Perry Odak began his career as an accounting associate at Armour Foods. Nine years later, after resigning from his post as senior vice president at Armour, he began working for a small start-up company, Jovan, Inc. After seven years, Odak and his partners sold Jovan, Inc. and he became president of the Consumer Product Group at Atari. From there he became a partner in Catalyst Technologies, where he restructured and started numerous holdings, including a company called ETAK, Inc., which in 1985 produced the first vehicle navigation system. In 1990 Odak became a consultant operating as a temporary CEO to help companies in trouble.
Over the next six years, he came to the rescue of a half dozen firms, where he engineered mergers, boosted sales, and, perhaps most important, won the hearts of employees whose jobs he saved. In 1997, when Ben & Jerry's lured him away from U.S. Repeating Arms, the gunmaker's workers petitioned its management to do whatever was necessary to convince him to stay.
Perry Odak left Ben & Jerry's in 2000 and was appointed as CEO and President of Wild Oats Markets, Inc., the second largest natural foods supermarket chain in North America.
Perry Odak is a graduate of Cornell University.
The downside of it was, were we gonna become a house brand? How much control were they gonna
have over us? They were our largest customer in the United States to begin with. Are they gonna now
exert more control over us, etc? And those were all ri...(Full transcript available to logged in subscribers.).
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