There is indeed a sausage king of Chicago and, contrary to popular belief, it is not Abe Froman, the mythical sovereign of tubed meat immortalized in the 1986 classic “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”
Oh, Vienna Beef CEO Jim Bodman will deny it, but who else?
Almost 50 years ago, Bodman took his first Vienna Beef job as a warehouse worker and started working his way up. In 1983, Bodman and business partner Jim Eisenberg bought the company. At 75, Bodman doesn’t appear to be slowing down much. The septuagenarian wears mustard yellow pants to work, flies his family to the Bahamas in his own private jet, and, just recently, got his motorcycle license for the first time. That zippy new Vespa isn’t going to ride itself.
And he continues to grow Vienna Beef sales despite consumer trends that show people are reaching for more health-conscious food than, you know, hot dogs. Turns out the trick is not forgetting your past, he said.
“You’re feeding memories. And the last thing in the world that I want on my tombstone is I drove this company into the poorhouse,” Bodman said. “Because it would take a lot of work to screw this company up. People love the products that we make.”
But there are changes afoot. Bodman has plans to grow the company’s lesser-known soup business to help offset the volatile impact of beef prices on the company’s profits. About half of Vienna Beef’s $130 million annual revenue is from beef products, including the dogs, while the company’s pickle business represents another third. Soup and chili, sold exclusively to restaurants, make up the rest.
Vienna Beef moved its plant to the city’s Bridgeport neighborhood last year from the North Branch industrial corridor where it was displaced by the reconfiguration of the six-corner intersection where Damen, Elston and Fullerton avenues meet.
Bodman — father of seven, including Vienna Beef Co-president Jack Bodman, and grandfather of 10 — lives in Northfield with his wife, Rhonda. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What called you to this business and what made you want to stick with it for so many years?
A: That’s a very curious question. I’ve never been asked that before. … I loved the hot dog business. I loved the relaxed atmosphere around here. It’s like a college fraternity or sorority house. We have a lot of fun. … We take our serious responsibilities very seriously, but we also have a hell of a lot of fun.
Q: Who’s the biggest competition in Chicago for Vienna Beef hot dogs?
A: We really don’t have any competition. … It sounds like a very arrogant thing to say, but it’s really something that I truly believe. Now, other parts of our business are different. When it comes to making corned beef, roast beef or pastrami, we have a lot of competitors, who are good. And corned beef is corned beef is corned beef. You can make it in a bathtub. … And in our pickle area, we have a lot of competitors and we sell to some big companies. … But when it comes to hot dogs, no one can hold a candle to us.
Q: What defines a Chicago hot dog?
A: Memories.
Q: So it’s not the ingredients?
A: I could go through all the technical specifications about why our product is better than someone else’s — and it is — and why our manufacturing process is more difficult to execute and produces a product that has a noticeable difference from the customer’s point of view. I could go through all of that stuff and it would mean something.
But at the end of the day, what makes our product is memories. Because kids have gone to hot dog stands with their mothers and fathers for a hundred years. When they get away from town, they start missing some of the things that were here. They start missing the Cubs. They miss the White Sox. They don’t want to hear about anyone else’s frickin’ football team. It’s the Bears and only the Bears. And it’s Charlie’s hot dog stand that was up the street from my high school where I worked for two summers and where my mom and dad took me for a sandwich in 1957. That’s what makes it.
Q: What is your position on ketchup on hot dogs? Is it morally wrong?
A: Did you say morally or mortally? (Laughter.) It’s something we have fun with it. … It’s OK to put your french fries in ketchup, so all this stuff is going to be mixed up and it’s going to be in your stomach. But the flavors (of the dogs) really need mustard.
Q: You wouldn’t put ketchup on your dog.
A: Good Lord, no! You’ll get me shot.
Q: How is Vienna Beef evolving with the times?
A: We do have some new products that are very interesting. We make a hot dog for Mike Ditka called the Ditka Dog. … That does very well. Mike was in here and — he’s not a close personal friend by any stretch of the imagination, but I know him and he knows me — and he sat here and we had 25 polish sausages laid out for him. And we ate them and he said: That’s the one I like right there. So that’s the one we put on the marketplace (under the Mike Ditka brand).
And the growth of our soup business over the last 10 years has been modest because we don’t know what the hell we’re doing. We’re trying to figure out how to position it.
Q: Where do you see the future of Vienna Beef?
A: We’re convinced our soup company has the ability to add 50 percent to our overall revenues. … Most of the money we put into our new plant was to give us the ability to expand our ability in our soup production. Are we going to sell more hot dogs to people? Probably not. Are we going to sell more corned beef and pastrami to people? Probably not. Those are mature product lines.
Q: Where do you source your beef from? And how do you know the conditions those animals are raised in are humane?
A: Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska. Texas, sometimes. … We have a buyer who travels around the country and visits all of these places and knows every Cargill slaughtering facility. At the end of the day, it’s very hard to be kind to an animal when you’re killing it. But we are sensitive to it.
Q: What are the largest challenges facing Vienna Beef now?
A: The business challenge is the fact we are totally dependent upon the beef cycle in order to make money and keep the company afloat. Our cost of goods sold is mainly the cost of raw meat. … We can manage this company perfectly and the meat markets can be horrible and we can lose our shorts. We can manage this company horribly and the meat markets can be positive and we can make a lot of money.
Doing business in the state of Illinois, (and) regulations that exist from the federal government, are also major obstacles to my long-term happiness and health.
Q: What specifically is challenging about doing business in Illinois?
A: The inspectors come in every 20 minutes. They go through your records because (the state is) broke. They look for any way to squeeze money. …
The state of Illinois is just very difficult to deal with because they don’t have any money. We are caught in the position where we as citizens owe so much money to these pensions that I don’t know how we’re ever going to get it paid off. It would be really easy to pack our bags and leave Chicago, leave Illinois. We could go to Wisconsin and become an enormously profitable company.
Q: Is it that crucial to your brand to stay in Chicago?
A: It’s probably more crucial to me personally than it is to our brand. I refuse to move from this city.
Q: Why is it so important to you to be a Chicago company?
A: It’s just part of our DNA. We are part of the fabric of this city. We are defined as being a Chicago company. And it would emasculate our business to move out of the city. … If we were the Vienna Beef company from Sheboygan, Wis., I’d go fishing for the rest of my life.
Twitter @GregTrotterTrib
