PHILADELPHIA _ Gerald Shreiber's 11-year-old daughter wanted a waterbed _ and that's how Shreiber wound up as the founder and chief executive of a publicly traded company that sells nearly a billion dollars of soft pretzels, icy drinks and churros a year.
In fact, that daughter pretty much propelled Shreiber's entire career. She now she works as an executive for the company he started, J&J Snack Foods Corp., headquartered outside Philadelphia in Pennsauken, N.J. By the way, the company has topped itself in sales every year and never had a money-losing quarter.
It all started in 1960, when, at age 18, Shreiber found himself a young married father.
"I was a machine shop apprentice," he said. "I was making a buck fifty an hour. The greatest benefit that they gave me _ and there's pictures of those guys, right there on that second shelf _ was that they paid for my education.
"I went to Spring Garden Institute (a private technical college). I went there to learn metal working and then I went to Drexel for a couple of semesters. This is at night. I mean I'm working from 7 a.m. to 5:30 in the plant and going to school 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.
"It taught me value of work, and value of improving yourself in education. I was fast as a machinist, but awful. I just didn't have the skills set, so fortunately for me I got a break at that company. I went into management and ultimately, sales. And then I left to start my own machine shop and sold it a couple of years later."
Q: When you started your own machine shop, did you actually start it and buy the equipment? Or did you buy it from someone else?
A: I bought used equipment and we put it together, had a partner then. And we put it together _ and sold it a few years later to a New York Stock Exchange company, called United Industrial. Even though I had sold out physically, I didn't sell out emotionally, if you know what I mean.
Q: Right.
A: I had a five-year earn out and I was terminated, relieved of my duties.
Q: Really?
A: Really. So I sued them, they sued me.
Q: Why were you terminated, because you were still trying to run the show?
A: Yeah, yeah. They wanted to move the plant to Maryland, you know. I didn't own it. I'd sold out. But that led me through the back door and through the front door, looking at a business opportunity. Where did I show up? J&J Soft Pretzel, which was a bankrupt soft pretzel company.
Q: How did that happen?
A: OK, this is the story now. And after a meeting with my attorney in town to try and reacquire my machine shop, I'm walking and I see a waterbed store. Remember waterbeds?
Q: Right, right.
A: And my daughter at the time was, this was 1971, so she'd be 11, 12. She wanted a waterbed. So I went in there because of curiosity. And I see an old man sitting at a desk. When I say an old, maybe 65, I'm 28. He had flaming white hair. I started talking to him. I talk to everybody.
Q: Not surprising. I can see that.
A: And one thing leads to the other and he told me about a soft pretzel business that he owned, that he sold to others and they were going bankrupt.
Q: You had something in common, right? What you had in common with that gentleman, was that you were both heartsick over your businesses you sold.
A: I wasn't heartsick. But I had to do something. He was retired. He was golfing every day. He had gotten into the waterbed business because he loaned some money to some Temple students to open the store. And they went away. So he's watching his asset.
Q: Then what happened?
A: One thing led to the other and on Sept. 27, 1971, I attended a bankruptcy auction in Camden, N.J., and I wound up raising my hand and I paid the princely price of $72,100 for J&J Soft Pretzel, which included some old baking equipment, eight employees, $400,000 in sales.
I quickly had to give the judge a name. I was going to call it National Snack Food, because I didn't want to limit it to soft pretzels. When I started to write that out, NSF, in those days, NSF stood for non-sufficient funds. I stopped. I said, 'That's a bad omen. Let's call it J&J Snack Foods instead.' thinking I would change it later.
Q: The rest is history.
A: Never changed the name.
