Seymour Siegel, 76, Brooklyn’s Potato Salad King

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The New York Sun

Seymour Siegel, who died September 20 at 76, was an entrepreneur of appetizing.


Starting as a humble takeout roast chicken store in Yorkville, Blue Ridge Farms was transformed by Siegel into the largest manufacturer of prepared salads on the East Coast, producing some 200 million pounds annually. “That’s a lot of potato salad,” Siegel’s son, Jeffrey, CEO of Blue Ridge Farms, said.


Siegel grew up in East New York, the son of Russian immigrants, and left Thomas Jefferson High School at age 14 to help support the family. When apprenticing under his father, a plumber, didn’t work out, he went to work for his aunt and uncle at Blue Ridge Farms. Before World War II, the chain had dozens of New York outlets, but most were closed by the 1950s.


Using leftover offal from the chickens, Siegel’s mother used a family recipe to produce chopped liver, which he sold as a sideline. Eventually, the sideline replaced the main product, and in the late 1950s, Siegel moved from retail chickens to wholesale salads. He opened his first factory in Astoria, supplying Macy’s, then Waldbaum’s and other supermarkets.


As the business grew, it diversified into more than 100 kinds of salads, as well as knishes and pickles. It continues to make at least 11 different kinds of potato salad alone, each targeted to a different regional market.


Siegel patented a method of saturating water with ozone for cleaning equipment and also chilling produce in a sterile environment. He also developed new procedures for skinning potatoes and processing other salad ingredients, Jeffrey Siegel said. “He knew how flavors run together, he was like a chef and could feel food in a different way than most of us.” One of his more innovative versions of potato salad included red potatoes, Yukon golds, and yams. Sometimes he struck out, though – for instance, when he attempted to introduce a spaghetti pie.


In the 1970s, Siegel brought his sons, Jeffrey and Richard, into the business, and they convinced him to adopt more aggressive marketing strategies. The business grew to more than $100 million in annual sales. It employs 600 people at its Cypress Hills factory on eastern Atlantic Avenue. The company also has two other factories, in Miami and Chicago. Controlling interest was sold earlier this year to Chloe Foods Corporation.


Blue Ridge is today a stand-alone brand in many Southern groceries, but in the New York market, the salads are still mainly sold from behind the glass at deli counters. This preserves the illusion that they are made in-house.


Siegel viewed himself as a vision of the American Dream, the son of immigrants who made good, and he lived it to the hilt. Although his salads were delicious, his personal accoutrements were not necessarily in the best of taste. Brass nymphs and pharaohs festooned his office, which was also decorated with financial highlights: his first bankbook, recording a 25-cent deposit to the East New York Savings Bank in 1940, as well as a certificate for the $16 million loan he took out in 1990 to renovate his plant.


Bedecked with a nugget-sized pinkie ring and an ostentatious diamond bracelet proclaiming his first name, Siegel weighed in the neighborhood of 300 pounds. Thanks to a career spent moving factory equipment, he had strength to spare. His idea of a practical joke was to pick up a friend’s car, front end first, and move it onto the curb. Cars were a particular love, and he owned a 1929 Duesenberg, a 1965 Rolls-Royce, and a 1984 Maserati.


Subordinates often greeted him with a kiss to the cheek, but it was a distant cousin, Bugsy Siegel, who was the mobster.


Seymour Siegel
Born June 6, 1929, in Brooklyn; died September 30 at Boca Raton Community Hospital of complications of cancer; survived by his wife, June nee Marks, sons Richard and Jeffrey, and six grandchildren.


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