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Title details for McIlhenny's Gold by Jeffrey Rothfeder - Available

McIlhenny's Gold

How a Louisiana Family Built the Tabasco Empire

by Jeffrey Rothfeder
Norman Dietz
Audiobook
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After the Civil War ended, Edmund McIlhenny, an ambitious and tenacious Louisiana businessman, found himself with few prospects. The South's economy in ruins and his millions of dollars in Confederacy currency worthless, he had no choice but to return with his wife, Mary, to her family home in Avery Island, a former sugar plantation destroyed by Union soldiers. To McIlhenny's surprise, however, the hot peppers he had planted before being forced off the island had flourished. Desperate for money, he chopped up the peppers, combined them with salt and vinegar, and produced the first batch of hot pepper sauce. He called it Tabasco.


Former BusinessWeek editor Jeffrey Rothfeder tells how, from a simple idea—the outgrowth of three peppers planted on an isolated island on the Gulf of Mexico—a secretive family business emerged that would produce one of the best–known brands in the world. In short order, McIlhenny's descendants would turn Tabasco into a gold mine, making it as ubiquitous as Coke, Kodak, and Kleenex: an icon of pop culture. The McIlhenny Company, still run by a family of matchless characters who believe in a rigid code of family loyalty, clings to tradition and the old ways of doing business.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    November 15, 2007

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781400125692
      • File size: 284246 KB
      • Duration: 09:52:10

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      This intriguing biography of the McIlhenny Tabasco Company, a family business that has refused to go public like its wealthy counterparts, is as spicy an account as it is charming. Author Rothfeder is no stranger to writing about the business world, and his lengthy experience is demonstrated as he thoroughly recounts the creation of the family's treasured Tabasco Sauce and the principals who grew it into an unlikely family-run empire. This enthusiasm is wonderfully realized by celebrated narrator Norman Dietz, who offers a straightforward, unobtrusive reading that makes the McIlhenny company the star of the story. There are no frills, no thrills in Dietz's delivery, but his reading is thoroughly intriguing and inspiring. L.B. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 13, 2007
      This portrait of the eccentric family that brought the world Tabasco sauce isn't exactly hot, but it's certainly flavorful. Rothfeder digs deep into “one of the most profitable and oldest family businesses in U.S. history”—McIlhenny Co., founded in 1869 on a salt-mine island off Louisiana—and has fun sorting family legend from fact. The early years—including setting up a plantation with workers' housing that remained in operation until only a few years ago—were the company's most eventful. After winning a dubious legal battle to trademark “Tabasco,” McIlhenny Co. settled in as a sluggish one-product manufacturer relying on word of mouth. So it's a good thing for readers that the McIlhennys have left such colorful and controversial legacies as collectors, conservationists, citizens and especially CEOs. Granted, with its unique circumstances and “relatively simple, one-dimensional Tabasco business model,” McIlhenny Co. is of little use as a corporate case study, except perhaps as an example of how family ownership can destabilize even a sure thing. Despite the company's “ebbing sales and profits” even in the midst of a hot-sauce craze, Rothfeder's tale is balanced and always entertaining, and may please at least some of those who shake a few drops of Tabasco on whatever they're eating.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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