McCormick’s Roots

The industry would come to Baltimore much later. In 1889, a 25-year-old Baltimorean named Willoughby McCormick began a startup business in his one-room basement. He had some flavoring extracts, but most of his extracts were fruit syrups and root beer—not spices at all. With three assistants he sold his products door-to-door and within a year of making profits, was able to move to larger quarters. In 1896, the commitment to spices was made when he bought the F.G. Emmett Spice Company of Philadelphia.

Today, McCormick & Company is a Fortune 500 company with $5.6 billion dollars in revenue and stock that sells at about $87 per share. It has the largest spice producing facility on the planet, a 320,000-square foot campus in Baltimore County’s Hunt Valley.

Before it’s move from the City of Baltimore, the nine-story national headquarters and manufacturing center built in 1921 enthused and relaxed the public with spicy odors wafting across the Inner Harbor. The roaring ’20s was an age of optimism and prosperity. And then McCormick the leader died in 1932 and in the Depression, the company lost its way.

His nephew Charles McCormick, who was Johns Hopkins educated, would rescue the company. A man who understood human nature and respected people, the younger McCormick believed a company was nothing without an engaged workforce. He raised salaries by 10 percent, reduced work hours from 56 to 45 per week, instituted profit sharing, and began a series of junior boards that became a multiple management style—a Baltimore first that was eventually adopted by other corporations nationally and abroad. Within the first five years of this leadership style, McCormick instituted 2,000 ideas for improvement recommended by the junior boards. The model continues today.

Along the way McCormick of the Inner Harbor introduced several industry firsts. They were the first to introduce gauze covered tea bags, for example. Generations later, the company became the first to build an AI system to analyze decades of data to build new flavor combinations—the resulting platform “ONE” launched in 2019.

Driven by a strategy for growth of acquisition, joint ventures, and as a supplier to food corporations such as McDonalds, McCormick & Company would own brands in 170 countries including popular names like French’s, Lawry’s, Zatarain’s, Cattlemen’s BBQ Sauce, and dozens more, including Maryland’s distinctive yellow and blue can of spice, Old Bay, purchased in 1990.