News from the College of Agricultural & Life Sciences

John and Rita Leahy, Edward C. Sloan, and Ed Traisman will be inducted into the Wisconsin Meat Industry Hall of Fame at a luncheon Thursday, May 1 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Madison. The event will be hosted by the Wisconsin Livestock and Meat Council. The annual meeting of the Meat Council takes place at 10:30 a.m. that day, and the luncheon begins at noon.

John and Rita Leahy

John and Rita Leahy created a highly successful meat processing business near Lake Geneva, Wis., and provided strong leadership and assistance to state and national meat processing associations and their members.

The Leahys started their own meat processing business, Lake Geneva Packing, in 1965. The original plant was a converted barn.. Their business flourished over the years, undergoing several expansions and adding 15 employees, and eventually changing its name to Lake Geneva Country Meats.

The Leahys joined the Wisconsin Association of Meat Processors and the American Association of Meat Processors, holding a number of offices in the organizations and working with fellow members to improve their businesses. Perhaps their greatest contribution to the meat industry has been their willingness to share their business experience and expertise with their peers. Together, the Leahys helped to make small meat processors in Wisconsin the envy of those in other states.

E.C. (Ted) Sloan’s 20 years of innovative work in the research department of Oscar Mayer and Company in Madison led to many important advancements for the company and for the nation’s processed meat industry, including, flexible, oxygen-impermeable packaging film, and the world’s first continuous wiener process. Today continuous systems produce three-quarters of the nation’s wieners, and virtually all processed meat is sold in polymer film.

Sloan challenged the research department to produce more wieners without building new plants. The group designed an automated path that went up and down like a roller coaster. The process duplicated traditional steps in one-tenth of the time, and produced more consistent wieners with a longer shelf life.

Ed Traisman earned his B.S. in chemistry from the University of Illinois. He worked as a research manager at Kraft until he noticed a new drive-in restaurant in Des Plaines called McDonald's.

In 1958 Traisman brought the first McDonald’s franchise to Madison. Over the next 13 years he acquired four more McDonald's franchises and was a consultant to the parent company. Traisman’s science background and business skills contributed significantly to the company’s success. Many of his innovations were adopted nationwide, including a process to freeze partially cooked french-fried potatoes. He was the first franchise owner to encourage employment of women.

In 1975 Traisman became the senior research program manager for the Food Research Institute at the UW-Madison. He was instrumental in helping fund FRI projects dealing with additives and contamination of meat products. In 1987 he helped initiate research on E. coli 0157:H7, which was then a little-known pathogen.

John was originally from the Lake Geneva area, and began his career while still in high school, working part time as a meat cutter in a supermarket. After serving with the combat engineers in the Korean War, he managed the meat department of a Sentry store. During this time he also courted Rita Powers, whom he married in 1957. Rita grew up in the Mauston, Wisconsin area, but came to the southwest part of the state to teach.

The Leahys started their own meat processing business, originally known as Lake Geneva Packing, in 1965. The original plant was a converted barn. After they determined that the business would be successful, they built a new plant on John’s family’s farm east of Lake Geneva in 1967.

It was a team effort from the beginning, with John as chief (and only) butcher and meat cutter, and Rita as the sole meat wrapper, secretary and bookkeeper. Their business flourished over the years, undergoing several expansions and adding 15 employees. Later the company name was changed to Lake Geneva Country Meats.

The Leahys joined the Wisconsin Association of Meat Processors and the American Association of Meat Processors and worked with their fellow members to improve their businesses. They participated in the associations’ educational activities, and their meat products became frequent winners in both groups’ product shows.

Perhaps the Leahys greatest contribution to the meat industry has been their willingness to share their business experience and expertise with their peers. Together, the Leahys helped to make small meat processors in Wisconsin the envy of those in other states.

John served as a president of WAMP, and as a member of the board of directors for many years; he received WAMP’s Meritorious Service Award in 1994. He also served as a director on the AAMP board.

Rita has also been very active in WAMP, serving with the association’s board of directors as treasurer since 1992, and working many hours at the WAMP convention registration and information desk. Over the years she has served on many WAMP and AAMP committees, and also received the Meritorious Service Award in 2001 from WAMP.

