Encyclopedia Dubuque
"Encyclopedia Dubuque is the online authority for all things Dubuque, written by the people who know the city best.”
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Affiliated with the Local History Network of the State Historical Society of Iowa, and the Iowa Museum Association.
MCINNERNEY, Thomas Henry
MCINNERNEY, Thomas Henry. (Dubuque, IA, 1869-- ). McInnerney studied pharmacy at the University of Illinois in 1893 and ran a drug store at Chicago's 35th Street and Indiana Avenue. He later moved to Manhattan and became the general manager of the Siegel, Cooper and Company department store.
McInnerney returned to Chicago in 1911 with an interest in a coal company which operated an ice cream division. He traded his interest in coal and ice for the control of the ice cream portion of the business. By 1920 he was dong a million-dollar-a-year ice cream business in Chicago. It was during this time that he began thinking about consolidating the dairy products industry.
In 1923 McInnerney sold the milk-consolidation idea to the investment firm of Goldman-Sachs. In 1930 took over the Kraft-Phenix Cheese Corporation which was then selling about forty percent of all cheese in the United States. By 1936 McInnerney's National Dairy Company included more than one hundred companies operating in milk and other dairy products. The test of whether a company was worth purchasing was whether it was earning as much per share as National Dairy was at the time.