PARROT PEOPLE

Tom Roudybush: dedicated scientist
turned bird-food entrepreneur

TOM ROUDYBUSH IS not a bird person, at least not the kind most people expect someone who makes a famous bird food to be. "I'm a misplaced academic," protests the 53-year-old Californian, chuckling. "A lot of people think I'm an aviculturist, that I love having all these birds around me. I'm a scientist who happens to work with birds."

Sure enough, Roudybush has not shared his home with a parrot since he gave his yellow-nape Amazon to his ex-wife two years ago. He was fond of Little One, the smallest among five yellow napes he used to own, but didn't feel right leaving her home alone when he traveled.

New products, better packaging
Home for Roudybush is Placerville, Calif., a quaint Gold Rush town of 8,000 nestled in the Sierra Nevada foothills. However, he spends most of his time these days on the central California coast, where the company's 15,000-square-foot manufacturing plant each year turns out some 2,000 tons of the honey-colored Roudybush pellets. Every Sunday Roudybush jumps into his 1999 Infiniti and drives the 300 miles to Paso Robles; every Thursday he heads back home again to finish the week at corporate headquarters in nearby Cameron Park.

Roudybush undertook the hectic schedule last August to correct some operations problems he saw brewing. Doing the work of two managers he had to let go, he has cleaned up a small mouse and insect infestation problem and retrained the six-person Paso Robles staff to improve work flow. "I have good people; they were just a little disorganized," he says.

Now, with the finetuning almost complete, Roudybush is looking forward to ending the long commute--and moving his 16-year-old company into a new phase. Last month, Roudybush launched its first finch food, but "that's just the tip of the iceberg," its sandy-haired founder hints mysteriously.

By this summer, Roudybush will introduce at least two additional new lines, including a diet for parrots with allergies. The new feed will make his competitors' "mouths drop open," he promises. "It's going to make them scramble..and say, 'what are we going to do now?'"

The new diets will come in more durable, sexier see-through packaging but will keep the whimsical bird-toe logo sported by the familiar Roudybush milk-carton style containers. Roudybush also plans to consolidate corporate headquarters and manufacturing into one location near Sacramento and lease newer, more efficient machinery to produce the new lines and turn orders around faster.

When asked how sales compare with those of his competitors--Florida-based Harrison's, which touts organic pellets and is sold only through veterinarians' offices, and Illinois-based Lafeber, which augments pellets with the well-known bird treats Nutri-berries and Avi-Cakes--Roudybush demurs. The lanky executive would rather talk about where his real interests lie: the scientific research that made the Roudybush diet possible in the first place.

The reluctant vet
Roudybush spent his early childhood on a farm in Butler, Pa., a steel mill town north of Pittsburgh. He and two of his brothers (a baby brother 15 years Tom's junior would come later, after the family moved to Orange County) grew up with the usual farm-animal assortment of pigs, cows, chickens and ducks. The family also kept dogs, cats, guinea pigs and aquarium fish.

His childhood interest in animals and biology led family and friends to believe young Tom would naturally want to become a veterinarian. He went along with the notion until he entered college at the University of California at Davis at the age of 18.

After a few months at school, Roudybush decided to pursue a bachelor's degree in biochemistry instead. "I realized that being a vet is trying to cope with a problem with much less information than you need to make a clear decision," he says. "Lots of diagnoses are wrong, not because vets aren't good at what they do, but because they never get enough information to make a better diagnosis."

Summer jobs at local animal hospitals cemented his decision when he discovered another downside to animal medicine: handling the business end of cranky clients.

"Those big nasty dogs will bite you!" he exclaims. But an ocelot "all fangs and claws" made the biggest impression. To clean the animal's cage, technicians had to don heavy leather gloves, use a coathanger to pull the cat's leash to within reach, and then swing the ocelot by the neck into a separate holding cage. "We never touched it. One day I was swinging him and the leash broke. Fortunately, he landed in the cage."

Roudybush soon stumbled across a job he liked a lot better: researching poultry and game birds in the university's avian sciences department. Not only was lab work a less dangerous way to support his studies, the insular, methodical life of a researcher appealed to Roudybush, who jokes he has a "totally weird" personality that's a cross between a loner and a hard-driven entrepreneur.

Happy in his newfound niche, Roudybush set his sights on a master's degree in avian sciences and took long, happy breaks from school to study waterfowl in the Farallon Islands and Alaska.

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