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How DelGrosso Foods Doubled a 78-Year-Old Family Business in Just Two Years | Manufacturing Series · The Inspired Stories Podcast

• 0:04
  Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast,
• 0:08
  where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from
• 0:12
  their successes and be inspired by how they've overcome
• 0:15
  adversity. My name is Anthony Kotaspodi and
• 0:18
  today's guest is Michael Delgrosso, Chief Sales and
• 0:21
  Marketing Officer at Delgrosso Foods.
• 0:24
  This family owned company, founded in 1947 can actually
• 0:28
  trace its roots back to the tradition started by Mariana
• 0:33
  Puccino Pulcino. They are widely known for
• 0:38
  producing premium sauces and holding the proud title of
• 0:41
  America's first family of pasta sauce.
• 0:45
  With a commitment to quality, they offer a range of pasta
• 0:48
  sauces, pizza sauces, and organic options, all rooted in
• 0:53
  authentic family recipes. Additionally, they have a huge
• 0:56
  private label business where they produce products for over
• 1:00
  half of America's top 20 grocers and many other popular brands.
• 1:06
  In total, they have over 300 recipes.
• 1:09
  As an interesting bonus, we will get to hear about an amusement
• 1:13
  park that plays a key role in the company's history now.
• 1:17
  Michael began his career in the family business at age 10, later
• 1:21
  graduated from the US Naval Academy and served as a Naval
• 1:26
  officer. More recently, Michael, along
• 1:28
  with several other family members and hundreds of
• 1:31
  dedicated employees have guided the brand's growth
• 1:33
  internationally away from Del Grosso Poos.
• 1:36
  He has served as director on corporate and non profit boards
• 1:40
  and has appeared on the Food Network and NB CS Today show.
• 1:44
  With a background in management consulting and global marketing,
• 1:48
  Michael brings a unique perspective on leadership and
• 1:51
  innovation. Now before we get into all that
• 1:54
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• 1:57
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  To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at
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  adbackbenefits.com. Now back to our guest today, the
• 2:25
  Chief Sales and Marketing Officer of Delgrosso Foods,
• 2:29
  Michael Delgrosso. I appreciate you making the time
• 2:31
  to Share your story today. Anthony, thanks for having me as
• 2:35
  your guest. So Michael, your family's sauce
• 2:39
  making legacy stretches back over a century, starting with
• 2:44
  and I. I slipped up on the name in the
• 2:45
  intro, which makes me a bad Italian Mariana Pulcino.
• 2:50
  Good job. And her recipe?
• 2:51
  What stories can you tell us about those early days and how
• 2:54
  it eventually led to the formation of this company in
• 2:57
  1947? Oh, my.
• 2:59
  It's, it's it's a unique story. And when you think pasta sauce,
• 3:03
  you know, you might think a restaurant, sure, that makes
• 3:06
  sense. But you're not going to probably
• 3:08
  think of a railroader and an amusement park, right.
• 3:11
  So how does this how did this all come together?
• 3:14
  And it is a fascinating story. So, yeah.
• 3:16
  You mentioned my great grandmother, Mariana Polcino.
• 3:18
  She came from the region of Lazio, about 70 miles southeast
• 3:21
  of Rome, She and her husband. But she gets all the credit
• 3:25
  because she had the recipe. So they came over in the early
• 3:28
  1900s, settled in Altoona, PA. So Altoona is in the central
• 3:33
  part of the state, a big, bustling railroading center at
• 3:37
  the time. And a lot of immigrants were
• 3:40
  flooding into that area to make a better life for themselves.
• 3:43
  Well, my great grandmother, she knew how to cook.
• 3:46
  So she established a place called Mom's Cafe in Altoona on
• 3:51
  Walton Ave. where she started not only making great meals, but
• 3:56
  I also only in about last 10 years learned that she was
• 3:59
  actually making beer in the basement during prohibition.
• 4:01
  So that's pretty cool too. But Mariana had several children
• 4:06
  and among them was a a girl named Mafalda.
• 4:09
  Mafalda was my grandmother and and we affectionately know her
• 4:13
  as Grandma Murph. Now Murph was waiting tables for
• 4:16
  her mom at that cafe one day and a handsome young railroader
• 4:20
  named Ferdinando Grosso was travelling with a friend that
• 4:23
  day. They made a wrong turn when they
• 4:26
  were looking for another place to eat, but they saw this cafe
• 4:29
  and they said, well, let's just go in here.
