Then he impressed colleagues together with his deft administration of McCormick’s packaging enterprise within the Nineteen Eighties. When the CEO job got here open in 1987, he bought the nod to run the dominant U.S. spice provider, primarily based in Hunt Valley, Md.

He agreed to promote McCormick’s real-estate division in 1988 to give attention to the core, spices. It was “dumb luck” that the timing was excellent, shortly earlier than a real-estate hunch, he mentioned.

Mr. McCormick additionally refreshed the packaging, changing tin packing containers with clear plastic bottles.

Revenue grew, and the inventory value soared. Desperate to spend extra time on sailboats, he retired in 1992 at age 64. Three years later he got here out of retirement to guide McCormick via a problem from Burns, Philp & Co., an Australian firm that acquired the Durkee and Spice Islands manufacturers. After a pricey battle for grocery store shelf house, McCormick emerged victorious. Mr. McCormick retired for good in 1999.

Charles Perry McCormick Jr. was born Might 29, 1928, in Baltimore. A nurse gave him the nickname Buzz, impressed by the corporate’s Bee model extracts and spices.

One in every of his grand uncles, Willoughby M. McCormick, based the corporate in a cellar in 1889. Early merchandise included glue, root beer, flavoring extracts, syrups and Uncle Sam’s Nerve and Bone Liniment, marketed as a cure-all for folks and livestock. The founder bought his wares door to door.

After Willoughby McCormick died in 1932, administration of the corporate handed to a nephew, Charles P. McCormick Sr., father of Buzz. Mr. McCormick Sr. wrote administration books, together with “The Energy of Folks,” and pioneered the thought of soliciting concepts from staff and center managers. Through the Melancholy, he raised wages.

Buzz McCormick excelled at lacrosse as a youngster. “I used to be a horrible scholar,” he later instructed the Solar. He lasted solely briefly as a enterprise scholar at Johns Hopkins College and Duke College. He felt extra snug as a salesman for the spice firm.

“I used to be sort of a shy, quiet little man,” he mentioned. “I didn’t have any born expertise as a salesman. It was tough for me, however I loved it.” Promoting appealed to his aggressive streak.

He was capable of bounce again from defeats, reminiscent of his effort within the Fifties to pitch a brand new product, McCormick’s Fluffy instantaneous mashed potatoes, to a grocer in Tampa, Fla. “He let me undergo the entire pitch with graphs, charts and every thing,” Mr. McCormick recalled. “After which on the finish he mentioned: ‘No, son, I’ve already bought one model of marshmallows, and I don’t want any extra.’”

He led the introduction of one other product, packets of powder stirred into water to make a candy drink. That product flopped, partly due to a producing flaw that induced the packets to swell. “If you happen to stepped on one it could go off like a firecracker,” Mr. McCormick mentioned. He concluded that the corporate ought to stick with spices.

When he first grew to become CEO, he mentioned, his precedence was “to assist all of our workers have a greater life.” Following his father’s instance, he requested workers for his or her concepts. “What we wanted was management, with a transparent imaginative and prescient as to what we wished to do and what we didn’t need to do,” he mentioned later. “So we needed to inform our people—not methods to do it—however the place we wished them to go and the place we didn’t need to go.”

He ran the corporate in tandem with one other prime government, Bailey Thomas, in what was dubbed “the Buzz and Bailey present.” Mr. Thomas, who had a theatrical streak, as soon as appeared in a Batman go well with at an organization occasion.

Mr. McCormick retired in Stuart, Fla. His survivors embrace three kids and 10 grandchildren. He married the previous Jimi Helen Faulk in 1980. She died in 2013. An earlier marriage resulted in divorce.

He was a two-time winner of the Excessive Level Trophy for prime sailboat racers on Chesapeake Bay. At age 90, he managed to “shoot his personal age,” finishing a spherical of golf in 90 strokes.

Write to James R. Hagerty at [email protected]