Potato Salad and Cornelius

Nothing beats my mom’s potato salad. I can make her recipe, but she must have held onto a secret or two, because mine never quite tastes the same. I wonder if the Reser kids felt the same way about their mother’s.

Many of you already know the connection between Cornelius and the Resers, but for those who don’t, here’s the story of how one of the country’s largest family owned food companies got its start in a farmhouse kitchen north of town.

Mildred and Earl Reser moved to Oregon from Topeka, Kansas, in 1949, arriving with less than five dollars to their name. In their new town, they started out working in a restaurant, Earl as a cook, Mildred as a waitress. To help make ends meet, Mildred began making her own potato salad at night in the kitchen of their farmhouse on NW Cornelius Schefflin Road, north of Cornelius. She called the little side venture Mrs. Reser’s Salads. The farmhouse still stands today, now home to Mike and Debbie, who grow and sell fruits and vegetables from the property.

Mildred and other women from town would sit on the back porch peeling mountains of potatoes by hand, turning out batches of up to 200 pounds of salad at a time. Earl worked as salesman and distributor, driving the fresh batches out to local grocery stores and butcher shops.

The business took off quickly. In 1951, Mildred landed a major deal to supply her potato salad to Safeway, which asked her to stock not just one local store but every Safeway outlet in Oregon. With demand outpacing what the family kitchen could handle, the operation moved that same year into its first processing plant, a small 20 by 50 foot rental building in downtown Cornelius at 1236 E. Baseline St.

It remained a primitive, batch by batch operation for years, with little in the way of technology to help. Workers, including the whole Reser family and neighbors and former restaurant co-workers, often cooked and packed all night to prepare for Sunday deliveries. Delivery trucks weren’t refrigerated in those early days, so the company relied on dry ice to keep everything cool. Before long, four more salads had joined the potato salad lineup, along with gelatin, and independent area groceries like Chet’s, Hank’s, and Tipton’s began carrying the products too.

Son Al Reser, born in Topeka in 1935, the oldest of four children, had been helping with the business since he was a boy, logging long hours helping his mother with deliveries between selling hot dogs at ballgames and newspapers on street corners. After graduating from Hillsboro High School in 1953 and serving two years in the U.S. Army, he enrolled at Portland State College, where he met Patricia Valian. The couple married in 1958 and transferred to Oregon State College, where Al studied food science. Both graduated in 1960.

That same year, Mildred and Earl divorced. Mildred didn’t want the business to disappear, so she convinced her 25-year-old son to buy out his father’s share and take over as president. The company was renamed Reser’s Fine Foods Inc., and Al moved its operations from Cornelius to Beaverton, leasing a 33,000-square-foot building. He took the company public that December, listing shares on the National Over-the-Counter Stock Exchange.

Mildred remained involved with the company as vice president in the years that followed. She eventually remarried and settled in Seattle, where she lived for a number of years. She died in August 1977 at the age of 64, and was laid to rest at Valley Memorial Park in Hillsboro.

At Oregon State, Al had experimented with a sour-cream-based dip that went on to become one of the company’s flagship products, and a crucial one: it sold well through the winter months when salad sales slowed, eventually accounting for about a third of total sales. Al pushed hard to develop products that weren’t seasonal, and one early success was a line of salsas and frozen burritos aimed at Oregon’s growing Latino population; by 2010, the company was producing five million tortillas a day.

Growth continued through acquisitions, starting with the Sausage Kitchen in Milwaukie in the early 1970s, which brought processed meats into the product line. By decade’s end, Reser’s was a founding member of what’s now known as the Refrigerated Foods Association.

The company weathered a serious threat in the early 1980s when Texas investor Atlee Kohl began quietly buying up Reser’s stock, aiming for a hostile takeover. Once Kohl’s stake reached 44 percent, Al Reser launched a grassroots campaign urging small shareholders to sell their shares directly to him instead. He secured a loan to buy out Kohl’s holdings, and by early 1987 the company had been delisted from public trading and was back fully in family hands.

The decades that followed brought steady expansion and a string of acquisitions, including Stonemill Kitchens and Don Pancho Authentic Mexican Foods, along with a dozen other companies from Hawaii to Maryland during the 1990s and 2000s. The company also invested heavily in Al’s hometown of Topeka, building a plant there in 1990 and breaking ground in 2017 on an $86.5 million prepared-salad facility.

Growth hasn’t come without controversy. A 2014 decision to move Oregon production from Beaverton to Hillsboro strained relations between the two cities. Between 2000 and 2017, the company was fined a total of $232,678 by OSHA across thirteen violations, mostly at its Kansas and North Carolina plants, including a $76,283 fine in 2015. That same year, listeria discovered at the North Carolina facility led to a product recall, and in 2017 undeclared milk and soy in the company’s macaroni salad triggered an allergy alert.

Al Reser handed control of the company to his son, Mark, in 2006, and died four years later, on April 12, 2010, while on vacation in Sarasota, Florida. In 2011, the company acquired two more competitors, Orval Kent and Vaughn Foods, pushing gross receipts past a billion dollars for the first time. By 2017, Reser’s employed more than 4,800 workers across seventeen production and distribution plants in Oregon, Washington, Utah, Ohio, Kansas, North Carolina, and Mexico. At its 75th anniversary, the company had reached $2 billion in annual revenue, still the largest family-owned prepared foods business in the country.

The Reser family’s ties to the region run deep. Al’s devotion to his alma mater, Oregon State University, and the family’s giving, more than $35 million to date, led to OSU’s football stadium being renamed Reser Stadium in 1999. Pat Reser co-chaired OSU’s billion-dollar capital campaign from 2007 to 2014 and served as the first chair of the reconstituted OSU Board of Trustees in 2013. The family remains active in Washington County and Portland civic life, including annual support for the Portland Rose Festival Parade.

What started as Mildred peeling potatoes on a farmhouse porch north of Cornelius is now one of the largest family-owned food companies in the country.