• 4:31
  That chance encounter was the spark that really created a love
• 4:35
  story that extends to today. Fred and Murph met that day,
• 4:39
  fell in love and eventually they created their own cafe do
• 4:43
  Grosso's Cafe in Altoona. And my grandfather noticed that
• 4:47
  that original recipe from his mother-in-law, Mariana, was
• 4:51
  beloved. People thought of them as the
• 4:54
  best spaghetti at dinner in town.
• 4:56
  And people were even asking if they could pay a little extra to
• 4:59
  take home some sauce with them. So, you know, he had this idea.
• 5:03
  Well, gosh, maybe we can can this product and sell in grocery
• 5:06
  stores. And now that might make a lot of
• 5:08
  sense to you and me, but back then, canning and selling in a
• 5:13
  grocery store prepared sauce was pretty rare.
• 5:16
  And in fact, it was only in the early 1940s that Ragu and Chef
• 5:20
  Boyardee, the first big national brands of spaghetti sauce, even
• 5:24
  started up. And so.
• 5:27
  This is kind of a cutting edge idea at the time.
• 5:29
  It was, it really was, and he didn't have the means though to
• 5:33
  implement it at the time. So this is where the story takes
• 5:37
  an interesting twist. So 1946, my grandfather's
• 5:41
  driving down the road from Altoona, just 11 miles north,
• 5:44
  and stopped at a little town called Tipton where Bland's Park
• 5:48
  was set up. This is old family owned
• 5:50
  amusement park that had an old wooden carousel, a few other
• 5:56
  rides and attractions, and a roller skating rink.
• 5:59
  In the back of the amusement park he noticed a for sale sign
• 6:03
  on this amusement park. Now my grandfather had never
• 6:06
  operated an amusement park, had never had no experience but on a
• 6:11
  on a after a 2 hour conversation and a handshake with the owner
• 6:15
  he agreed to buy this amusement park.
• 6:18
  OK. What did he have in mind?
• 6:20
  Well, I don't know what he had in mind initially, but it took
• 6:23
  about two weeks for my grandmother to even speak to him
• 6:26
  again after he told her the news.
• 6:29
  But I guess what he had in mind was what he did.
• 6:32
  He moved the entire family from Altoona into this tiny house in
• 6:37
  the back end of the amusement park.
• 6:39
  So if you go into Del Grosso's Park today and you see a little
• 6:45
  house by the park stage has five rooms in it, That was the
• 6:49
  original house that they lived in.
• 6:51
  So my father, all of his six brothers and sisters, grew up in
• 6:55
  this five room house with one bathroom.
• 6:58
  There wasn't even a kitchen. My grandmother had to do all the
• 7:01
  cooking for the family in the park kitchen.
• 7:03
  OK, so 1947 is the first year they actually started operating
• 7:08
  the park. And he, you know, had the
• 7:11
  employees from before, but now he had this, you know, the
• 7:13
  family, he could help out. But it was also that next year
• 7:17
  in 1947, where he said, well, hey, this little garage that's
• 7:23
  right behind the house, we could turn that into a factory and
• 7:27
  start canning the sauce. So with the help of some
• 7:30
  friends, he got things up and running, and everything was done
• 7:34
  by hand. So, you know, you have these
• 7:36
  romanticized pictures of what an old, you know, sauce factory
• 7:39
  might look like. Well, that's pretty much what
• 7:41
  you got. So you had big kettles.
• 7:43
  I actually have one of the old paddles.
• 7:45
  All right, It's a it's about 3 or 3 1/2 feet long.
• 7:48
  I have a olden paddle in my garage as a souvenir from the
• 7:52
  1950s, right. This is even after about 10
• 7:54
  years after they got started. So they would have to stir that.
• 7:58
  But think about this. You, you think of the machines
• 8:01
  they have these days to fill jars or cans.
• 8:03
  Well, back then you would have the can, you would ladle out the
• 8:06
  sauce, fill up the can, and then you'd have to set the lid on,
• 8:10
  put it in a clamp, and you'd have to hand seal.
