ffi

PROFILE

Sweet
RicbardWortb says bis cookies arc goodforyol,r.

al

k about a k icl in a

candy store: Richarcl Worth ,40 going on 14., gets to

owll his own cookie cc)nU)an1-arrd judging fnrm

Itis waistline,, he believes in sampling his proclucts. Lut'kily fbr him, so do horcles ,f grocery shoprpers, who have nrade R.W. Frookies, Inc. of Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, perhaps the most su(:cessful cookie start-u1l since Jarnes Mitchell created FiS Newtons.

In just two years? CEO Worth and his wile/coftrurrrler Randye have nracle their R. W. Frookie brand of u'natural" r'ookies ars ubiquitotrs in modet"n grocery t:arts as tofu. While there are similar fruit-juir:e-sweetenerl, no-preservative brands in natural-{botl stores., Frookie-whose name came front "f't'uit" lllLrs uu(,ook1""-is the {'irst to stornt superrnarkets. In that highly competitive fiekl., where rnost nrarkets c:harge "slotting fees'o ftrr slrelf s[)a(:e, F.rookiss-lrrgely uitlr,ou,l llaying thsrnhas rnatle it onto sonle 65 1-rercent <lf the nation's grocery shelves. Worth had projected they'rl sell 90,000 cases and gross $l million his first year; the conU)any rlitl nearly l8 tinres that instead.
"ltos lleen a bucking llronco show," Worth ntuses

in his cltrtterede c'onlpar:t office insirle a suburllan low-rise.'uOul' first-year restrlts al'e lleyond our fifth-year projections." (continuecl on page 66)

B1t Frank

Louece

CONTINtsNTAL PROFILES SEru

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C H A RD

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(continuedfrom, page 37 ) Yet if any growing pains remain from the company's swift expansion, it's nowhere

was getting shortchanged," says Worth.

evident among the leisurely dressed

staff and their equally casual CEO, who sometimes takes to calling himself "the Merry Frookster. " Wnrth, indeed? seems amazingly like a Keebler elf as portrayed by Brian Dennehy. Panda-bearish and talkative, he co-founded R.W. Frookies with his second wife, a dietician and former cookbook author who serves as vice-president. Both often sport sneakers to work; on this particular day, Randye wears a sweatshirt and sweatpants, Richard a

There were a growing number of natural food stores, and companies to supply

them, but in the mainstream was a void. "The busy mom and pop running into the supermarket were not being presented these alternatives." Drawing on his experience in naturalfood mass merchandising, and sensing a niche in what might be called healthy

Cortsumers uere seeking altqnatiues

purple Frookie golf shirt, blue jeans,

and a herringbone blazer.'ol'm not a ma-

to cbemical
preseruatiues and to uthite, refined table
sugA,r.
junk food, Worth and his partners spent
three years "struggling to come up with an all-natural cookie formulation that A)

jor suit person," says W<lrth. "Not because I think I'm above wearing a suit,"
he impishly explains, "but because I almost got choked by u tie once."

espite his clowning, Wcrrth is

a serious and astute business-

man. Prior to R.W. Frookies,

he and his then-wife, Suzanne,

co-

founded Sorrell Ridge ,, & popular maker of all-natural, jam-like fruit conserves.

would work, and B) would work on a

mass-production scale.

"

That company hit the million-dollar

$B

mark within two years; revenues reached million in 1985, the year Worth sold

out to Allied Old English Ine. for cash and 3 percent of future sales. His next step was just that: a company
named the Next Step, which Worth play-

fully calls "-y food consulting

or,

rather, insulting business." With associate Simpson Markson, Worth and his

That story seems as quintessentially 90s as TV dinners seem quintessentially 50s. Consumers? Worth real ized, were seeking alternatives to chemical preservatives and to white, refined table sugar, or sucrose. Sucrose raises and drops a body's insulin level in the familiar cycle of energy burst and "sugar blues," and the refining process strips away nutrient minerals. In response to
changing consumer tastes, some compa-

wife, Randye, also used Next Step as a

home base to launch new food products.

nies have turned to fructose (naturally

occurring fruit sugar) and maltose (made from barley or rice), both of which retain

Besides Frookies, which spun out on its

own, Next Step products include Vermont Upcountry Cocoa (an acquisition)

nutrients and have few,

if

any, harmful

and Siinpson's Salsa. Worth honed in on the natural foods category, both for practical and idealistic reasons. "I really felt the consumer

effects "I understand why people use sugar

as a sweetener?" says

Worth.

oolt's

proba-

bly the most wonderful baking ingredi-

ent known to man. It's white,

sweet,

Which, in that time and place,

was

leave his heirs something more substan-

[otherwise] tasteless, cheap, and totally predictable. But I just do not believe in

barely an adequate income, Worth says. But when his first child, Jonas, was born

tial.
That became Sorrell Ridge, the fruitconserve company, which Worth says he

it at all-it's empty calories without nutrients, and probably more dangerous

than people even know.

in

1978,, that gave him the impetus to

"

rookies are sweetened with fruit juice, "a l'unny creaturer" Worth
cLf

concedes.

