By Ray Barrington
News-Chronicle
When John C. "Jack" Meng started at Schreiber Foods in 1968, the company was doing $43 million worth of business a year.
Today, he's chairman of the board, and the company does the same amount of business in a week.
That's one reason the Green Bay Rotary Club is giving Meng its Free Enterprise Award May 5. He's the third Schreiber executive to receive the award, following Merlin G. Bush (1984) and Robert G. Bush (1994). But there are many other reasons for Meng's award, including his work with community organizations and issues.
Meng stepped down from day-to-day operations at Schreiber in 1999, staying as its chairman. He handles all of this from a De Pere office, housing the Meng Foundation, which opened in January and still needs a little work. For one thing, he has ordered lettering for the wall with a favorite statement:
"We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."
The foundation tries to "help the physically and mentally challenged, the poor and hungry, the homeless," he said. The foundation funds scholarships and works with Neighborhood Housing Services of Green Bay on its Adopt-A-Home program. The foundation loans the money to NHS to buy the home. NHS rehabs it and sells it.
"The joys of my career have been to help people succeed and help people in need. At the company I was able to help them succeed, and now we're helping people in need, which is really a great joy," he said.
It's hardly his only outlet; he's on the boards of a variety of area companies (Associated Bank, Tosca, Wisconsin Public Service and others).
There's another benefit from being retired: "Now I can be introduced as Inky's husband," he said, referring to his wife, Engrid. Both have a lengthy record of working on housing, health-care and community issues, including the successful All-America City project.
After college (Wabash, Ind., College for his bachelor's, Washington University in St. Louis for his MBA), Meng went to Green Bay, Inky's hometown. He had offers to join both Procter & Gamble and Schreiber. Schreiber, the smaller company, impressed him with its way of doing business.
"I got a chance to know the leadership at Schreiber," he said. "They were very proud of the fact that they were doing all this business on a handshake. They didn't have any contracts or anything like that.
"I grew up in Glenview, Ill., in the Chicago area, and I'd hear talk about how somebody screwed somebody or got the upper hand. And these (Schreiber people) were people who had a lot of integrity. They said '16 ounces to the pound and if you don't like it, send it back.' We still behave that way."
Of those who would short-weight customers, he said, "you can make a lot of money doing that, but I don't see how you can look in the mirror in the morning."
He started as an industrial-relations manager. "I was only three steps out of the presidency, but only one step out of the union," he said.
He gradually learned all aspects of the cheese business, something he hadn't studied in college. Sometimes, the learning was a little too hands-on. In 1971, he was plant manager of a Utah company that Schreiber had acquired.
"Pollution was starting to become a really big issue," he said. A TV station asked about the plant's water output and Meng offered to drink directly from the stream into which the plant sent its treated water.
"I took another sip, and he said, 'Do you have cattle on this range?' I said yes, and he says ... 'like that one?' Well, upstream about 20 feet, was this big old cow urinating in the water that I was telling him was drinking-water quality."
There were rough times. In 1987, Schreiber had too much capacity. "We had to downsize, right size, whatever you want to call it," he said. "We had to close three plants. It was the most difficult thing in my career."
That night, he went home and saw his daughter packing for college.
"Dad, you don't look too good," she said. He replied, "I know that some dad is going home tonight and telling his daughter he can't afford to send his daughter to college."
However, he said, he had to do that to save the rest of the company. There were 1,200 workers let go; the jobs have since been recovered.
"They're not workers at Schreiber; they're "partners," Meng said. "We try to develop partnerships based on mutual trust, mutual respect and mutual benefit.
"We're customer-driven. A lot of people look at customers only as the ones who get invoices and pay the bills. We like to think of customers as anyone who uses the product of our work. An accountant has a customer, the person who uses his report.
"Once everybody has that customer mentality, then I think things really started to grow." Schreiber's strength is its culture, he said.
"The competition can come in and buy the equipment, buy the inventory, buy the systems and all that, but they can't buy our culture," he said.
It has led to a lot of loyalty up and down the line.
"During Y2K (the 2000 fears of computer crashes), we went 18 months without any turnover in the (information technology) department. And they were being picked off like flies. But people like the culture here."
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