• 8:12
  So you're cranking 21 revolutions just to seal a
• 8:16
  single can. So you can imagine as the
• 8:19
  company was growing, how just laborious that became.
• 8:22
  So that took them through the, the, you know, the late 40's,
• 8:25
  the 50s through the 60s. And by the time the, the mid 70s
• 8:30
  came around, they were really struggling to keep up with
• 8:33
  demand. OK.
• 8:34
  So this was a Pennsylvania brand.
• 8:36
  It was a what I would call what we would call today, a value
• 8:41
  tier brand. So a great quality product,
• 8:44
  natural ingredients and so forth.
• 8:46
  It was a tomato paste based product, but very inexpensive.
• 8:50
  So this would compete, if you want to call it that, against
• 8:54
  the, you know, the Ragus of the world back then.
• 8:58
  But by the late 70s it was clear that if they wanted to grow,
• 9:01
  they were going to have to expand.
• 9:02
  So right across the road from the amusement park was some land
• 9:07
  that they owned and spent back then.
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  And I don't even know what the amount was back in 1978 that,
• 9:13
  you know, they put down for this.
• 9:15
  I was, I was only 8-8 years old at the time, but they started
• 9:18
  building the plant and now this new plant was modern.
• 9:22
  It could run much faster volumes.
• 9:25
  It was much more automated and they eventually were able to run
• 9:29
  glass jars too. Just just interrupt for a
• 9:31
  second. So up until the 70s it wasn't
• 9:34
  still all like hand done like there had been some automations
• 9:38
  introduced along the way. Yeah.
• 9:39
  So you know, there was AI have a picture from the the late 50s
• 9:42
  where there's like a small conveyor belt, right.
• 9:44
  And there was a a leveraged pool and it would fill up the can.
• 9:47
  So you weren't ladling it by hand.
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  And I don't know what point they got an automatic, you know,
• 9:52
  sealer for the for the lids of the cans, right.
• 9:55
  So yes, little by little, small investments, buying used
• 9:58
  equipment, whatever they could throw together, you know, this
• 10:01
  was. All taking place on the grounds
• 10:03
  of the amusement park. All the amusement.
• 10:06
  Park and so you know, the, you can imagine there's people out
• 10:09
  there enjoying the amusement park and, and coming through the
• 10:13
  park is a forklift with a pallet of spaghetti sauce, putting it
• 10:16
  in another building to store it, right.
• 10:18
  So it was, it was really something, you know, and it was,
• 10:24
  you know, maybe talk about what it was like when I was a kid
• 10:27
  working at the park, But you know, it was, it was just really
• 10:30
  step by step, little by little. So by the time the 70s, late 70s
• 10:35
  came out and they built that new plant, you know, that was a new
• 10:37
  era for us. And I remember as a kid, we had
• 10:42
  just had an agreement with a, a family friend that introduced us
• 10:46
  to the NFL legend Franco Harris, right?
• 10:49
  You, a lot of people know him from the Immaculate Reception.
• 10:52
  And so we developed a friendship with Franco.
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  He was actually our spokesperson.
• 10:55
  He did some TV commercials for us in Pennsylvania and he would
• 11:00
  come to visit the amusement park when I was a kid.
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  And I thought I was just the coolest kid, you know, walking
• 11:04
  around with Franco at the amusement park.
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  So some great memories of those days too.
• 11:10
  So problem came though in the in the early mid 80's, the bills
• 11:17
  were coming in for this plant. It was a big capital outlay, but
• 11:21
  the, the growth just wasn't, wasn't there.
• 11:24
  The, the sales weren't there. So, you know, my, we scrambled,
• 11:29
  we sold a bunch of other assets, some farmland that my
• 11:31
  grandfather had purchased before, sold a restaurant that
• 11:35
  they owned and so forth to try to save the business.
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  But there was really getting no getting around the fact that we
• 11:40
  needed more volume. And at that time in the early
• 11:45
  mid 80s, there was some brand new concept that had just
• 11:48
  arrived from Europe and that was called private label, right
• 11:51
  store brand. And at first, my grandfather was
• 11:54
  actually pretty resistant to the idea of making product for other
• 11:58
  people for, you know, for their label.
• 12:01
  But it really saved the business.
