The Costco Connection - January 2014

54 ;e Costco Connection JANUARY 2014
for your health: VITAMIX SUPPLIER PROFILE
A successful business
Vitamix is a healthy
company, in many ways
By Teri Cettina

TUNE TO A program on the Food Network— or any of your favorite cooking shows—and you get a quick glimpse inside a real chef’s kitchen. Along with the professional-grade stove and high-carbon steel knives, you’re likely to see the same blender among every chef’s equipment: a Vitamix.

Those appearances aren’t paid endorsements. Vitamix has a strict policy against making deals with celebrities to encourage sales. “Quite simply, the blender is there because the TV chef insisted on it,” says Tony Ciepiel, Vitamix’s chief operating officer.

But you don’t have to turn on your TV to see a Vitamix at work. If you buy chilled, blended coffee drinks, smoothies or shakes, your beverage was most likely made in a Vitamix. The world’s top three coffee chains, top two smoothie chains and one of the world’s best-known fast-food restaurants use the Vitamix to craft their blended drinks. In addition, more than 150 U.S. culinary schools and more than 100,000 commercial restaurants and food-service companies use the brand’s blending equipment.

Based in Cleveland, Ohio, with more than 90 percent of its blenders produced and shipped from this Midwest location, using mostly local suppliers for materials, Vitamix has a consumer fan base that’s growing exponentially, with household blender sales up a whopping 500 percent in the past five years.

Jon Berghoff, Vitamix’s national sales manager, attributes the company’s exploding growth to the current emphasis on homemade healthful foods and the popularity of fine cooking as a hobby. “People want to know what’s in their food, and to use quality ingredients and whole foods when making it themselves. The Vitamix plays into that perfectly,” he says.

In fact, the health-food trend was pre-
cisely what company founder William Grover
Barnard—affectionately called “Papa”
Barnard—hoped to tap into when he founded
the firm in 1921. His company was initially
called The Natural Food Institute, and he
traveled around the United States selling
modern kitchen products and promoting
fresh food preparation. In 1937, he discovered
the then-recent invention known as the
blender. He quickly focused his efforts on
revolutionizing this tool and pairing it with
his passion for healthful eating.

In 1949, Barnard took his own “ VitaMix” blender to the airwaves, creating what’s generally regarded as the world’s first TV infomercial. Barnard’s son, Bill, took over the company in the 1950s and officially changed the firm’s name to the Vitamix Corporation in 1964. In the late ’60s, the company introduced more-powerful machines that could actually cook soup, knead bread dough, make frozen desserts and grind whole grains, just as the company’s machines do today. In the mid-1980s, the company also introduced commercial-use machines.