[Penzey wasn’t the first C.E.O. to advocate for progressive
values. But he has consistently used his business as a platform to
deliver messages about truth in science, mass shootings, marriage
equality.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE C.E.O. WHO CALLED TRUMP A RACIST (AND SOLD A LOT OF SPICE MIX)  
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Helen Rosner
February 1, 2018
The New Yorker
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_ Penzey wasn’t the first C.E.O. to advocate for progressive
values. But he has consistently used his business as a platform to
deliver messages about truth in science, mass shootings, marriage
equality. _

Bill Penzey, who owns the largest independent spice retailer in the
United States, is upending the conventional wisdom that business and
politics don’t mix. , Photograph from Getty

 

A week after Donald Trump was elected the forty-fifth President of the
United States, Bill Penzey sent an e-mail to a few thousand people.
“The open embrace of racism by the Republican Party in this election
is now unleashing a wave of ugliness unseen in this country for
decades,” he wrote. “The American people are taking notice.
Let’s commit to giving the people a better choice.” The recipients
weren’t friends or colleagues or the fellow-members of an activist
group. They were customers—subscribers to the mailing list of
Penzey’s Wisconsin-based company, Penzeys Spices, which, with an
online store and sixty-!ve retail locations, is America’s largest
independent spice retailer. At the end of the message, he mentioned
the company’s Thanksgiving specials, including a gift box of four
mini-jars of spices for ten dollars.

Penzey, a bespectacled, rosy-cheeked man in his middle years, founded
his namesake company in the late eighties as a mail-order business.
Almost from the start, he used the brand’s official communiques as a
megaphone, devoting the first and last pages of his catalog to
personal notes and op-eds. Over the years, Penzey expressed his dismay
at, among other things, urban white flight, low teacher pay, and the
use of Native American iconography in sports. With the advent of
social media, he expanded his platform to include the e-mail
newsletter and a company Facebook page. And with the election of
Trump, he found an issue that nearly everyone took personally.

Penzey’s post-election statements—including a follow-up e-mail
telling Trump supporters, “You just voted for an openly racist
candidate for the presidency of the United States of America”—went
viral, earning coverage everywhere from USA Today to Fox News. It won
praise from Web sites like DailyKos and Upworthy, and intense derision
from members of the right-wing news media. The pundit Michelle Malkin
tweeted the American Conservative’s take, with a caption claiming
that Penzey had gone “full moonbat,” while David Clarke, who was
at the time the Milwaukee County sheriff, tweeted his opinion that
Penzey was a “typical hate-filled white elitist lefty.” A
conservative food blogger declared his intent to boycott the company,
going so far as to mock up a satirical jar of “Socialist Sea
Salt.” Almost overnight, the bleeding-heart spice magnate became a
bannerman of the #resistance and an icon of activist capitalism.

In the business world, conventional wisdom holds that controversial
political opinions should be kept as far away from products as
possible. You never know who among your customer base (or your
potential customer base) will be wildly turned off by whatever you
have to say, and you don’t want money walking out the door. The
result is a sea of milquetoast advertisements, with brands fastening
their identities to anodyne, dream-journal abstractions like
“community” and “craftsmanship,” urging their fans and
acolytes to “be more” or “dream bigger” or, in Pepsi’s case,
to “join the conversation.”

Penzey wasn’t the first C.E.O. to speak out against Trump or to use
his position to advocate for progressive values. But he was quite
possibly the first to publicly call Trump’s election an “embrace
of racism,” and he was definitely the first to do so while hawking a
free bottle of Quebec Seasonings with any five-dollar purchase. In a
letter addressed to “America’s CEOs” posted to his Facebook page
that December, Penzey wrote that, in the two weeks following his post-
election e-mail, the “right wing firestorm” cost the company three
per cent of its customers—but that online sales rose nearly sixty
per cent in the same period, and gift-box sales increased by more than
double that. He urged other business owners to follow his lead: “If,
as a company, you have values, now is the time to share them. You may
well lose a chunk of your AM radio-listening customers, but if you
really are honest and sincere, don’t be surprised to see your
promotions suddenly, finally, find active engagement with the
Millennial generation.”

