By Cliff Peale
The Cincinnati Enquirer

ST. BERNARD - Procter & Gamble Co.'s oldest plant is once again getting smaller, after competing with other P&G plants around North America for businesses - and losing.

The company told employees early Wednesday that it would eliminate about 180 jobs at Ivorydale, most of them by next spring, with a sale of the plant that makes the flagship Ivory bar soap, as well as Zest, Safeguard and Olay, to a contract manufacturer.

Procter & Gamble workers file out of the Ivorydale plant Wednesday morning after company managers announced 180 layoffs and other changes at the venerable St. Bernard factory. (Michael E. Keating photo) | ZOOM |

P&G also plans to sell a power plant at Ivorydale to a Cinergy Corp. subsidiary. It will also transfer production of Olay and Noxzema facial cloths to a Canadian plant.

The cuts are a blow locally because they further reduce P&G's manufacturing base in its hometown and push even further into distant memory the days when Ivorydale was the base for the company's soap production.

"It seems like a whole era is coming to an end," said Ken Wright of Bridgetown, who retired from Ivorydale in 1994 after a 33-year career. "There's a lot of sadness. We all felt like we wouldn't live to see this occur."

After the sales, P&G will own and operate only one plant at Ivorydale, making surfactant, a cleaning ingredient in liquid laundry detergent. It will have fewer than 100 employees.

But for the company, the announcement is only one in a series of moves designed to cut plant costs, consolidate capacity and dispose of assets not crucial to its core marketing and product development functions.

Stockholders have reaped the benefit of the trend. In the last 18 months alone, P&G's stock price has increased about 50 percent to $90.50 a share Wednesday, as earnings rose steadily.

"When you can take cost out of the system, that's clearly linked to earnings and the stock price," said Terry Kelly, a senior portfolio manager at Bartlett & Co. in Cincinnati, which manages P&G shares. "There's no question, at least in the investment community, that results are what's important."

The liquid detergent plant, the Ivorydale Technical Center and a soon-to-open Fabric and Home Care Innovation Center, located on Spring Grove Avenue, will be unaffected by the change. Overall, P&G will employ about 1,400 workers on the site, compared with about 1,580 now.

In its heyday, close to 2,000 Ivorydale workers made many of the company's core products. At lunch and after work, they played softball behind the plant. Even now, hundreds gather every year for a reunion at the complex.

Ivorydale was built after a fire destroyed P&G's manufacturing plant on Cincinnati's Central Avenue in 1884, just as demand for the company's Ivory soap was building. The company obtained a $1 million loan from the Mercantile Bank of New York and hired industrial architect Solon Beman to design a new complex on a 55-acre site in the Mill Valley, about seven miles north of the burned factory.

Ivorydale was born a colossus, with more than 20 separate buildings connected underground by a network of steam mains and water pipes. All the limestone and brick-trimmed buildings were one-story tall, except the two-story buildings housing the soap boiling kettles.

"Although some businessmen of the day considered the expenses an unwarranted extravagance, well-kept lawns, flower beds and trees separated the factory from the street and provided on Spring Grove Avenue a general impression of `a nice place to work,' " Oscar Schisgall wrote in his 1981 company history, Eyes on Tomorrow.

Ivorydale opened in 1868, and it more than doubled the number of soap bars P&G could produce each day. Its first expansion came in 1911, with a new plant to make Crisco shortening.

New products mainly spurred the expansions and new buildings through the next century, just as the downsizing of the last several years has been based on reduced consumer demand.

For example, products made at Ivorydale in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s included growing products such as Crest toothpaste, Secret deodorant, Scope mouthwash and Head & Shoulders shampoo, which were added to the core soap production. Other products, such as Duncan Hines cake mixes, were made on the property.

In the early 1990s, a "Bar Soap Modernization Project" consolidated production of bar soaps, laundry, and shortening and oils into Ivorydale.

But the last decade saw the decline of all those businesses. As consumers started using more liquid detergent and less powder detergent, the Tide plant at Ivorydale was closed in 1999.

Crisco, no longer a P&G priority, was sold to J.M. Smucker Co. earlier this year. Fat substitute Olean, part of the food business, didn't pan out as P&G hoped, and that plant was sold to Twin Rivers Technologies.

Most of the more than 500 plant workers currently employed at Ivorydale left soon after the Wednesday morning meeting, and the plant was shut down all day. It will reopen today as scheduled, a spokeswoman said.

At the meeting, the company told workers that it would:

Sell the bar-soap plant to Trillium Healthcare Products Inc., a Canadian company that contracts with several large companies to make soap products. Trillium will keep about 150 workers at the plant, cutting close to 70 jobs.

P&G will continue to own and market the soap brands, and make them at other plants.

Sell the power plant to Cinergy Solutions Inc. Cinergy will keep an unknown number of the 38 workers there.

Move production of Olay and Noxzema facial cloths to a plant in Belleville, Ontario, eliminating about 60 jobs.

Several employees leaving the plant Wednesday declined to comment on the announcement.

Like corporations all over the world, P&G has put its plants in competition with one another for increased business and consolidations. In recent years, it has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Ivorydale to keep it competitive.

But sales and mergers, as well as plant consolidations, kept chipping away. A company study of plant efficiency unveiled at Wednesday's meeting led to the latest cuts.

P&G has made similar moves in plants throughout North America in the past several years. Just in the last several months, the company has announced it is closing a plant in Minnesota and is moving some production lines in and out of plants in Augusta, Ga.; Alexandria, La., and Green Bay, Wis.

E-mail cpeale@enquirer.com