McIlhenny’s Gold: How a Louisiana Family Built the Tabasco Empire: Jeffrey Rothfeder
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
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. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Few other food products are so immediately recognizable as that ubiquitous bottle of Tabasco sauce gracing so many American tables. Attempting to uncover the authentic story of Tabasco, business-historian Rothfeder has his work cut out, thanks to endless confabulation generated over decades by the McIlhenny family. Founder Edward McIlhenny, a Baltimore banker, moved to 1830s New Orleans and ended up with a parcel of swamp whose only use seemed to be to grow pepper plants. Dogged and determined to preserve their trademark, the McIlhenny family drove competition to the ground. After the manner of northern industrialists, the McIlhennys pioneered development of the company town, imposing a controlling, paternalistic, blatantly racist culture. Having made a fortune from Tabasco, they multiplied it with income from salt and oil deposits beneath the pepper plants’ roots. Reading this piquant history means you can never again reach for that little bottle without recalling the amazing history fraught within. Knoblauch, Mark