This Michigan Company Once Offered Take-Home Vanilla Extract as an Employee Perk
There are likely few who will argue that the attitudes of much of the American workforce has changed post-Pandemic. Work from home, flexible hours and benefits have all altered the relationship between employees and employers. There's always the much ballyhooed pizza party as a panacea morale boost. But consider what one Michigan company once offered as an employee perk: special vanilla extract.
The company was the Upjohn Corporation in Kalamazoo. Now part of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, Upjohn was founded in Southwest Michigan and made Kalamazoo a company town. An interesting historical tidbit about working at Upjohn came to light recently on the Vanished Kalamazoo Facebook group.
At one time employees of Upjohn could purchase some Vanilla extract and everyone raved about it, can someone tell me what it was made of.
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Why would a drug company make vanilla extract? It was used as a flavoring in some of the medicines produced. A common use noted was for Kaopectate, the anti-diarrheal treatment made at the time by Upjohn.
The story goes from a website focused on the history of the company,
that Martha Parfet, wife of CEO Ted Parfet, used a lot of vanilla in her cooking but could not find a good quality source of it in Kalamazoo during the 1970s. Since The Upjohn Company already used large quantities of imitation vanilla flavoring in products like Kaopectate, the materials were already in-house. It didn’t take much effort to formulate and bottle it. It was a popular product with employees because batches were made through the 1970s and 80s.
It's interesting that the product was labeled very specifically as for employee use only and for the flavoring of fountain syrup and ice cream.
Back on the Facebook group, many long-time Kalamazoo residents do have memories of Upjohn Vanilla:
A baking staple in our house! I still have the bottle...the empty bottle!
Us Upjohn families/ employees all had it. Those were the days.
My dad worked for Upjohns up to retirement and he did bring home vanilla!!
My Grandma used that and fresh snow after a snowfall to make us ice cream
So, stock options and pizza parties or take home vanilla? If you were an employee of Upjohn in Kalamazoo back in the day, it was all about that vanilla.