Tin Can Mother

In 1921 a Rochester. N. Y., restaurateur named Harold H. Clapp found himself reduced to the unmanly position of nurse, cook & bottlewasher for his two infant sons while their mother lay ill in the hospital. Unable to buy the special pureed vegetables and soups which a physician prescribed for his boys, he began straining his own vegetables, brewing Irs own soups. Manlike, he overproduced, ladled out his surplus to neighbors. Their hearty acceptance of his product led him to start a strained vegetable route. Within a year he had given up the restaurant business to found Harold H. Clapp, Inc., pioneer U. S. baby-food maker.

By the time Founder Clapp sold his business to Johnson & Johnson (surgical dressings, Pharmaceuticals) in 1931, prepared baby-food was big business with a score of companies scrambling for it.

When American Home Products Corp. (drugs, cosmetics, floor polish, etc.) bought it from Johnson & Johnson last year, the Clapp firm had a line of 29 products suitable for carrying a four-month-old infant straight through to his fifth year. Packaged in four-and-a-half-ounce tins retailing at about 8-c- apiece, the cans of strained or chopped liver, lamb and beef complete with vegetables and vitamins left busy mothers little to do but make up dessert for Junior.

Two months ago even that effort was made easy. On the market appeared Clapp's Rennet Desserts in six flavors (vanilla, chocolate, lemon, orange, raspberry, maple). Price: 15-c- a package. Chief ingredients: sugar, calcium, salt, skim milk and rennet (an enzyme from a calf's fourth stomach). Children took to the new desserts, did not mistake them for spinach. Last week, because of its booming sales, Clapp broke ground for a new $250,000 addition to its model Rochester plant--a 50% increase in floor space.

For handsome, athletic Henry Wisdom ("Tex") Roden, who took over as president when Founder Clapp sold out, this growth was a triumph. Despite the competition of big firms such as H. J. Heinz Co., Beechnut, Libby, McNeill & Libby, Inc., his firm claims 25% of the industry's yearly $15,000,000 gross business, runs a dead heat with Heinz for first place. Some 35% of U. S. babies feed on prepared baby food. Fields as yet untapped (aside from the rest of the infants) are the stomach ailment trade and oldsters who may need a strained food line of their own.

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