For Wenderworth, chickens are 'OK.' (Collier Wenderoth Jr., chief executive officer of OK Industries Inc.)

On the fourth floor of OK Industries Inc.'s new headquarters in Fort Smith, Collier Wenderoth Jr. reflects on his more than 50 years at the company his father built during the Depression. He knows his father would be surprised with the success of the company he started as OK Feed Mills Inc.

In fact, even the man who has been in charge of the company since his father's death in 1955 says he's taken back by the prosperity his company has had over the years.

"We're proud of what we've been able to do," says the company's chief executive office and chairman.

He has grown the company from OK Feed Mills Inc. to OK Industries Inc., with subsidiaries of OK Farms and OK Foods. Now, Wenderoth and his wife and daughters own the largest private food processing company in the state and the 16th-largest chicken company in the country, according to Broiler Industry, a national trade publication that ranks the top 100 poultry companies yearly. The 1997 annual revenue estimate for the company is $768.4 million.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, Collier Wenderoth Sr. worked for a feed mill until his job was consolidated and eliminated. Wenderoth looked around to start his own business and bought a feed mill operation in downtown Fort Smith, on a piece of property that is now home to the Southwest Times Record, the city's daily newspaper.

The name of the business would be OK Feed Mills Inc., Wenderoth's son says, because Wenderoth Feeds would be too hard for most people to say.

"OK stands for OK, it doesn't have anything to do with Oklahoma or anything else," Wenderoth Jr. says. "It means OK. He wanted to name it OK because that was easy to say."

The company started in 1933 with two employees. OK Feed Mills Inc. provided feed for cattle, livestock, hogs and chicken farmers in western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma, Wenderoth says.

Wenderoth Jr. left home for university studies in 1941. He attended Washington & Lee University in Virginia. His studies were interrupted by World War II, where he served in the U.S. Air Force. After the war, he returned to the university in Virginia and got his degree in business administration. He came home to Fort Smith to work for his father in February 1948.

"I guess I always knew that I'd come back and work in the feed business," Wenderoth says. "But I never knew I'd be in the chicken business. My father never knew that we'd do this, either. It was after he died before we really ever got into that."

The 74-year-old Wenderoth isn't in the chicken business - he's in the chicken "bidness." His demeanor is charming and relaxing, and if he didn't tell you he was in his mid-70s, you'd never know it.

He is a company man. He often wears golf shirts and khaki breeches to work. The shirts usually have a stitching of the OK trademark on them. He wears a big gold OK ring on his right hand and has a vigorous handshake - the kind of friendly handshake you associate with young politicians or old salesmen.

Growing Chickens

OK Feed Mills Inc. got into the chicken business in 1958 with the construction of a processing plant at Fort Smith. The company opened its first hatchery in 1962 and opened a new feed mill in 1965, both in Fort Smith.

"Then we built a further processing plant in 1970," he says. "And the original processing plant was remodeled and added onto about six times, and then we had this fire in 1994, and we completely built a new processing plant."

Chicken processing was the next logical step to ensure growth of the business, Wenderoth says.

"When I got out of the service and went back to school and came home and got in the feed business," he says, "if you had drought in the summertime, you had a wonderful feed business. If you had lush pastures and everything, it was very difficult. And chickens were eating all the time, no matter if it was wintertime or summertime. So it seemed logical to me to get into the chicken business. And when we got big enough into the chicken business, we had difficulty finding markets that were available to slaughter chickens when they were ready for market.

"It became that it was necessary to integrate yourself so that you had a feed mill, the hatchery, the poultry processing plant and the whole thing all together so you could handle the end product that would go to the consumer."

In the early days of the chicken business, he says, chickens weren't sold at fast-food outlets, but were sold directly to consumers at grocery stores.

In the 1960s, OK started making boneless, skinless chicken breast and processed chicken rolls that were sold primarily in the Northeast.

Today, the company completely processes all of its chicken products, a move made in the 1980s.

"All of our chicken is either boneless, skinless breast, or patties or nuggets, or some kind of fully-cooked item," he says.

The first facility the company ever built outside the state was a hatchery plant at Heavener, Okla., about 40 miles southeast of Fort Smith. OK Industries had always had a number of contract growers in the Heavener area, Wenderoth says, so moving into that area was not a hard decision to make. The company also built a deboning plant in Heavener in 1990. OK owns a third hatchery in Stigler, Okla.

In 1994, OK built a slaughter plant in Heavener, bringing the number of slaughter facilities to two. The other is in Fort Smith.

The company processes 500,000 birds a day, he says; half are processed in Arkansas and half in Oklahoma. OK owns a distribution center in Muldrow, Okla., just outside Fort Smith.

"We're looking to add another facility soon," he says. "We haven't decided if we're going to put it in Arkansas or Oklahoma yet."

The retail brand of OK's chicken is Tenderbird. The company's biggest retail client is Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and its largest fast-food client is Burger King. His chicken is sold throughout the United States and in several international markets, including Russia, Indonesia, Europe and Hong Kong.

A few years ago, OK Industries' management considered a move to go public, but Wenderoth says he backed away from the plan.

"I think if you go public, you live in a goldfish bowl," he says. In fact, Wenderoth is the only person on the payroll allowed to talk to the media about OK Industries.

"I'm not against anything a public company does, but it always seems they are trying to beat the last quarter's estimates and the stock analysts. So they can pump the price up on the stock, which is part of the game. That's the way it is. That's just something that we didn't choose to do.

"We like to be a family-type organization."

Retirement

Wenderoth goes to work every day that he's in town, but admits that he takes more vacations now than he used to. He's in Alaska with two of his granddaughters for the rest of July. But he'll quickly tell you he's not retired and probably never will retire.

His son-in-law, Randy Goins, is vice chairman of the company and runs the day-to-day operations of the business, Wenderoth says. Goins likely will take over the company "when my time passes on," Wenderoth says.

The management team has been in place for about 20 years, he says, and has represented the 15-member board well.

"I've got a great group of people that I work with," he says.

Wenderoth has worked in a downtown office off of a plant for years but now enjoys handling corporate affairs from the complex in northern Fort Smith.

"We didn't have any windows over there," he says. 'I enjoy having these windows. It's nice."

The four-story office building that is home to the company's headquarters was completed late last year. It still smells new, and Wenderoth is still inviting his 4,300 employees from facilities in Fort Smith and Oklahoma over for tours.

"We want everybody to have a chance to see this building and know that this is theirs, too," he says of the plantation-styled, red-brick building with tall white columns.

"I went to school at Washington & Lee," he says. "There's a picture of it right there. I got the love for columns there."

No expense was spared in the building of the new headquarters. The facility has a 50-seat auditorium for media and company briefings, and for the first time, the company has a board room. Before the new building, board meetings were held in a small conference room near one of the Fort Smith plants.

A dining room for entertaining employees and potential customers sits atop the fourth floor, with a view of one of the company's facilities near the new headquarters. Of course, almost always, chicken is the main course.

"My dad would never have grown the business like we have," Wenderoth admits. "He wouldn't have approved the debt that we carry to grow. He was a C.O.D. man. He went through the Depression and always believed that you bought and paid for something when you got it or when you sold it. That's the way he did business."

Wenderoth says he knows changes are in store for OK when he's no longer running the company.

"They'll take this company further than I did," he says. "I know that. That's the way it goes."