Beyond Shareholder Primacy by Stuart Hart

Author:Stuart Hart [Hart, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2024-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

Griffith was founded in 1919 by Enoch Luther Griffith (E. L.), a Chicago sales executive, and his son, Carroll Ladd (C. L.) Griffith, a pharmacologist. From the beginning, E. L. and C. L. sought to infuse safety and reliability into a flawed food system. They named their company Griffith Laboratories to underscore their focus on food science.

At the time, the nation’s food supply couldn’t be trusted. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle had exposed the unhealthy conditions of the Chicago Stockyards in 1906, but rancid beef, inedible sausages, and unpurified spices continued to find their way into American homes.58 Both C. L. and E. L. Griffith wanted to help change that by introducing food science to the food industry. They believed they could improve food safety and help create healthier, better-tasting food using new technologies, food science, and innovative manufacturing processes.59

Griffith Laboratories’ original purpose was thus to enhance the safety and taste of food products, while at the same time reducing cost and food waste. From the beginning, Griffith “punched above its weight” by launching “win-win” innovations that were good for the food producers and good for end consumers. The company’s motto was, “Help customers prosper and Griffith will prosper.” Griffith also developed an early reputation for being most creative when times were most difficult. By partnering with large meatpackers such as Armour and Swift, Griffith helped to transform the meat industry at a time when food safety lapses, unsanitary conditions, and waste were rampant.

If Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was the clarion call a century ago in Chicago, perhaps Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma serves that purpose today, making clear the unsustainable and unhealthy nature of today’s global food and agricultural system.60 Might Griffith be able to use its creativity once again to address this daunting global challenge?

Food Becomes an Industry

In many ways, the journey of Griffith Foods parallels the industrialization of the food industry itself. A key turning point in this regard occurred in 1909 when Fritz Haber invented a way to make synthetic nitrogen (commercialized as the Haber-Bosch process), enabling the manufacture of synthetic fertilizer. Although nitrogen makes up about 80 percent of the earth’s atmosphere, nitrogen atoms are tightly paired and nonreactive until they can be split apart and bound to hydrogen. Until Haber figured out how to artificially “fix” nitrogen from the atmosphere, all the useable nitrogen on Earth was fixed by soil bacteria living on the roots of leguminous plants (for example, peas, beans, lentils, pulses). Before Haber’s invention of synthetic fertilizer, in other words, the amount of life on Earth—plants and animals—was limited by the amount of nitrogen fixed by natural processes.61

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