Gabriel Weber
Staff writer
In a display of the family devotion built into their businesses, executive chair of GOJO Industries Marcella Kanfer Rolnick and CEO of the J.M. Smucker Company Mark Smucker first exchanged gifts of Purell and Uncrustables for back-to-school season before launching into their discussion Tuesday morning in the Amphitheater.
Third- and fifth-generation family leaders respectively, Kanfer Rolnick and Smucker conversed about company values and what the next frontier of transformation looks like. The second day of the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Five theme, “Innovation in Capitalism: How to Meet 21st-Century Challenges?,” focused on the context of building two successful businesses and what it will take to maintain that success.
Moderator Jill Penrose, chief people and company services officer at the J.M. Smucker Company, began by pointing out that 54% of the GDP and 59% of employment is driven from family businesses — yet fewer than 12% of family-run companies make it to the third generation.
The demand for hand hygiene products to keep hands healthy and clean arose in the 1940s when women went to work in rubber factories in Akron, Ohio, and complained about their hands not getting clean; Kanfer Rolnick’s aunt, Goldie Lippman, was one of those women. Her husband, Jerry Lippman, was a three- or four-time failed entrepreneur until he worked with chemistry professor Clarence Cook to create a solution.
In 1983, with an E. coli outbreak at a fast food chain, GOJO created a novel product within five years that enabled people to wash their hands away from a sink: hand sanitizer.
“It took a long time to train people on what that meant and how to do it; questions like, ‘Where do the germs go?’ confounded people, and they didn’t know if they could trust it,” Kanfer Rolnick said. “So we had to build trust and explain how the science worked. We have always been very science-based over generations. Now someone who is maybe 20 years old and going off to college always has had Purell in their life.”
J.M. Smucker began with an innovative idea as well, with Smucker’s great, great grandfather — Jerome Monroe Smucker — creating the brand’s apple butter in 1897. After building a cider press, a kind of large pressure cooker that accelerated the cider-making process, the founder sold apple butter out of his wagon.
One important thing that is not as visible as J.M. Smucker’s history is the employees’ long-standing and invisible support system that make the work that happens every day possible. The purpose of the company is feeding connections that help us thrive, after all.
“We make products and brands that most people know about. We’re in the business of trying to bring people together, to nourish them, to bring them delight and joy, whether that’s a cup of coffee to help you wake up in the morning to a plain old PB&J sandwich. Recently, we acquired Hostess about a year-and-a-half ago, so delighting people with cupcakes and Twinkies is something that we’re about,” Smucker said. “Whether it’s fun, whether it’s nourishment, nourishing your pets, those are things that we take seriously. If we continue to provide safe, quality brands, quality food to our consumers that delight them, that’s why we’re in business.”
Both Smucker and Kanfer Rolnick began from the ground up, working odd jobs around the manufacturing plants; Smucker started off as a janitor while Kanfer Rolnick began building dispensaries on the factory floor. Before committing fully to their corresponding companies, they felt they had to affirm there would be no looking back.
Smucker worked as an eighth grade science teacher in Alabama prior to heading back to school to earn his Master of Business Administration and working in advertising in Argentina. Kanfer Rolnick’s dad initially offered to have her sit in on the executive meetings, but she felt she had to earn her chops, especially as a woman in a male-dominated field, and obtained her Master of Business Administration while consulting on the business.
The pull between tradition and evolution in family businesses is a tricky line to hold.
“Jerry and Joe have been fond of saying over the decades, ‘We can only eat steak three times a day, and even that we don’t want to do.’ What that means is it really wasn’t about economics for our family, it wasn’t about greed or accumulation — it was about growth and doing something important in the world and the economics we believed would follow,” Kanfer Rolnick said. “The thing that I have brought in my generation, and I think it’s just the natural evolution of the business, was converting the growth commitment to profitable growth and making sure that we had the right economic resources to weather storms, to reinvest as the company got bigger.”
J.M. Smucker continues with conscious capitalism through serving constituencies in an intentional order: consumer, customers, employees, suppliers and then communities. This conserves the original excellence and allows for space to grow in places like advertising.
“What we’re good at is not making fruit-based products. It’s actually marketing and selling brands. We’re good at brands, good at connecting brands to consumers and developing brand love and emotional bonds. That realization unlocked the ability for the company to get into other categories. So we merged with a spinoff from Procter & Gamble, which was Jif and Crisco — doubling the size of the company. That launched the ability for us to continue to do that a few times over with the Pillsbury brand, which is no longer part of our portfolio. Later coffee, later pet food, and so on,” Smucker said. “Both of those decisions were very important because as leaders of the company, they realized that in order for the company to thrive for the future generations of all of our stakeholders, including our employees, that we had to grow.”
To engineer brand trust, J.M. Smucker prioritizes clarity in mission and product quality. One of their brands, Café Bustelo, supports musicians and artists in the Latino community.
“Every year, we put out a sustainability report, or a corporate responsibility report, that details the different ways that we support the planet and the communities in which we work,” Smucker said. “I think that’s a piece of generating trust.”
Kanfer Rolnick takes a different approach in focusing on where her company’s expertise lies.
“We are experts in public health and well-being in the disruption of disease transmission,” Kanfer Rolnick said. “That’s where we stand up and get loud and bring our science. We have an incredible group of scientists across all of the disciplines to make sure that everything that we’re innovating and everything we are advocating for really is grounded and has nothing but high integrity. So we stay in our lane. We do not get pulled into places that we don’t think we can add value or move the needle or don’t have expertise.”
J.M. Smucker has leveraged brand building to remain continuously relevant in recognition that their old marketing model was no longer cutting it. To make the point, Smucker played a video that showed the progression of tactics used to reach more consumers; the audience laughed several times at the out-of-the-box rebrand.
GOJO created entire categories of consumer goods that hadn’t existed previously with their invention of Purell. Operating on the principle that customers are loyal to the best solution, Kanfer Rolnick pointed out their founder Jerry Lippman created the first-ever portion-control dispenser.
Thinking about the generations who will lead in the future, Smucker finds that young peoples’ insight is impressive. J.M. Smucker has an influx of interns over the summer and ends up offering 70% of them full-time offers before graduating college.
“We cannot ignore what these younger generations are telling us, whether it’s how they use AI, how they are thinking about our portfolio, how our brands need to evolve, what types of ingredients that we should be thinking about for the future, how we change our products or how we market our products,” Smucker said. “I have always been so impressed and inspired by our interns and our young employees because they give us that spark and they continue to help drive us.”
Kanfer Rolnick believes it’s important to tell stories of the past to inform the thinking of tomorrow. GOJO gives out the Henry Orr Award — named after an employee who defied orders to create a better product — to inspire thinking outside of the box, honoring the authority of what the need is.
“Listen to the young people, but also keep listening with ferocity to the people using your products,” Kanfer Rolnick said. “We inspire our teams to take risks toward the jobs to be done. We say go for it, be creative, be wild, think outside the box. No one is going to penalize you.”