For customers who preferred their cardamom pods without a side of
flaming liberal politics, another spice company awaited with open
arms. A few days after Penzey’s e-mails exploded onto the national
stage, the Spice House, another Wisconsin-based retailer, posted a
message on its own Facebook page. “My husband and I are very careful
to never bring politics or personal opinions into our spice company,
they have no business there,” Patty Erd, who owns the Spice House
with her husband, Tom, wrote. Never mind that the spice trade itself
is one of the most intensely political industries in history, or that
“staying out of politics” is, of course, its own kind of political
statement. “Heck, I would not even want to get into a subjective
debate over which cinnamon is the best!” Erd wrote. It may have been
mere coincidence that she chose to single out cinnamon only days after
the meticulous kitchen testers at Cook’s Illustrated had named
Penzeys Spices’ Vietnamese varietal their pick for the best on the
market, praising its “big, spicy flavor” and high percentage of
volatile aromatic compounds. It was not, however, a coincidence that
Erd felt the need to distance her business from Penzey’s: the two of
them are siblings.

Patty and Bill are second-generation spice mavens. In 1957, their
parents opened a coffee and tea store in their home town of Wauwatosa,
which eventually became known as the Spice House. Bill Penzey, Sr.,
was a philosopher and storyteller who liked to put his customers to
work grinding spices as he off-handedly lectured about the lore and
history of the spice trade. Bill, Jr., spun off his own namesake spice
company in 1986; Erd and her husband, Tom, took over her parents’
business in 1992. The two companies have not always coexisted
peacefully: a Crain’s story from 2009 described a “palpable”
tension between brother and sister. But, in the wake of Trump’s
election, the sibling rivalry became a fundamental matter of business
philosophy. Shortly after the Spice House distanced itself from
Penzeys, Erd and her husband began reaching out to conservative
bloggers, sharing a special offer for anyone in need of a new spice
purveyor: free shipping to those who used the promotional code
nopolitics.

In the past year, Penzey has used his business as a platform to
deliver missives about America’s culture of mass shootings, used Pi
Day as an opportunity to talk about truth in science, and hailed the
Democratic victory in the special Senate election in Alabama. He
introduced Tsardust Memories, a “ripped-from-the-headlines”
Russian spice blend (including cinnamon, nutmeg, and marjoram), and
put together a spice rainbow (red cayenne, orange curry powder, etc.)
to celebrate the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision on
marriage equality. On July 6, 2017, two years after Trump kicked off
his Presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants to the United
States “a tremendous infectious disease,” Penzey announced that
the company would be doing a no-strings-attached giveaway of Mexican
vanilla extract, writing, “Today, on this anniversary, it seems a
good day to apologize to the people of Mexico and Latin America.”
That post, and a follow-up a week later reporting on the success of
the special, generated such a #ood of business that the company
suspended its regularly planned promotions to focus on replenishing
inventory.

Penzey isn’t shy about how his politics have continued to benefit
his business’s bottom line. “This is the future,” he told his
home-town paper, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, in February of last
year. “I think if you don’t care about your customers and what
they care about, in a world of social media, no one’s going to talk
about you.” Recent studies show that today’s consumers feel more
allegiance to companies that take a position—any position—on major
political issues, and that those pesky millennials are going out of
their way to support companies led by figures who take left-leaning,
progressive positions. In other words, Penzey is a savvy salesman
who’s figured out how to capitalize on the political outrage of the
Trump era and social media’s way of amplifying it—which might seem
cynical if his political outrage weren’t so obviously real. When I
wrote asking for an interview last month, he responded with one of the
great rejection letters of my career, a long e-mail in which he
assailed the food media, critiqued my past reporting, and suggested
that I skip this story altogether and instead focus on the food
industry’s sexual-harassment problem. “If you ever have a spare
year, spend a lot of time with old food magazines through the
decades,” he wrote. “Before advertising and marketing took control
there really were some amazing publications.”

    Helen Rosner is a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 2016, she
won the James Beard award for personal-essay writing.fi

* progressive politics
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* spice trade
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* ethics
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