Rita and John have four daughters (Michelle, Theresa, Kathleen, and Barbara) and six grandchildren. John passed away in 1997. Rita still maintains a strong interest in the operation of Lake Geneva Country Meats, now managed by daughter Kathy and son-in-law Scott Vorpagel.

This fine couple are being honored for the exemplary model they have provided in starting a meat business, and over almost 40 years building it to one of the most prominent plants in Wisconsin. Their lives have also been filled with unselfish service to state and national meat processing organizations, their community, their church, and their family.

E.C. (Ted) Sloan’s 20 years of innovative work in the Research Department of Oscar Mayer and Company in Madison, Wisconsin, led to many important advancements for the company and for the nation’s processed meat industry. The two most significant accomplishments of that era were the development of transparent, flexible, oxygen-impermeable meat packaging systems, and the world’s first continuous wiener process. From their early inception in the mid-1950s, today over 75 percent of the wieners manufactured in the United States are manufactured on continuous sausage processing units, and virtually all processed meat sold at retail is packaged in attractive, clear plastic film that preserves product quality for months.

Ted Sloan was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and graduated from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. After completing his education he served two years as an Army flyer, and several years working for American and British oil companies in Mexico and other locations. At that point Sloan became involved with plastics. He operated his own plastics design business in the early 1930s, followed by seven years with the Hawley Products Company of St. Charles, Ill. In 1940 he joined Oscar Mayer and Company in Chicago, but in 1942 took a war-related leave of absence to take charge of plastics research for Navy aircraft with the Rudolph Wurlitzer Company of DeKalb, Ill. Following the war he returned to Oscar Mayer and Company in Madison, retiring as vice president and director of research in 1961.

With the support of Mr. Gottfried O. Mayer, Ted Sloan created a corporate research department in Madison. He hired a staff of individuals with scientific skill, a strong work ethic and an ability to think "outside of the box.". From the very beginning, Sloan’s research and research management efforts began to pay dividends. Sloan himself holds the patent on the machine that applied brand identification in the form of a printed paper band to each Oscar Mayer wiener. This moved wieners from being a generic commodity to a brand-labeled product, taking the company name into every kitchen.

One day in 1958, E.C. Sloan gathered members of the Oscar Mayer Research department into his office to discuss a new idea. The challenge was to produce more Oscar Mayer wieners, without building any new plants. The only way to do that was to make more wieners in less time in existing plants. At that time Oscar Mayer wieners were made in consecutive 500 pound batches, each taking 24 hours to produce. It was a lengthy, labor-intensive process with many opportunities for error.

Sloan challenged his team to come up with a process to produce wieners – beginning to end – in less than an hour. The group envisioned a continuous process, but then realized that it would take a layout the length of a football field to accommodate all the steps – grinding, mixing, chopping, stuffing, linking, smoking, cooking, cooling, peeling and packaging. However, someone observed that space goes in all directions. Why couldn’t the product move through a path that was like a roller coaster, going up and down through different zones, allowing enough space and time for each step in the process, and making the most of space in the plant?

After encountering and solving many problems the first wiener tunnel (nicknamed the "hot dog highway") was ready for its initial run in 1960. The continuous wiener process was actually a combination of mechanical components and processing innovations. The system was designed to take in raw meat and other ingredients at one end, and produce vacuum-packaged, consumer-ready wieners at the other end less than an hour later. The process duplicated all the traditional wiener-making steps in one-tenth of the time, and produced more consistent wieners with a much longer shelf life. The entire process is automated and the wieners untouched by human hands.

The system captures fresh wiener flavor by sealing them in polymer film just minutes after processing. The use of anaerobic flexible packaging material, which extends the shelf life of processed meat products over 10-fold, was evolving at the time of the project initiation. Preformed Saran and Saran-coated polymers were already in use at Oscar Mayer on some sausage and sliced luncheon meats. The extrusion of an amorphous, anaerobic film right on the packaging line was a key feature that was incorporated into the continuous wiener-making process.

