New Jersey Monthly

Worth it!

(continued)

"If we hadn't had a doctor there, I would not have had a son nor would I have had (his then-wife Suzanne)," says Worth. "There are times in your life when you instantly have knowledge with a big 'K.' And immediately I realized that the set of rules that had been set up by the counterculture were just as rigid and wrong as the ones that they were set up against. Rigidity is the enemy. You see, I can rebel even against the rebellion."

Right then, Worth decided he wasn't going to leave his son a farm that brought in $3,500 a year. At three in the morning, Worth and a friend sat up and decided to start a business. Worth was either going to build wood-cook stoves or turn his blueberries into jam.

He chose jam because, he says, it was "harder."

"Flip Hamburgers"

By the time he started Sorrell Ridge, named after his farm, Worth's ego knew no bounds. He'd been successful at everything he'd tried; jam-making was simply another venture on which to work his magic. He'd just look over a few jam plants and put a plant up in his blueberry field.

It didn't make any difference that tractor-trailers would have trouble going over the wooden-covered bridge to get to his field. It didn't matter that Worth was away from the marketplace and raw materials, other than blueberries. It didn't matter that he knew nothing about the industry. He was marketing master Rich Worth.

He wasn't going to compete against Welch's or against Timmy Smuckers. He was going to take the sugar out of the jams and jellies. He was going to cater to the embryonic health-food market. He was until, his words now, "I got my ass kicked."

Out of ignorance, Worth says he let distributors in Boston tell him what prices to charge. Of course, the distributors wanted Worth to set prices low so they could move large volumes, while it would have been in Worth's interest to sell less at higher margins.

"This was a lesson," says Worth. "I don't care if it's one month, two months or three months. If you want a hamburger joint, flip hamburgers for a couple of months. If you want an automobile dealership, work as a salesman for a couple of months, learn the operation and move up."

Worth was also a little ahead of his time. "When Sorrell Ridge came out, I would demonstrate the product in supermarkets and tell people there was no sugar added and they would turn and say, 'Yuck, no sugar.' They didn't want to try it," says Randye Worth, Rich's current wife, a nutritionist and now Frookies' research-and-development chief.

Still, by 1985, Sorrell Ridge's sales were $10 million, and Worth decided to sell out to Allied Old English for cash and a 3 percent royalty. That way he wouldn't have to do what he wasn't good at -- mixing kettles and continuous manufacturing. He wanted to see the "hole in the line" in the marketplace, design new products and sell them.

Worth stayed on with Allied Old English for a bit, but, as you might have guessed, he wasn't corporate material. "I actually admire people who can function in a corporate setting," he says. "I don't look down on them. I think in some ways they have more self-control than I do."

Worth says he'd go into a boardroom and if someone said something off the wall, he'd simply be unable to go into the standard corporate refrain: "John, that's very interesting and I understand why you're saying that, and perhaps that might work, but would you think of it this way."

"I'd just go in and say, 'John, that just isn't going to work. That's crazy. And here's why,'" says Worth. "People like that can't function in the corporate world as well, unless they can hypnotize themselves and say, 'I will not say what I feel, I will not say what I think.'"(continued)

 

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