American Agriculturist 
THE FARM PAPER THAT PRINTS THE FARM NEWS 
“Agriculture is the Most Healthful, Most Useful and Most Noble Employment of Man .”—Washington 
Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Established 1842 
Volume 113 
For the Week Ending May 24, 1924 
Number 21 
Who Markets the Farmers’ Wheat? 
The Baker and the Grocer Have a Role to Play That is Important 
By I. K. RUSSELL 
ARE THE wheat growers of America ever 
f\ going to come to a time when they 
look at their wheat fields in the light 
that butter men have just learned they 
must look at butter, and as yeast men have 
learned they have to look at yeast? 
In other words, instead of flinging darts at the 
baking world, are the wheat men going to tie 
up with the baking world and push with it for 
the better production of bread, so that it will 
enter the American diet to a greater degree, and 
thus pull more wheat into the bake shops? 
I am writing this story in the hope—it may be a 
vain hope—that farmers will see something in the 
news of two merchandising groups 
it contains, to make them sit up 
and take notice. 
In the first place, we have the 
opinion of many merchandisers 
that no matter how many hands 
a product passes through, the 
only real sale of that product is 
when the consumer buys it. If 
that statement is true the real 
sale of wheat isn’t when elevator 
man buys it from farmer, or 
miller buys it from elevator man. 
It is when consumer buys baked 
goods for home use. 
The contact men at the point 
of sale are, then, bakers and 
grocers. Do they sell their 
baked goods in the way that gets 
the largest volume of them 
across? 
Toast Tells the Tale 
Let us look to see at just one 
little item. Grandfather on the 
farm liked toast. Grandmother made it along 
with the parched corn on the coals of an open 
fireplace. Like parched corn the toast came off 
the fire after slow heating with a golden-brown 
color. It was flavorful and appetizing. 
Then came the city heating systems—gas and 
electricity—quick heat. Electrical and gas 
engineers responded to the demands of hotel 
chefs for quick-fire toast—“flash” toast. They 
never stopped to taste and compare flavors. 
The new heats were applied in scorching volume. 
Toast became a blackened, ashy abomination. 
Now working alone, without help from outside, 
some two hundred or three hundred bakers, 
hacked the forming of an institute of research— 
the American Institute of Baking. One of its 
research scientists was handed a slice of black¬ 
ened toast. He was asked to find out what was 
wrong with it—and why. He began to make 
toast—in ten seconds—in twenty seconds, in 
thirty seconds, in a minute, in two minutes, in 
three minutes—in five minutes. He compared 
them. He found that the second you cut under 
three minutes in making toast—you lost the 
charm of grandfather’s favorite coffee dip, or 
Jam carrier. In slow-fire toast of the olden days 
you got golden results in the form of browned or 
caramelized encrustation. That meant the form¬ 
ing of a pfoduct out of the dextrin in the bread 
that was really appealing. This research scientist, 
Dr. L. A. Rumsey, by applying his knowledge of 
chemistry to this seemingly simple proposition, 
rediscovered what all the world had forgotten 
since the disappearance of slow-burning farm 
heating systems. He found that for a generation 
city folks had been eating ashes and calling it 
toast. The blackened toast carried a carbonized, 
not a caramelized crust. Carbonized crust meant 
just plain black ashes. Men were sent around 
Chicago, to buy toast. They brought in fifty-odd 
samples. Practically every one was a burned 
up piece of bread—carbonized and ashed over. 
Here seemed a gigantic task. It called for 
building over the toast theory in every hotel. 
dining car, restaurant—and the individual home. 
As great as the job was, Dr. Rumsey tackled it. 
He called in the makers of electric toasters—a 
score of them. He exhibited to them what their 
toasters were doing—and showed them the toast 
they made, compared to the caramelized golden 
toast they could have made. Unexpectedly they 
all responded. They redesigned their toasters. 
The emphasis on “flash” toast and “instanta¬ 
neous” toast went absolutely out of the market. 
Gas toaster makers followed suit. Here was a 
partial victory at the outset. The Institute 
suddenly found to help it a new force—a force 
contasting closely with wheat farmers. This 
was the Wheat Council of the United States. 
It asked for Dr. Rumsey. He was “loaned” from 
the American Institute of Baking, and now he 
directs a nation-wide campaign—to increase 
the use of wheat foods. 
Do the baker and the wheat grower have 
things in common to work out? I have seen other 
groups work the way I believe these two groups 
must ultimately work. Once upon a time orange 
men forgot their interest in oranges as soon as 
they sold to a jobber. If a blizzard hit Pennsyl¬ 
vania the jobbers in New York hi-jacked the 
price until they disgusted New York consumers, 
and made the industry pay dearly in lost prestige 
for a short day of gouging. G. Harold Powell and 
his cooperators attended to that. They began to 
warehouse oranges in New York and worked 
against market corners as something disastrous 
to the industry. I saw the orange people build 
up their sales from 5,000 carloads a year to 28,000 
carloads, which was the total when G. Harold 
Powell died. 
But the orange people controlled a whole 
crop. Their men went out and practically 
commandeered the retail stores. They fitted them 
up with banners, bepostered their windows, ad¬ 
vertised what they had to sell—and so literally 
guided the retailing methods. 
I used to see raisins grow worm eaten and be- 
weeviled in Bush Terminal warehouses. I saw 
the raisin growers take an interest in that final 
purchaser—the consumer—and they saw to it 
that no bad raisin could reach the 
market. They took an interest 
in the grocer—and his customer, 
and by intensively studying mer¬ 
chandising, they ran the sales for 
raisins up from 40,000, tons a 
year to 240,000 tons, which they 
sold this year past. If they had 
retained their interest in sales 
to jobbers only they would still 
be away back where they were. 
• Farmers mistrust bakers. Their 
literature teems with indignant 
claims that the bakers are getting 
too much for bread. Yet baking 
is undergoing a revolution as 
great as that farming went 
through when the McCormick 
reaper and the De Laval separa¬ 
tor and Babcock tester came into 
being. They lifted the woman’s 
hands off the churn handle, and 
set up modern dairying. 
Inventions of mighty mixing 
machines, each with the strength 
of a million mothers in their steel arms, ovens that 
bake 6,000 loaves of bread an hour, machines that 
take the dough and give you wrapped bread 
without ever a human hand intervening—make 
a baking industry that is the newest child of Mrs. 
Machinery. 
It means an entire redistribution of baking 
costs just as farm machinery meant a redistribu¬ 
tion of farm costs—and an end to mobilizing an 
army of neighbors each harvest season to hand- 
cradle the grain. Our change in the baking 
industry is new—so new that it is almost alto¬ 
gether a post-war development. Bread now goes 
100 miles from the bakery, and 65 per cent, of 
the women of America buy from the baker, whereas 
only 35 to 40 per cent, of them bought from the 
hand-craft baker. 
Distribution absorbs costs—whereas only flour 
used to do so and an army of hand bakers sold in 
little shops to people who walked from a block or 
two away from the shops. The bread mer¬ 
chandised itself. 
Now the five-cent loaf could come back. It 
has often. But good bakers welcome it as com¬ 
petition, for a reason I am often slurred as a 
“press agent” for stating. Yet it is the solemn 
truth. This reason is that the best modern 
bakers have captured the housewives with 
QUALITY bread whereas the old flour-water-and 
yeast loaf is utterly unacceptable by comparison. 
Into the quality loaf that has captured the 
(Continued on page 507) A 
The Marketing of Wheat Does Not End with the Harvest or at the Elevator 
