Chicken comes first at Farmers Pride

Scott Sechler may well be one of the last self-made men today who hasn't launched a dot-com or made millions in venture capital.

Sechler, 41, barely graduated from high school and never went to college. And, at a time when agriculture is the last place a wannabe business tycoon would dream of

His Pennsylvania Dutch grandparents were his business models, after all. They taught Sechler to kill a chicken properly - "you'd put its head between two nails hammered into a stump and chop it off and toss the head in a peach basket." But they also taught him how to keep the chicken house spotless and how to raise healthy birds.

Today, Sechler is president and chief stockholder of the privately owned Farmers Pride Inc. in Fredericksburg. The company, which had $78 million in sales last year, is best known for producing Bell & Evans chicken, fresh chicken that is free of antibiotics.

The company sells more antibiotic-free chicken than any other, and Bell & Evans is popular in urban markets, like New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. It is difficult to find in Central Pennsylvania, where grocery stores are reluctant to stock the higher-priced chicken.

In Central Pennsylvania grocery stores, you can find Purdue or Tyson boneless, skinless chicken breast on sale for $1.59 to $1,99 a pound. The Bell & Evans boneless, skinless chicken breast, on sale, is $3.99 a pound, according to CEO Bruno Schmalhofer. In urban markets, however, there is less of a price difference, with Bell & Evans consequently more competitive in those areas.

Sechler of Strothtown, Berks County, grew up in Kempton, near Kutztown. When he was 10, his grandparents began taking him to Pennsylvania Dutch festivals to demonstrate how to prepare a chicken. Only a few years ago, he discovered a photo of himself as a child holding a rooster in an April 1973 National Geographic. The photo was part of a feature on the Pennsylvania Dutch.

When he was 16, Sechler bought his first truck and started driving Pennsylvania-raised chickens to Canada.

"He was always running chickens, and he was always tired at school," said Tom Stone, marketing director for Farmers Pride, where the story of Sechler's beginnings is well-known.

"I was taking hundreds of loads to Canada," said Sechler. "I barely graduated from high school."

Sechler got into the chicken business to help his father with the family farm. After high school, he went to work for Farmers Pride, then owned by former state Sen. Clarence F. Manbeck, who had started the business in 1939. The company primarily sold chicken in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

In 1984, at the age of 24, Sechler bought Farmers Pride. To buy the company, Sechler used some money he saved from his early poultry brokerage days. However, the deal was a leveraged buyout, with Sechler taking out a highinterest loan to finance it, according to Schmalhofer.

"Senator Manbeck came to me and told me I knew more about raising chickens then he did, and he offered to sell it to me," said Sechler.

Two years later, Sechler bought Bell & Evans, another family-owned chicken company founded in the 1890s and based in New Jersey.

In the early 1990s, Sechler decided to focus his efforts on Bell & Evans' signature "Excellent Chicken." Farmers Pride stepped up a marketing campaign that pointed out that the chickens were raised on a natural diet of corn and soybeans, without antibiotics or hormones.

The timing was perfect. A decade ago, Americans were taking a huge interest in their diet, spurred by a whole array of new fat-free and organic foods, as well as by high-cholesterol warnings. People began eating more chicken. The combination of a new health awareness and a healthy economy meant that most people didn't mind paying a little more for chicken that was bound to be good for you. Enter Bell & Evans.

Sechler claims his chickens taste better because of what they're fed - or not fed - and because they're raised in a stress-free environment. His chickens are raised in roomier chicken houses and the birds are allowed to roam. Bell & Evans chickens are not "free-range" chickens, however. The chickens are not permitted outdoors where they would be exposed to diseases. But they can roam the entire chicken house, which is about three-quarters of a square foot per bird.

Between 80 and 90 farmers in Central Pennsylvania raise the chickens. Farmers Pride owns the birds, the feed and the gas to heat the chicken houses. The farmers supply the labor and the buildings.

All Bell & Evans chicken is processed at the company's newly expanded plant in Fredericksburg. Almost $10 million was spent to double the capacity of the facility, said Schmalhofer.

The company has 650 employees and runs two shifts for processing chickens and another shift for cleaning the plant. Most of the employees live in Lebanon County. They also hail from Reading and Berks County, Harrisburg and Pottsville.

What does the future hold for Farmers Pride? The company would like to expand its Bell & Evans markets westward - currently it sells chicken as far west as Wisconsin and as far south as Key West, Fla. And it exports to Japan.

According to Schmalhofer, the company wants to expand its uses for leg meat, including developing a sausage that would be marketed as a natural alternative to pork sausage.

Farmers Pride's main competition in the all-natural, antibiotic-free market are small independent producers. Perdue Farms Inc., Salisbury, Md., and Tyson Foods Inc., Springdale, Ark., the top two producers in the nation, also attempt to take business away from Bell & Evans.

"We've probably had two companies make a product that was targeted to compete directly with us, and both withdrew within six months to a year and were unsuccessful," said Schmalhofer. "However, the larger the market gets and the more demand for the product, we would anticipate more competition."

In addition to Schmalhofer, Sechler is joined by Robert L. Walborn, vice president of sales and marketing, and William D. Gruber, vice president of production, in running Farmers Pride.

Sechler continues to run his company by following the principles of his grandparents.

"The philosophy is from my grandparents," said Sechler. "They were strict with the way they cleaned the houses and the way the chickens were fed. Now, we call it allnatural. Back then, it was the right way to do it."