• 12:04
  And, and I'll give you the, the specific example, back in the
• 12:09
  mid 80's, the biggest grocer in America was A&P, the great A and
• 12:12
  PT company. They had over 3000 locations and
• 12:15
  they put out a bid to different suppliers, including us saying,
• 12:20
  hey, provide some formulas, provide some pricing and we're
• 12:24
  going to award business to somebody, whoever has the best
• 12:27
  combination. So we came up with this, you
• 12:29
  know, a, a, a different set of recipes and, you know, something
• 12:33
  we thought would really resonate with our customers.
• 12:35
  And we, we got the business and that volume was just enough to
• 12:40
  keep us above water, keep us, you know, you know, paying the
• 12:43
  bills, get us a little bit more scale.
• 12:46
  And then later that decade in the 80s, we had, you know,
• 12:50
  another one or two private label companies.
• 12:53
  And by the time you get to the, the late 90s in 2000, we've
• 12:58
  grown pretty substantially. So we're making a lot of product
• 13:01
  for a lot of people, almost a third of the top 20 grocers at
• 13:04
  the time for private label and, and a couple very small regional
• 13:08
  brands as well. And that actually that that
• 13:12
  culminated in a, an award, a national award from the Small
• 13:16
  Business Administration for Small Business of the year.
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  And my grandmother, a couple of my uncles got to go down to the
• 13:21
  White House and receive that award.
• 13:24
  And it was a really, really special time.
• 13:26
  So that was that was the year 2000.
• 13:28
  That's really cool. Couple things I want to unpack
• 13:30
  there. I mean what a great chance
• 13:33
  meeting between Grandma Murph and was it your grandpa or your
• 13:38
  great grandpa? Missing.
• 13:40
  Yeah. So my, my, my grandfather and my
• 13:42
  grandma who who, you know, started do grisa foods.
• 13:45
  Yeah. Grandma Murph was your
• 13:46
  grandmother, not your great grandma.
• 13:48
  OK, just this chance meeting that turned into, you know, a
• 13:53
  marriage and, you know, building a family and building a business
• 13:55
  together. So the first product was like a
• 13:58
  really good value product, right?
• 14:00
  Yes. He said it, you know, if you
• 14:02
  would call it that kind of competes with a, with a ragu
• 14:05
  like great ingredients, you know, affordable for the working
• 14:08
  family. But you guys were making a lot
• 14:11
  of investments and you had to change, you had to adapt.
• 14:15
  You know, you needed more automations, but with that
• 14:19
  investment that you had to really generate a lot more
• 14:22
  sales. And it kind of wasn't happening
• 14:24
  until you guys stumbled upon the idea of private label up until
• 14:27
  that point. Michael, where would people have
• 14:30
  found the Delgrosso product? Was it?
• 14:33
  Just. Regionally in grocery stores,
• 14:36
  that's right. That's right.
• 14:37
  And. You know, actually the that
• 14:39
  original Del Grosso brand is still mainly a regional product.
• 14:42
  It's Pennsylvania, I call it Pennsylvania plus, right, you
• 14:45
  got some eastern Ohio, a little bit of Northern Maryland, you
• 14:49
  know, a couple nibbles of upstate New York and so forth.
• 14:52
  But it is still a regional brand.
• 14:54
  But one of the most popular brands.
• 14:57
  In fact, the Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce was doing a
• 15:01
  sort of a March Madness, but Pennsylvania products edition,
• 15:06
  which I think it either just end or is about the end.
• 15:09
  But they started out with 64 iconic Pennsylvania brands.
• 15:13
  We made it to the the 8, the final eight and we were beat.
• 15:17
  We were beat by the Sheets MTO. So Sheets is a, a very popular
• 15:21
  convenience store on the East Coast.
• 15:23
  And yeah, we are, we are pretty honored to lose to them.
• 15:26
  So yeah, it's it's it's a staple of many Pennsylvania households.
• 15:30
  That's great. And as a kid you get to meet and
• 15:33
  hang out a little bit with Franco Harris.
• 15:35
  I mean, and as being a Pennsylvania, you had to have
• 15:37
  been a Steelers fan, right? So this is just like the idol of
• 15:40
  idols at that time. That's exactly right.
• 15:43
  It was pretty cool. And you know, for a lot of our
• 15:46
  younger listeners, they probably don't recognize the A&P name,
• 15:49
  but they used to be just this enormous grocery store chain.