"It tends to

wanna

change over time. It tends to wanna say,

'Hi! I'm a grape! Watch me taste like a grape in your oatmeal cookie!'
Fruits," he says? half-admiringly,
minds of their own.
'ohave

"
\

So does Worth himself. The scion of

Boston's Brookline Worths-his family owned the clothing store Worth of Bos-

ton, a city institution-he was a college student of the 60s who took the era's idealism very seriously. After graduat-

irg in l97I with a psychology degree from Hobart College in upstate New
York, he worked toward the Woodstock
Nation dream of getting back to the land.

Straight out of school, he delivered

bread and pastries to raise enough capi-

tal to start an irrigation business in Boston and a real-estate company, and then purchased a 1,500-acre farm called Sor-

rell Ridge in New Brunswick,

Canada.

"I looked "

at a mapr" remembers Worth,

"and said, 'This is the farthest I can get away from society without being in lce-

If you're flying into Denver on

business, why not make it as pleasurable as possible ?

And since some of the world's

greatest business deals have taken place

land.'

hundred acres were devoted to blueberries, a 50-acre patch to subsistence farming, and the rest to lumber. "Basically, I loved it," he says. "If I could have made a living as a farmer,
probably I'd still be there." However, he says, "the pulp and paper industry had the local farmers in servitude; the average income at that time of the person going into the woods and cutting lumber,

Come to Scanticon. Indulge in one of our four superb restaurants. Exercise in Denver's most complete hotel fitness center. Or relax in one of our soothing hot tubs, saunas or pools. Of course, taking care of business travelen is our first priority. That's

on the golf course, we offer a great one of those too. The extraordinary
Inverness Golf Course. With 6,790 yards of championship meeting space. So once you're on solid ground, call for reservations or for information about our \Teekend Golf Package. After all, there's only one hotel in Denver with a golf course. \Uhy

why we offer rooms with oversized

desks. A private Club Floor. 33 conference rooms.

And

negotiate for anything

less

and growing the blueberries,

$3,500 a year."

was

Scanticon DENVER

Conference Center o Hotel . Resort

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67

125 andCounty Line Road l-800J46-4891 In Denver call 799-5800

CHARD

\(/ o R T H

founded on profits from his real-estate investments and "a small Canadian development loan, $301000. There weren't

rieties: Oatmeal Raisin, Ginger Spice,

and Oat Bran Muffin. Since then, they've added Apple Cinnamon Oat
Bran, 7-Crain Oatmeal, three types of
chocolate chip, Fig Fruitins and Apple Fruitins, and Animal Frackers. With a second factory now on-line-the Mur-

the slotting fees there are today,"

he

says. ooYou could start a food business back then for $30,000."

By 1985, when Worth co-founded

Frookies? you could start a food business for no less than $200,000-still a min-

ray Biscuit Co. in Augusta, Georgiathe company is gearing up for Chocolate

iscule figure in the $4-billion cookie

Frackers, holiday ginger-buy cookies,

and ice cream Frones. Frookies has also

just acquired and is reformulating Fib-

Frookies Are sweetened uithfrutt juice, "aJftlnru) creah,tre," Worth

conced,es.
market, where giants such as RJR Nabisco and Keebler may each spend rnore

bers, a brand of high-fiber cookies.

ome Frookie varieties supplement the fruit juice with Sucanat, evaporated sugarcane juice made by Pronatec International of Peterborough, New Hampshire. Depending on the harvest, Sucanat contains up to l0 percent fructose, 9 per-

cent glucose, 3 percent

minerals, and
a

nutrient

than $tO million annually on advertisirg, and can pay slotting fees in part to

whopping B0 percent sucrose. While the amount of Sucanat in selected Frookies is small-only within

the chocolate chips, which Worth

says

guarantee new-product placement.

Wnrth avoided the fees in part by giving markets stand-up cardboard displays for

had given them "a horrendous time" in developmsnl-i1 still seems a small
compromise of the Frookie vision.

his cookies. To generate cash, he devised an innovative partnership plan that seems as New Ag. as his cookie. Lacking a factory and a distribution
apparatus, Worth sold stock to bakeries,

"I'm not a saintr" Worth

edges. "But

acknowl-

if I can combine eating well and producing a good product that

makes a profit, it's the best of both worlds. You can)" he says emphaticallR "do profit and purity at the same time." And with Worth aiming for a $120 million, 5 percent share of the market by 1992; with the major cookie-makers removing harmful tropical oils from their

distributors, and others in a sort of coop-

erative capitalism. The Consolidated

Biscuit Corp., whose mammoth Ohio factory bakes cookies and crackers for
Frookies, Nabisco, and many other companies, is reportedly a 5.2 percent part-

ner; the clistributor Shur-Good Biscuit

Co. is in for more than 2 percent. About a thircl of F-rookies is parceled out this
way. Worth is onlv half-kidding when he

cookies; and with other natural, trosugar cookies like Fruitsweet joining F-rookies in the supermarkets, our
cookie aisles are already a lclt purer than they were before. f

refers

to hinrself as Frookie's "chairMaO!,'

man_like

F'rookies starterl out with a trio of va-

Frank Louece is a nationally syndicated ente rtainment columnist .

CONTINENTAL PROFILES SEM,

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