WSJ article on pop-up poultry timers / Thanksgiving turkeys .....................................
November 22, 2005
Ask the Volk Family: 30 Million Turkeys Can't Be Wrong
Maker's Pop-Up Timers Grace Many Thanksgiving Birds; Martha Stewart Demurs
By ROBERT TOMSHO
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
TURLOCK, Calif. -- The late Tony Volk seldom left this agricultural town. But once again this Thanksgiving, the invention he promoted will appear in millions of American kitchens.
Determined to make turkeys as easy to cook as a TV dinner, he was a pioneer of the pop-up poultry timer.
This time of year, that means both fortune and grief for his oldest son, Anthony. Since his father's death in 1991, the 58-year-old has been chief executive officer of closely held Volk Enterprises Inc. The company has annual revenue of about $100 million and is the only U.S. maker of the little breast-mounted gadgets that sell for a dime apiece to turkey processors. They are designed so that a red plastic temperature indicator, shaped like a tiny umbrella, pops out at 180 degrees, when a bird is fully cooked.
Mr. Volk, who manages the company with his three brothers, relishes the fact that Volk pop-ups will be embedded in some 30 million of the 46 million turkeys headed into ovens this Thanksgiving. Yet during holiday food shows and in cooking columns, the pop-up seldom comes in for praise. In her recipe for "Perfect Roast Turkey," Martha Stewart advises fans to toss the little timer. "An instant-read thermometer is a much more accurate indication of doneness," avows Ms. Stewart.
Rick Rodgers, author of "Thanksgiving 101," says he avoids pop-ups because he worries basting will prevent them from popping properly. Sgt. First Class David Russ, a U.S. Army chef from Fort Bragg, N.C., who won the National Military Culinary Chef award in 2004, can't stand the puncture a pop-up leaves behind. "If you get a piece of turkey on your plate with a hole in it," he says, "you wonder where it came from."
Cook's Illustrated, a popular journal for food lovers, put the disposable timers on trial a few years ago and also came out favoring thermometers. Because pop-ups don't go off until the deepest dark meat is safely cooked, editor Chris Kimball says the breasts of his test birds came out dry. "As a friend of mine says, that's why they invented gravy," Mr. Kimball jokes.
It's not funny to Anthony Volk, who maintains the pop-up is reliable and as much of a Thanksgiving tradition for most people as pumpkin-pie filling from a can. "A lot of these gourmets and professionals look down on anything that is convenience-related," he says.
"It's an American icon," adds his brother, Steve Volk.
Yvonne Vizzier Thaxton has long relied on the pop-up at home. "It's not supposed to tell you the turkey is perfect," says Ms. Thaxton, a poultry science professor at Mississippi State University. "It's supposed to tell you it's safe to eat."
The pop-up's patriarch was born on a South Dakota farm and played a big role in convincing American homemakers to buy more turkey. A frugal man who bought his clothes at Kmart, Tony Volk became manager of a turkey processing plant in Turlock in 1951. Soon he set up a side business of his own to pursue turkey-related innovations.
In those days, most turkeys were still sold in butcher shops with head, feet and entrails intact. Meanwhile, processors trying to market fully eviscerated turkeys to supermarkets were having trouble with the drumsticks which, left to themselves, sometimes emerged from processing pointing every which way.
Determined to rein the legs in, Tony Volk experimented with string, rubber bands and other bindings. He taught his sons to use wire-bending machines and convinced his younger brother, Henry, to quit his job as a tax auditor and join the quest. "It was something that needed to be done," declares Henry Volk, now 80 years old.
The result was a breakthrough in supermarket turkey presentation: the Hok-Lok. Introduced in 1963, it was a patented length of thick-gauge wire that looped over the ends of both drumsticks, holding them tight to the bird, with both ends anchored in the body cavity. The wire was designed to keep the turkey in one good-looking piece all the way through the cooking.
Processors loved the Hok-Lok because it made a bird's breast appear plumper. At first some consumers tried to yank the unfamiliar contraption out before cooking, but eventually most got used to it. By the early 1970s, the Volks were selling 100 million Hok-Loks a year.
Tony Volk wasn't always so lucky. A scheme to market turkey feathers left him with a warehouse full of slow-selling fluff. In the late 1960s, he was also beaten to the punch in marketing the first pop-up timer.
That distinction fell to Dun-Rite Co., a tiny company in Fresno, Calif. The Dun-Rite pop-up contained a spring-mounted plunger whose lower tip was embedded in a metallic bead. The bead was designed to liquefy at 180 degrees and release the plunger. "They didn't always work," admits co-founder Leo Pearlstein, an 85-year-old public-relations man in Los Angeles who now promotes poultry stuffing.
Dun-Rite was sold in 1973 to 3M Co., the big St. Paul., Minn., conglomerate. It refined the pop-ups and put its marketing muscle behind them.
By then, Tony Volk had launched a counterattack. His initial weapon was the Vue-Temp. Instead of popping out when the turkey was done, the Vue-Temp stuck out at the start and gradually sank into the roasting bird. When it disappeared, the meat was ready. However, the protruding stem of the Vue-Temp had to be folded down for packaging. Cooks had to snap up the stem before putting the bird in the oven, which some failed to do.
"People would write letters saying, 'Why didn't it pop up?' " says Steve Volk.
Tony Volk shifted to a pop-up timer of his own design, similar to the Dun-Rite/3M device. Oldest son Anthony crisscrossed the country pitching pop-ups to processors and supermarket chains. In Turlock, the clan donned sanitary hairnets and put together pop-ups around the kitchen table at night.
The Volk family business was sued by 3M for patent infringement in 1982. After several years of litigation, the two sides negotiated a settlement that permitted them to manufacture pop-ups under each other's patents. Thanks to Tony Volk's contacts in the turkey business, his own timer business took off and, a few months before his death from cancer in 1991, Volk Enterprises acquired 3M's pop-up business.
At the company Tony Volk left behind, the Hok-Lok has largely given way to its more supple nylon cousin, another Volk invention called the Handi-Clamp. With offices in Brazil, Canada and Hong Kong, the company now markets pop-ups for everything from salmon steaks to pork chops, selling over 100 million of the devices a year. Manufacturing now takes place in a sprawling modern complex whose circular lobby sports a V-shaped fountain and a life-size painting of the founder.
The Volk sons have worked hard to boost the pop-up's respectability and counter its critics. The company has sponsored university cooking studies and armed its timers with more powerful springs to ensure they can burst through the thickest basting. Anthony Volk says he continues to invite high-profile chefs to visit his factory. None have.
Meanwhile, working over turkeys wired with all manner of electronic probes to measure heat, company researchers are testing timers that spring at lower temperatures and devices that follow the roasting process in greater detail. The tip of one model changes color as the turkey gets hotter before finally popping. Another contains multiple plungers, also to give cooks a clear idea of how their bird is progressing.
Still, Steve Volk worries that adding too many bells and whistles to the simple turkey timer will only spark more culinary confusion. "To change it into some high-tech device may not fly," he says.
Write to Robert Tomsho at rob.tomsho@wsj.com
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