mother make potato salad and his father deliver to warehouses. He remembers working when he was in college as well.
"Even though I was in college, I worked a lot of hours during the week," Al says. "We always worked on Saturdays because we had to deliver to the warehouse on Sundays, and Mom wanted the potato salad to be fresh. Saturday was one of our biggest days."
Pat Reser, née Valian, who lived in Portland, and Al Reser were dating at the time, and Pat smiles as she remembers telephone calls from Mildred.
"She'd call me up and say, 'Tell Brother-she always called him Brother or Son-tell Brother he has to be at work at 4 in the morning.' Sometimes it was 3 or 3:30, and sometimes Al made it home just in time to go to work!"
The company was making four salads and a variety of gelatins.
That changed during Al's last year at Oregon State University when he developed dips for chips for Blue Bell Potato Chip Co., and created Reser's first private label.
"Because I was studying food technology, Oregon State gave me some help developing the recipe. It was the first time I ever developed a product. We did five flavors. We did batch after batch after batch, and finally the Blue Bell people bought them. Our sales were about $300,000 a year at that time, and the Blue Bell business was almost a third of that."
Not only did the Blue Bell chip dips provide huge volume during winter when the salad business was slow, but the dips were also a milestone for the company and the industry. They were the first dips made with sour cream rather than with cream cheese.
And Reser's legendary commitment to customer service reached another level. Al, who was still a university student, had to ensure the dips were delivered fresh on Sundays.
"It was a lot of business for us and it was fun. I'd get to the plant around 4 or 5 on Friday afternoon and start prepping so I'd be ready for the crew I hired from Pacific University to begin work around midnight or 1 o'clock on Saturday morning. We usually worked 24 hours straight through to Sunday morning. We had machine filling, but we did all the mixing by hand."
Darrell Vandehey, next door neighbor Ida's son, helped out with production while he was in high school. When he returned from the Army in 1956, Earl encouraged him to go to college.
Darrell took the advice. "I went to Portland State University and to Oregon State University and got a degree in food technology. I worked weekends in the Cornelius plant."
Reser's cooked the potatoes whole, Darrell remembers, and about a half dozen women scraped the skins off. The dicer was a box with woven wire.
"We were up to about 8,000 or 9,000 pounds a day by then, and we sold to Safeway, Hank's Markets, Chet's Market, Tipton's, and a variety of other independent grocery stores."
In 1960, Earl opened a food brokerage company in Seattle and sold his stock in Mrs. Reser's Salads to Al, who incorporated the company as Reser's Fine Foods and became President, a title he holds to this day.
When Darrell graduated from Oregon State University in 1960, he joined Reser's full-time. In 1962, he was named Vice President, Production, and in 1997, when he thought he was retiring, he appointed himself Special Projects Manager. He's still working. Darrell's retirement, although short-lived, makes him the second generation of his family to retire from Reser's, following in his mother's footsteps.
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