Costco Connection - December 2007

supplier
profile

Name: Jones Dairy Farm

Employees: 350

Address: P.O. Box 808 Fort Atkinson, WI 53538-0808

Phone: 1-800-635-6637

Web site: www.jonesdairyfarm.com

Products at Costco: Costco members will find Jones Dairy Farm pork sausage links and patties, Canadian bacon, whole ham and rack of pork (selection varies by location).

Comments about Costco: “Costco challenges us to think about all aspects of our business, including ways to add value for our customers and creativity to our product lines.”—Philip Jones

(L to R) Cole, Adele, Ted and Philip Jones still find time to relax in front of the farmhouse where Jones Dairy Farm originated in 1889.

Keeping up with
the Joneses

PETER VANCE

Farm’s past ensures future success

By T. Foster Jones

I AM NOT RELATED to the Jones Dairy Farm family. But I did grow up with them. Many breakfasts over the years with my own Jones family have included a Jones Dairy Farm product on the table.

It was a real pleasure, then, to visit the 117-year-old business and meet the family responsible for so many happy meals and memories of my own, as well as those of thousands of others through several generations. The Jones Dairy Farm name has, over the decades, become renowned and respected around the world.

Set on 300 sprawling acres in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, the farm encompasses the Jones factory, cornfields, the original farmhouse where Milo Jones I settled in 1843 and stately homes where brothers Philip and Cole Jones and their families continue to live. Nearby, beyond a gently sloping lawn and past a copse of overhanging trees, runs the Rock River.

The serene setting belies the fact that just down the path the Jones factory is running full speed, producing and shipping hundreds of thousands of pounds of their products— sausage, ham, Canadian bacon, bacon, liver sausage and scrapple—each year to the world.

Steeped in the past

In many ways, little has changed since Milo Jones II forayed into the pork business, six generations of Joneses ago. A successful entrepreneur, in 1889 he came up with the idea of producing sausage using a popular recipe his mother had brought from Vermont 40 years earlier. Word spread fast, the business grew and the rest, as they say, is history.

That recipe, created from all-natural ingredients and spices, and incorporated into all of the Jones sausage products, has remained unchanged for 117 years. This all-natural approach, also followed in all of their other pork products, also remains unaltered. And the Joneses have been adamant about maintaining the same high quality standards set down more than 100 years ago.

“We’ve been successful at providing consistent quality to generations,” says Philip Jones, the company’s current president. “We are keenly aware of what works.”

Who’s on first?

For a company with such deep roots, one could understand a reluctance to change. But the company has been a groundbreaker, establishing a number of industry firsts.

“One reason we’ve been in business over multiple generations is a strong entrepreneurial spirit,” says Jones.

In the 1920s, Jones Dairy Farm was the first meatpacking company to quick-freeze sausage, facilitating shipping throughout the United States and abroad without the need for chemicals or preservatives.

They were the first to introduce a line of fully cooked breakfast sausage, and, in deference to diet-conscious customers, the first to offer “light” breakfast sausage products.

Most significant, they became one of the first meatpacking companies to operate a modern bacteriological laboratory on-site to monitor and test for food safety. Testing is done seven days a week, with close to 100,000 tests per year checking cleanliness, water qual-

ity, temperature and equipment.

The Jones lab has been instrumental in introducing new testing methods to the industry, and Jones is one of just five food companies (and the only privately owned company) that meets the standards set by the American Association for Laboratory Accreditation, a nonprofit public service dedicated to the formal recognition of testing laboratories, inspection bodies and proficiency testing.

“Not too many businesses have this kind of infrastructure,” says Jones. “Some ways may be quicker or cheaper, but they’re not as accurate. And if you don’t have a clean plant, you don’t have anything to sell.

“We put a huge emphasis on process and protocol,” he continues. “It is the future for us as a company that we are known for quality.”

Past links to future

Although Jones Dairy Farm has been successful for more than a century, it is now gaining a new legion of fans, as the company’s attachment to the past has put Jones in the forefront of the all-natural food movement.

“The all-natural trend is more relevant than ever today,” says Jones, “and it makes Jones even more relevant. Consumers are becoming more educated about what they consume. They want to know that a product doesn’t have a binder, filler or MSG [monoso-dium glutamate]. It puts us in a good position, because we’ve always been all natural.