• 15:53
  And so this was really your first foray into private label,
• 15:57
  which now is is commonplace, lots of store brands to be found
• 16:02
  pretty much everywhere you shop. But at the time this was new and
• 16:06
  you said this idea actually kind of came from Europe.
• 16:09
  Yeah, you know, it was adopted in Europe and I, I don't know
• 16:12
  the full history, but it, it probably was in place there for
• 16:15
  at least a decade before it took hold in the US And A&P was, was
• 16:20
  a leader in, in starting up this whole store brand idea.
• 16:24
  And I mean, interesting to think like what would the Delgrosso
• 16:30
  track record or history have been had that not come to
• 16:33
  fruition? But here we are today.
• 16:35
  Thankfully, it did. And it was like a great, not
• 16:38
  only was it like great revenue for you guys to kind of get your
• 16:41
  footing under you, but it was a great proof of concept like,
• 16:44
  hey, this can really work and we can be good at this.
• 16:48
  Yeah. You know, there's, there are
• 16:50
  brands, there are manufacturers and sometimes those are the same
• 16:55
  thing, but not always. And it really solidified us as
• 17:00
  you know, we've had to make sauce, making sauce at scale we
• 17:03
  are getting good at. But this really took us to
• 17:06
  another level. And I have to ask, like, what's
• 17:11
  what's the state of the amusement park?
• 17:12
  Like? Is it still open?
• 17:14
  When did it close? Like what?
• 17:15
  What's the What's going on? Yeah.
• 17:16
  So the, the amusement park still operates Dole Grossos Park in
• 17:20
  Laguna Splash. And you say what's Laguna
• 17:22
  Splash? Well, that opened about, I want
• 17:25
  to say 8-9 years ago. And that is a America's only
• 17:29
  Italian themed water park, Anthony.
• 17:32
  So if you can imagine floating down the lazy river past, you
• 17:38
  know, Italian bridges and wine jugs that will squirt water and
• 17:43
  you'll eventually float around the curve to you pass the the
• 17:46
  Leaning Tower Pisa with water coming down from it.
• 17:49
  There's a gondola. There's oh, it's, it's, it's
• 17:52
  great. And then we have the best
• 17:53
  amusement park food in America. There are a lot of adults who
• 17:57
  never stepped foot in a ride but come weekly for our amusement
• 18:01
  park. We have a lot of Italian
• 18:02
  specialities and and the amusement park itself.
• 18:05
  There are lots of typical amusement park fair.
• 18:08
  But my Aunt Marianne always says we do everything the hard way.
• 18:11
  So much of it is done by hand. Our steak sandwiches, you know,
• 18:15
  are sliced by hand. We have this potato salad
• 18:18
  recipe. My great, my, my grandmother
• 18:20
  developed, you know, decades ago and we'll sell, you know, a
• 18:25
  couple 1000 lbs of this stuff over a weekend.
• 18:28
  It's just so popular. But all that is, you know, the,
• 18:31
  the potatoes are boiled and peeled by hand and everything's,
• 18:34
  it's, it's, we do so much work with so much love and care, but
• 18:39
  it, it's the family wouldn't have it any other way.
• 18:43
  And so is, is it still a single manufacturing facility and is it
• 18:48
  at that same property? Yeah.
• 18:50
  So, you know, there there's, you know, a recent development, I
• 18:54
  say recent, two years ago we did open a second plant and you
• 18:58
  know, and that's kind of part of the story of our evolution.
• 19:01
  So you know, I think we we, we can talk about that because I'll
• 19:05
  go into that in a bit more detail.
• 19:06
  But yeah, that has really changed.
• 19:09
  If, if private label changed our business, this has changed it
• 19:13
  just as much. So yeah.
• 19:15
  Let's put a pin in that and come back.
• 19:17
  I want to hear more about that, but now I want to hear about,
• 19:21
  well, I guess it it you're sort of double entree into the the
• 19:25
  family business because I understand you first started
• 19:27
  working there when you were 10 years old.
• 19:30
  Let's talk about that. What was that like?
• 19:31
  What? Were you doing?
• 19:32
  That's right, you know, Well, imagine you go to work as a kid
• 19:36
  and every day is a family reunion, right?
• 19:40
  Your, your, your parents are there.
• 19:42
  Or at least my mom was there every day.
