National Post (National Edition)
`CHICKEN MAN' SAYS FAREWELL TO A 100-YEAR FAMILY BUSINESS.
On Dec. 29, for the very last time, 30,000 chicks will leave Marvin Ungerman's farm in Port Perry, Ont., and he will witness the end of fabled family history that monopolized Ontario's lucrative poultry processing industry.
Ungerman, 82, is preparing to write the last chapter of a 100-year family dynasty.
I sat with the “chicken man,” the same name attributed to his father and his grandfather, as he emotionally looked back on a rags-toriches story of immigration, hard work and cutthroat business.
“I don't think I had much of a role in planning my own destiny; I spent my whole life in the chicken business. I guess I was born to do it. It wasn't fancy work but I provided for my family and I was proud to carry on a tradition,” says Ungerman.
The Ungerman story began much like many of the dynasties built in the immigrant-rich pockets of Canada such as the Bronfmans who built a liquor dynasty and the Posluns who created a retail empire.
Isaac Ungerman, Marvin's grandfather, arrived in Canada from Poland in 1913. “They had nothing but a few dollars and some pots and pans,” says Marvin.
Isaac brought his wife, Jenny, and their children Harry and Jack, Marvin's father. They settled on 100 acres outside of Toronto and began raising chickens before moving to Kensington Avenue in Toronto.
With his family now expanded to include five children, Isaac opened a butcher shop below his cramped second-floor apartment, and so began the great Ungerman chicken dynasty. It was a bumpy start.
He worked gruelling, 18-hour days and although Jenny was skilled with numbers, Isaac gave away free chickens to recently arrived immigrants and he extended overly generous credit terms. The business collapsed.
A year later and undeterred, Isaac rolled the dice again and bought a building for $7,000, funded with three mortgages, on Royce Avenue (now Dupont Avenue). He put his family, now including seven children, in the second-floor apartment above his new butcher shop that he called Royce Avenue Poultry and Egg Market. Marvin remembers the slaughter room in the back of the building, hot lunches prepared by his grandmother as she fiercely managed the books. They were determined to make it work this time.
The year was 1928, and the Royce neighbourhood was still industrial, featuring a Ford Model-T factory and the Evening Telegram newspaper down the street from Isaac's butcher shop. But each day the line outside his store grew as his reputation for selling the best chicken in town spread.
Although business was good, Isaac struggled to feed his large family. As soon as he closed the door for the day, he would hit the streets peddling anything he could sell. All of his sons were told to get jobs to help feed the family. Marvin remembers his father's newsstand down the street from the King Edward Hotel and his father having to endure often anti-Semitic fights to protect his turf.
“Every night, the five brothers would meet around the kitchen table and throw their money on the table, no questions asked,” Marvin recalls.
Eventually it was time for Jack and his brother Harry to follow their father into the chicken business. They opened the Toronto Packing Company in a large warehouse on Spadina Avenue with a huge dream: cornering the chicken business.
Over the next decade, they grew the business dramatically, by becoming major suppliers to Campbell's Soup and the Canadian Armed Forces during the war.
After Marvin graduated from high school in 1959, his father woke him up at 4 a.m. and said, “welcome to the chicken business.”
“While it was still pitch black outside, my father would take me to meet a rogue gang of furriers and butchers at the Crescent Grill or Switzer's Deli and wash down our eggs with a few shots of Canadian Club rye” remembers Marvin.
As the business was prospering, Jack, perhaps part Duddy Kravitz, started buying up farmland north of Toronto that he would eventually sell to real estate developers. “His own father drilled it into his head, that without land, you are nothing,” says Marvin. It was a lesson he wouldn't forget.
Marvin's uncles, Karl and Irving, having just returned from war, Joined their father at Royce Poultry, eventually expanding and modernizing it to supply huge customers like Maple Leaf Foods.
By the 1970s, the Ungerman brothers, along with Isaac's brother-in-law who owned A. Stork and Sons on Queen Street, were unstoppable, controlling 100 per cent of the city's chicken business.
Although the brothers were extremely competitive, Marvin remembers them being uniquely civil with each other.
“They would fight tooth and nail for contracts all week but on Sunday, after dining at different Chinese restaurants, they would all congregate at the home of their father, Isaac, the chicken patriarch who wanted to hear every detail about their growing chicken empires.”
Back at Toronto Packing Company, Jack had new partners to grow the business and saw an unlikely future for his son Marvin.
Jack told Marvin it was time to launch the next generation of chicken men. In 1970, Marvin joined his uncle Irving to run St. Clair Poultry, located in the famed Toronto stockyards. Irving, part chicken mogul and boxing promoter, had acquired the struggling business a few years earlier and he needed a partner. Together, he and Marvin turned the operation around and became the main supplier to the rapidly expanding Swiss Chalet restaurant chain. Although he never complained to his father, Marvin did not like his uncle's aggressive style, and things became unpleasant. Marvin negotiated his exit from the company.
“Irving brought in his fancy lawyer, Alan Eagleson, to negotiate with me and I just gave my shares away, I had to get out,” says Marvin.
All three of the Ungerman poultry companies were eventually merged into one conglomerate called Prime Poultry, and then sold to Maple Leaf, concluding an era of Ungerman chicken moguls, with the exception of Marvin, who was looking for his next adventure.
Then 50 years old, he had three children to support and no income.
“I didn't have a university education but I had an MBA in chicken. I just started selling poultry I sourced from Quebec.”
It would take one cold call to Loblaws, and Marvin had a lucrative contract and he was in business.
Being the last Ungerman in the chicken business, he rolled the dice just like his father had 50 years earlier and bought 50 acres in Port Perry. He launched Sharvin Farms (a combination of his and his wife Sharon's names) and for the next 22 years, Marvin would take delivery of approximately 40,000 chicks five times a year, grow them and then sell them. Marvin was finally in charge of his own destiny.
With 2020 winding down, turning 83, and without a succession plan, Marvin decided to sell his business.
“I saw the margins decreasing and there was little room for small players like myself,” says Marvin. With the life lessons he learned from his grandfather and his own father, Marvin sold the business but kept the land.
“My father always said sell the business, keep the land. I always loved going to the farm to escape and get lost for a few hours. I will continue to do that,” says Marvin.
I asked Marvin how difficult it is to watch the end of an era.
“It still has not hit me yet. I will miss the chickens talking to each other and even the smell. It was my whole life. It was my family's life, for three generations. A hundred years.”