Chicken magnate Frank Perdue dies at 84

updated 4:43 p.m. ET April 1, 2005

BALTIMORE - With a beak-like nose, beady eyes and thin lips, Frank Perdue looked like he was born to sell chickens. It wasn’t until he put his face on TV commercials, however, that his father’s backyard egg business rapidly grew into one of the world’s largest chicken companies.

Perdue, who became famous for his folksy television pitch “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken,” died Thursday at his home in Salisbury after a brief illness, his company said. He was 84.

Perdue was one of the first CEOs to pitch his own product on television in 1971 and remained the company’s public face for the next two decades.

In that time, he helped build an empire that now employs 20,000 associates and partners with 7,500 independent farm families. The company went from annual sales of $56 million in 1970 to $2.8 billion in 2003.

Until the late 1990s, Perdue was regularly ranked in Forbes’ list of 400 richest Americans. In 1997, it ranked him 214th and estimated his net worth at $825 million.

Perdue’s rise was extraordinary, considering the company’s humble beginnings. Perdue’s father, Arthur W. Perdue, started the family business in 1920, raising chickens for eggs. Perdue and his father switched the business from eggs to chickens in the 1940s and broke into retail sales in 1968.

“A lot of corporate America could take a lesson from Frank Perdue, a man who started out selling chickens from an ice chest in the back of his truck,” said John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association, who sold chickens to Perdue for 13 years. “We didn’t always agree, but he was a good business man, he was fair, and he was responsive to the needs of his growers.”

At the time of his death, Perdue was chairman of the executive committee of the board of directors of Maryland-based Perdue Farms. He had handed over control of the company to his son, Jim, in 1991.

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