Nothing But the Finest: Sam Rowse ’65

Checking out Elmwood station on the rail trail in Hancock, N.H.

Nothing But the Finest

by Joe Sheppard

Coming to Lawrence Academy from tiny Mason, N.H., was “a pretty big deal” for Sam Rowse ’65, P’92, ’94; GP ’24. “I got a chance to do sports,” he recalled, “and really be involved with multiple teachers and things.”

Having more than one teacher was new to Sam, as he had only one teacher through the eighth grade in Mason — he was one of “seven or eight” in his graduating class — as was the chance to play football for Bob Shepherd and hockey “on that old rink on the lower fields.”

“We had good times,” Sam acknowledged in a recent conversation. “Sports really taught me a lot about getting along with people and that sort of thing” — lessons that would serve him well in his long career with the family business and beyond. For over a century, the family business was Veryfine Juice, a company started in 1900 by Sam’s grandfather, Arthur Rowse, when he bought the Standard Vinegar Company in Somerville, Mass. The elder Rowse eventually moved the business to Littleton to be “nearer the fruit,” and Sam’s dad ran the company from the 1930s through the early ‘70s, when Sam — then a recent graduate of Nasson College — took over the company with his late brother David.

They weren’t making any money Sam explained, “So David and I got together and tried to figure out what we were doing wrong. We just couldn’t make a dollar. When we looked around a little bit and saw that all the other beverage guys were into single-serve, we decided we’d try that.”

With a smile, Sam continued the saga: “Everybody said, ‘Nobody’s going to buy single-serve juice!’” Of course they quickly learned, everybody, was wrong. As Sam told his dad, now retired, “We did a home run with 10-ounce fruit juices and fruit drinks. We knocked it out of the park. And then we did another one.”

The next “home run” was Fruit20, the first-ever calorie-free flavored water. “We were the first guys,” Sam says with pride, “and all the rest followed us.” The brothers then approached Poland Spring with the idea of selling the company, but they weren’t interested — “It’s never going to be anything,” they told the Rowses — so they sold Veryfine, “a business that was growing at 300 percent a year,” to Kraft Foods.

The sale was “a good deal,” but, as Sam explained, “They gave the company to a couple of MBAs and they buried it in less than two years … It was hard to have our family put our entire work’s lives into the business and … to see it go down the tubes that quickly was awful.” The untimely death of his brother David in 1988 heightened Sam’s pain over the loss of the company.

Badly needing to recover and recharge, Sam “went sailing for quite a while.” The ocean air worked its magic, and Sam became a farmer, once again calling upon the innovative skills that made Veryfine a success. Today he is operating three separate and unique farms: the family property in Mason, where he grew up, raises Horned Dorset sheep; Peterborough, N.H., where Sam now lives, is home to a herd of Wagyu cattle; and his fiancée’s farm in Round Pond, Maine, is raising Berkshire hogs, considered, as Sam says, “the Wagyu of pork.”

“Our idea behind doing this is to be able to feed ourselves and others with high-quality food that we know where it came from,” Sam states. And his new enterprise is succeeding because his years in the family business taught him that there is no substitute for the best. Once again, he’s knocking one out of the park.