The Pepperidge Farm Story: Margaret Rudkin and the Loaf That Failed
About this episode
The episode explores the true story of Margaret Rudkin, who turned a baking failure into a successful business with Pepperidge Farm.
In 1937, a forty-year-old woman in Fairfield, Connecticut opened her oven and pulled out a failure. The loaf was one inch high. She said later it was hard as a rock, and that it belonged in the Smithsonian as a specimen of bread from the Stone Age. She had never baked a loaf of bread in her life. Upstairs was her nine-year-old son Mark, whose asthma and food allergies were severe enough that the family allergist had told her the mass-produced white bread on every counter in America was likely making him worse.Her name was Margaret Rudkin. Twenty-four years later she sold Pepperidge Farm to the Campbell Soup Company for roughly twenty-eight million dollars in stock and took a seat on Campbell's board of directors, the first woman ever to sit on it.This is the story of what happened in between, and it is not the story you have been told. The legend says a sweet housewife stumbled into baking and got lucky. The record says something else entirely. Margaret Fogarty graduated valedictorian in New York City, spent four years at a bank as a bookkeeper and a teller, and worked on Wall Street at the brokerage firm McClure, Jones and Company before she ever ran a household. When the crash…
Topics covered
- entrepreneurship
- history
- food industry
- women in business
- true story
- bread making
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