Mark Peters and Dave Riemersma keep product moving through the doors for Butterball Farms.

Butterball Farms to receive Outstanding Growth Award
Pete Daly

Mark Peters said he was caught by surprise when he first heard that the Association for Corporate Growth-West Michigan had determined that Butterball Farms had grown 300 percent in the past 12 years. That sounded like a lot — but then he did the math.

"Sure enough, they're right," he said.

Peters, CEO of the family-owned company based on Buchanan Street in southwest Grand Rapids, will be accepting the Outstanding Growth Award from the ACG-West Michigan at DeVos Place March 18. He will also explain how the company plans to move from its current $41 million in annual sales to $100 million within five years.

Butterball Farms employs about 190 people in Grand Rapids and about 30 more at a creamery it bought a couple of years ago in Stirling, Ontario, near Toronto.

The name Butterball brings to mind turkeys, and there actually is a connection to the famed frozen turkey brand name. But today, turkeys are totally out of the picture at Butterball Farms: It's all about butter.

Peters said as far as he knows, Butterball Farms is the largest specialty embossed butter producer in North America. Although the company does not make butter (except at the Stirling creamery for the Canadian market), Butterball Farms buys butter in bulk and repackages it into single-serving pats. Butterball also forms it into specialized designs for high-end restaurants, typically at hotels.

"We sell to the three biggest food distribution companies," said Peters, those being Gordon Food Service, Sysco and U.S. Foodservice. According to Peters, Dave Riemersma, president of Butterball Farms Inc., has estimated the company produces an average of more than two million butter pats each day of production.

Peters said Butterball also ships its embossed and specialty butter products to major hotel chains such as Hyatt, Westin, Sheraton, Wyndham and Four Seasons. The hotels typically want their name or logo embossed on each pat of butter, or the chef may order specially designed butter for lavish presentations. Butterball Farms has a widely recognized rose design that the company has trademarked.

Peters, 44, has worked at the family butter business since he was 12. The company was originally founded as Peters Pak in 1956 by his father, well-known Grand Rapids innovator and businessman Leo Peters, who passed away in 1995.

According to Mark Peters, his father bought the trademarked brand name "Butterball" in 1951 from an individual in Wyoming, Ohio. It's not clear now what the brand name had been used for, and Peters said he thinks his father wasn't even sure at the time how he would use the Butterball name.

Peters said his father may have developed the Butterball turkey in the early 1950s at Swift & Co., the major meat processor in Chicago. Eventually, Swift bought the Butterball Turkey trademark and patents from Leo Peters, but he retained rights to use the Butterball name for butter.

Leo Peters also developed an in-house expertise in designing and building CNC machining for making the company’s food processing equipment. That expertise eventually became a wholly owned subsidiary called TAS Solutions, which employs about 10 people and took in $1.2 million last year, 80 percent of that in sales to other West Michigan companies.

In 1972, Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald's, began buying embossed butter pats from Peters Pak to add a touch of class to its hotcakes meal. Although many fast-food businesses don't serve much real butter, McDonald's hotcakes breakfast is an exception, much to Butterball Farms' benefit.

Today, said Peters, "McDonald's is our largest account." Some of the butter pats it buys from Butterball Farms are shipped to McDonald's restaurants as far away as South Korea.

In the early 1980s, Leo Peters changed the company name from Peters Pak to Butterball Farms. Over the last 10 years, the company has frequently expanded its product line, now offering premium butter balls and butter in designs reflecting holidays, and even a new geometric-themed series of designs. Peters said Butterball Farms is probably about 10 times the size of its closest competitor in specialty butters, although there are larger companies producing plain butter pats for food service.

Although the management team is moving aggressively forward on expansion plans, Butterball Farms has also had to roll with the recent punches of the worldwide recession. Employment numbers there are down from a year ago, and the factory is operating on a four-day week.

"It's tough," said Peters, adding that sales volumes are down because "conventions are not getting booked, people aren't traveling as much, not going out to eat as much …"

Peters said he has heard that popular restaurants remain busy, but he still believes that the business is down. He said America seemingly had reached the point where the average family was eating out as much as four or five nights a week. If all those families stay home one extra night each week, "that's a 20 percent drop" in restaurant business, he said — and he added that many people have admitted to him that they have been doing just that.

Peters and his management team is not cowed by the recession. He said they are determined to grow the business, with three key elements at the core of the group’s plans: product innovation, collaboration with other businesses, and continuing education for everybody at the company.

Butterball Farms is developing a wide variety of new compound flavored butters, and it recently introduced a more cost-effective piping package for salted and unsalted butter used by chefs, called Pipe-N-Go.

Other restaurant chains and food companies that have special uses for butter are of interest to Butterball Farms, for possible collaborations. Peters said potential "joint ventures in other countries, or collaborations on other products, are going to help get us there."

Then there is continuing education, which at Butterball Farms starts at the top. Peters said he and Riemersma have had executive coaching over the past year, and everybody, from the plant floor on up, is encouraged to consider continuing their education.

At his latest quarterly meeting with all employees at the start of 2009, Peters said he told them it was going to be "a tough year," and the four-day work week would continue indefinitely. But he noted that they should think about using that extra day off as "an opportunity to take advantage of some education, either through The Source or through GRCC … or work on getting a GED."

Butterball Farms is one of more than a dozen local companies and organizations that are members of The Source, a not-for-profit employee support organization founded five years ago in Grand Rapids. The Source leverages resources to help its members' employees receive training and offers them other forms of support, such as ways to find efficient transportation to work and help doing their taxes.

Peters said he told his employees that "any time one of us gets a little smarter or a little bit better at problem solving, our whole company gets smarter. … We're all better off, because of it."