CHAPTER 11

EXTRACT AND IMPACT

C.F. Sauer Company

A particularly pleasant multisensory experience in Richmond can be had by heading west on Broad Street, watching for the twenty- by sixty-foot vanilla sign atop a brick building before turning onto Hermitage Road. Make sure the car windows are rolled down to catch a whiff of the aromatic entities in the hopper at The C.F. Sauer Company. The scent could be cumin or cinnamon or a mix that hints of Thanksgiving. Whether or not the iconic incandescently lighted rectangle atop the Richmond-born-and-bred company is twinkling like the eyes of the burly baker, within the bowels of the brick buildings, home to the spice manufacturer since 1911, stacks of sacks of pepper await grinding, vanilla extract lingers in enormous vats and one of Richmond’s oldest and proudest businesses keeps a multitude of flavors flowing. Since the plant is rarely open to the public, those lucky enough to get a tour of its inner workings can attest that it’s a cross between an unusually fragrant multilevel maze and Willy Wonka’s factory.

Founded by Conrad Frederick Sauer, known as Cuno, in 1887, The C.F. Sauer Company, which celebrated its 130^th anniversary in 2017, is a family-run enterprise, manufacturing flavoring extracts, spices, herbs and other tasty products. Cuno was born in 1866 in Richmond to his German immigrant father, Conrad, and his mother, Sarah, the daughter of German immigrants. In an autobiographical sketch from 1918, he remembered moving to Germany with his parents for a few years when he was nine years old, a foretaste of the international travel he would do later in life to grow his business into a behemoth.114

These women at C.F. Sauer Company are sorting nutmeg. Some will stay whole and others will be ground. The C.F. Sauer Company Archives.

At age thirteen, young Sauer worked as a store cashier. A customer cheated him out of four dollars, which, he later remembered, “served to sharpen my wits on the money question.” By age eighteen, he worked in Richmond as a drug clerk for Boedeker Brothers, learning the retail and wholesale drug business.115

When his father died and left him an inheritance, he figured it was time to open his own store, which he did on his twenty-first birthday in 1887 at Seventeenth and Broad Streets. At first, he ran a traditional drugstore of the day, “doing a general jobbing business, such as cigars, cigarettes and groceries.” He eventually distinguished his shop from others since he had noticed that housewives often came into drugstores to refill their own bottles with flavoring extracts and other products. So he began producing vanilla and lemon extracts in five- and ten-gram small bottles at consumer-friendly prices, displaying them in branded cartons with the Sauer name and logo and promise of purity prominent in the company’s advertising. Shoppers were smitten by the convenience and price, and since the company delivered the goods by horse and buggy to other shops and grocers around the city, sales grew quickly.¹¹⁶

EXHIBITING EXCELLENCE

In 1889, Sauer married Olga Hassel, also born in Richmond to German immigrants, and she went right to work alongside him, coming to the plant in the evenings to stir and test the vanilla and other extracts while he caught up on paperwork. Her not-so-little exhibit at the 1889 State Fair of Virginia won first prize and set the stage for the company’s carefully choreographed participation in trade shows and expositions in Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, San Francisco, Paris, Antwerp, Buenos Aires, Rome, Madrid and London, where Sauer’s flavoring extracts won gold medal after gold medal, all the while dazzling consumers and retailers with elegantly furnished booths and high-quality products. Closer to home at the Jamestown Exposition in 1907, their extract received a silver medal. Sauer Sr. was concerned enough to write the jury secretary, only to be assured that the silver was the highest honor awarded for extracts at that event.117

By 1909, Sauer products were sold in twenty-seven states and were even getting shipped to Europe by special request. Sauer concentrated more fully on the extract business and ramped up production of extracts to include rum, sherry, almond and even Old Virginia Fruitti-Punch extract, to a total of thirty-two flavors. The company’s growth necessitated a few moves around downtown until settling at its current location at 2000 West Broad in 1911, then a state-of-the-art showplace for manufacturing extracts. In 1927, a Richmonder eating a memorable dish at a Tokyo restaurant wondered what the secret ingredient was and was flabbergasted when told it was Sauer’s vanilla, all the way from his hometown.¹¹⁸

One employee said C.F. Sauer Sr. insisted on procuring raw goods by the trainload. He wasn’t kidding. The Valentine.

A longtime employee, Lula Pugh, who started in 1914 and eventually became the extract forewoman, remembered filling bottles one at a time with a rubber tube. That has changed, but the cold-pressed method for making vanilla extract that the Sauers perfected in the 1880s is still employed today, albeit on a much larger scale. Another longtime worker recalled in 1957 that if Sauer Sr. couldn’t buy the raw goods by the trainload, he wasn’t interested. He needed top-quality raw goods on hand in huge quantities to fill the millions of bottles his glass factory, another acquisition, turned out. By its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1912, C.F. Sauer had become the largest producer of extracts in the United States. Only then did Olga start to take a salary: fifteen dollars a week.119

EXPANSION

The 1920s saw the addition of spices to the company repertoire. Cuno had always wanted to add a mayonnaise to the line but hadn’t found a recipe that met his standards. After Sauer Sr.’s death, in 1927, C.F. Jr. became president and became acquainted with Mrs. Eugenia Duke’s brand of mayonnaise, headquartered in Greenville, South Carolina. She’d made a name for herself and her mayonnaise making sandwiches for soldiers stationed nearby during World War I and eventually bottled and sold the mayo. Sauer Jr. bought Duke Products in 1929, and the rest is tomato, mayonnaise and white bread sandwich history. It was an important acquisition for the company, as Duke’s has a fanatically loyal and growing customer base but also because C.F. Sauer III married a daughter of one of Duke’s salesmen.¹²⁰

Sauer’s moved away from metal spice containers when it became the first company to use and manufacture plastic spice containers, holding the patent for it. The company has expanded its product lines over the decades and now has a footprint well beyond Richmond, including its The Spice Hunter line in California and, of course, Duke’s in South Carolina, which just celebrated its 100^th anniversary. More than 750 people work in the various brands of the company, from coast to coast.

The headquarters, along with extract and spice production, remains in Richmond with the fourth generation of the Sauer family at the helm, with members of the fifth generation working there as well, continuing the family tradition. When asked what the secret is to be successful for 130 years in business, Conrad Sauer IV, president of the company, says it’s his family’s relationship with its employees: “Generations of Sauer leadership have treated employees like family and have given them full responsibility to do their job and trusted them to do it.”

A long line of women work the pepper line at Sauer’s. The C.F. Sauer Company Archives.

Over the centuries, tastes have changed, and the market for once beloved Old Virginia Fruitti-Punch extract is no longer, but cinnamon, black pepper and many other products retain their place in the C.F. Sauer pantheon. And bakers everywhere keep adding pure vanilla extract to the batter.

Olga Sauer said of her husband, Cuno, in a seventy-fifth anniversary commemorative article in the Greenville News, “He was determined to have his product pure. If it couldn’t be pure, and the best, he wasn’t going to do it.”121 Cuno Sauer’s innovation and inclination look (smell and taste) like pure genius.