This pioneering work significantly altered the processed meat industry worldwide. Because of the magnitude and complexity of the process, Oscar Mayer had an industry exclusive for nearly two decades. As word of the economy of production, high product consistency and long shelf life circulated, other companies developed their own continuous sausage manufacturing systems. Today continuous systems produce three-quarters of the nation’s wieners.

Because of the magnitude of this project and the significance of the dozens of individual components and innovations incorporated into it, no single individual can be identified as the developer, but Sloan was clearly the leader. Team members came from the departments of research, product control, packaging, and machine development, all based at the company’s Madison headquarters. More than 50 U.S. patents, by 17 individuals, on elements of the continuous process and anaerobic packaging were obtained by Oscar Mayer engineers and technologists between 1957 and 1963. Six members of the team perished in an airplane crash in 1959 while on a trip to identify system components.

The first two continuous wiener process systems ran at the Oscar Mayer plant in Madison for nearly 40 years. They were retired in 2000 to make way for a new-generation system, built on the original, Sloan-inspired principles and manufactured by Alkar, another Wisconsin company.

Ted Sloan and his wife Nell had two sons, Edward Jr., and John. Mr. Sloan died in April of 1987, in Tulsa, Okla. at age 92. He was inventing right up to the end.

Meat Industry Hall of Fame inductee Ed Traisman earned his B.S. degree in chemistry from the University of Illinois in 1936. After working as a sugar chemist with American-Maize Products of Hammond, Indiana for 10 years, he joined Kraft Foods as a cheese products researcher. He served as a research manager at Kraft for nine years, until he learned about a new system of fast foods distribution — McDonald's.

In 1957 as Traisman drove to and from his work at Kraft, he noticed a new drive-in restaurant in Des Plaines, called McDonald's. He could see lines of people waiting for service almost every time he passed. One day he stopped in to learn more about the restaurant. All employees seemed fully occupied, except for a middle-aged man sweeping the floor in the food preparation area. This man turned out to be Ray Kroc, and the ensuing discussion he had with the founder of this restaurant changed the course of Traisman’s life. Ray Kroc was a great salesman, and by the time Traisman left the store, he was 90 percent certain he wanted to buy a franchise, but he wasn’t sure where he’d find the money. His wife was all for taking the plunge, and said she’d find a job if necessary to feed their small children.

In 1958 Traisman brought the first McDonald’s franchise to Madison. He worked long hours improving his store, and was so successful that over the next 13 years he acquired four more McDonald's franchises in Madison and remained a technical consultant to the parent company. He strongly believed in McDonald’s basic concept of distributing safe, sanitary and nutritious food that consumers could obtain quickly at an affordable price, and that would be uniform in quality.

Traisman’s science background and business skills contributed significantly to the company’s success, and many of the innovations he introduced were adopted nationwide. He researched and developed a process to freeze partially-cooked french-fried potatoes, thus providing a uniformly high-quality product throughout the year. In Madison, he established the first "sit-down" McDonald's restaurant in the nation. He was the first franchise owner to recognize and encourage employment of women, and the first to hire mothers on a part-time basis while their children were in school.

In 1975 Traisman became the senior research program manager for the Food Research Institute (Department of Food Microbiology and Toxicology) at the UW-Madison. He was instrumental in helping fund FRI projects dealing with additives and contamination of meat products. One project showed that nitrite in cured meats was almost entirely modified into non-suspect compounds, and established nitrite’s crucial role in controlling botulism in temperature-abused cured meats. In 1987 he helped initiate research on E. coli 0157:H7, which was then a little-known pathogen, but already implicated in outbreaks of food-borne illness from ground beef. Following his semi-retirement in 1989, he has continued to edit the FRI’s quarterly research report.

For about 25 years Traisman guest-lectured UW-Madison seniors in Animal Science 405, "Livestock and Meat Distribution," providing valuable insights into retail meat distribution via the fast-food industry.

Ed Traisman has been married to Dorothy for 41 years. He has five children from his two marriages (Claudia, Barbara, Steven, Jennifer and Lisa), seven grandchildren and two great grandchildren.

Traisman is being honored for his significant role in Wisconsin’s meat industry, not only as a pioneer in retailing fast-food meat products, but also as one playing instrumental roles in meat safety and education.