Bob Evans sells Mimi’s Café

The Bob Evans restaurant chain is selling its Mimiès Café division to LeDuff  America. It bought the chain, with head offices in California, in 2004.

LeDuff owns chains of café bakeries, coffee houses and boulangeries across North America. It is a subsidiary of Groupe LaDuff SA of France.

Bob Evans is a hog farmer who started a restaurant to increase his profits at a time when hog prices were in the dumps.

I interviewed him at the time and he said owning restaurants was a poor way to bolster hog-farming profits.

He said the volume of pork sold was relatively small, even though he made sure his menus included lots of dishes featuring pork and bacon.

I interviewed him for an article assigned by the late Ginty Jocius when he took over management of Playboar magazine from Tom Hagey of Breslau.

The feature included interview with the Ontario Pork marketing board, which opened a basement-level restaurant in the theatre district of downtown Toronto, and hog farmer Ross Shantz who bought a hamburger joint near the two universities in Waterloo.

Neither the pork board nor Shantz made enough money to justify their investments, so they got out of the restaurant business.

Evans, of course, thrived and developed a national chain before he retired. He died in 2007.

The business has revenues of $1.75 billion a year from 715 restaurants under the  Bob Evans and Owens banners.

Bob Evans started making and marketing sausages in 1948 from the family farm at Gallipo, Illinois.

Next he set up a 12-stool diner on the farm; today that site is a company heritage restaurant that can seat up to 134 people.

But it’s still no big deal as a way to make money from farming hogs.

Incidentally, Playboar was a delightful spoof on Playboy magazine.

The article about the restaurants won a national newspaper award.

Every issue of Playboar featured a nearly-nude sow as its centerfold and at least one piece of serious journalism per issue – just like Playboy.

Jocius and Hagey also started Cowsmopolitan for dairy farmers. Sadly, neither one survived. They probably needed to hire better freelance journalists.