Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough, John Helyar

considered so much chin music. Everyone knew Nabisco, with dominant brands such as Ritz and Oreo, was the more powerful company. Everyone knew who would be in charge.
     

     
    Nabisco had been born a juggernaut. The National Biscuit Co., as it was originally called, was formed in 1898, the result of a transaction that merged one company that owned most of the nation’s major eastern bakers with another that owned most of the major western ones—and ended the cutthroat competition between the two. A product of the turn-of-the-century trust era, Nabisco was often called “the biscuit trust.” Yet it was also the biscuit pioneer, taking the cracker out of the cracker barrel and for the first time making it a packaged, standardized commodity. It was the first company to bring national marketing and distribution to a hitherto regional product.
    The man who created Nabisco was a Chicago lawyer, Adolphus Green. Green, the company’s first chairman, took a personal hand in inventing the octagonal soda cracker that was the company’s first national product. Uneeda Biscuit, he called it. He selected a company trademark still used today, a medieval Italian printers’ symbol consisting of a cross with two bars and an oval, representing the triumph of the moral and spiritual over the evil and the material. He designed the packaging and drafted the wording on the box: “Uneeda Biscuit. Served with every meal; take a box with you on your travels; splendid for sandwiches; perfect for picnics; unequalled for general use; do not contain sugar. This is a perfect food for everybody, and the price places them within the reach of all.”
    N. W. Ayer, Nabisco’s advertising agency, took it from there. In early 1899, it placed a one-word ad in newspapers and on billboards: “Uneeda.” Then the next step: “Uneeda Biscuit.” Then, “Do you know Uneeda Biscuit?” After that: “Of course Uneeda Biscuit!” Ayer went on to present an ad campaign that showed a little boy in a slicker with a box ofUneeda Biscuits, a simple, powerful image in an age before Madison Avenue had come to full flower. At the time it was the biggest ad campaign ever, and the first to feature a packaged ready-to-eat food.
    Uneeda Biscuit was a smashing success, and set the stage for a torrent of new Nabisco products: the Fig Newton, made by a Boston baker, named in honor of that city’s suburb of Newton; the Saltine cracker, from a St. Joseph, Missouri, baker; Animal Crackers, by two of the company’s New York City bakers. Nabisco was the first company to figure a way to mass-produce shortbread, and the result was Lorna Doone, an immediate hit. It concocted a combination of marshmallow and jelly, covered with chocolate icing, and named it Mallomar. Even its flops had a silver lining. In 1913, Green came out with a package of three new products known collectively as “Trio.” He had high hopes for two of them in particular: the Mother Goose Biscuit, which would depict scenes from nursery rhymes, and the Veronese Biscuit, an upscale hard cookie. But it was the third cookie in the trio, which featured vanilla frosting between two round chocolate wafers, that caught on. It would become the bestselling cookie in the world: the Oreo.
    Green pioneered the idea of using a direct sales force in the food business rather than a middleman, dispatching salesmen to push Nabisco products across the country. Beginning with the Uneeda Cadets, Nabisco mustered a huge, hardworking army of salesmen who made their appointed rounds in horse-drawn wagons with freshly painted Nabisco logos six days a week, twelve hours a day.
    A man who referred to his workers as “a great family,” Green made Nabisco a benevolent employer. Within three years of its founding, he installed a system for the company’s employees to buy stock on cut-rate terms, making them what he called “associate proprietors.” He refused to employ child labor in an era when it was common. And although he expected