• 19:43
  My dad was kind of back and forth between the sauce plant
• 19:46
  and the park. But I would see my aunts, my
• 19:48
  uncles, you know, I was one of 23 grandchildren.
• 19:52
  And I would see almost all of my cousins on a daily basis when
• 19:56
  the park was open during the summer.
• 19:58
  So we all had different jobs. You know, the older cousins, you
• 20:01
  know, my cousin Scott, my cousin Carl, they got to run the rides.
• 20:05
  You know, my older brothers, you know, they did their thing.
• 20:07
  My, you know, the, the, the, my sisters, my older cousins.
• 20:12
  They would often work in the food stands and so forth.
• 20:14
  So as a 10 year old, I was qualified to pick up litter and
• 20:18
  run errands, right? Wipe off tables, those kind of
• 20:21
  things. And I'll tell you what, it was
• 20:23
  great. My only regret is that I blew
• 20:26
  every quarter I ever made in the arcade.
• 20:28
  It's on the on the pinball machine.
• 20:31
  So I, I, I always think I could either have a lot of money had I
• 20:36
  invested in the right company back then, or great pinball
• 20:40
  skills. Well, I'm stuck with great
• 20:41
  pinball skills and not like, you know, decades old stock that
• 20:44
  might be worth a lot today. So, but it was a, it was a fun
• 20:48
  time. And then as I got older, you
• 20:50
  know, jumped around to different places, but my favorite was a
• 20:54
  ride that we used to have called Space Odyssey.
• 20:58
  You get on there, get on the microphone and talk to people
• 21:01
  and ask them if they wanted to go faster and all.
• 21:03
  You know, it was just great having you playing music and the
• 21:07
  whole control and all the lights, kind of like an indoor
• 21:09
  disco place. So it was a It was a great time
• 21:12
  growing up spending time with my family, making great friends and
• 21:17
  blowing my money in the arcade. You checked all the boxes as a
• 21:21
  yes kid. I love it.
• 21:23
  And so cool that you got to have those experiences with your
• 21:25
  cousins every summer. So so you worked there, you
• 21:30
  know, from 10 years old kind of growing up and then you went off
• 21:33
  and you you kind of did your own thing for a while.
• 21:36
  I'm curious like was that intentional?
• 21:40
  Hey, I want to get away from the family business.
• 21:42
  I want to make my own name. Was it more of like a I'm going
• 21:45
  to go do this so I can learn some skills and I know that I
• 21:48
  want to come back, or just kind of just.
• 21:51
  Following with life and you weren't really.
• 21:52
  Sure. Yeah.
• 21:53
  So, you know, one, one of the things that I, I, I really
• 21:57
  credit my father with and, and a lot of my family members was
• 22:01
  that, hey, this is a small business.
• 22:04
  We got a big family. There's not enough room for
• 22:06
  everybody, right? Make sure you you chart your own
• 22:09
  way. And I think I was probably in
• 22:12
  that direction anyway. My oldest brother, Dan, enlisted
• 22:15
  in the Navy. I was pretty fascinated by that
• 22:18
  life. At the same time I knew I wanted
• 22:21
  to go to college. I was also had my eye on
• 22:24
  throwing the javelin in college. It was something I did pretty
• 22:27
  well out of high school. So I was recruited by some
• 22:29
  different schools and I ended up eventually getting accepted the
• 22:33
  Naval Academy with a couple missteps, you know, between high
• 22:37
  school and, and two years later when I finally got admitted, it
• 22:39
  took me a couple years to get in.
• 22:41
  But yeah, that's where I ended up.
• 22:44
  Four years by the Severn River in the Chesapeake Bay.
• 22:48
  It was a great experience, super hard.
• 22:51
  I chose an economics major, but they still make you take all of
• 22:54
  these engineering courses and science courses.
• 22:57
  And I'll be honest, I did really well in economics and a lot of
• 23:01
  my electives, and I really struggled at electrical
• 23:04
  engineering and physics and architecture, or what was it,
• 23:08
  naval architecture, systems engineering, all those things
• 23:12
  that were were much more difficult.
• 23:14
  But it was a great, great experience for me.
• 23:18
  And of course, that leads to time as a Navy officer, which I
• 23:22
  was looking forward to and do. I served mainly in San Diego and
• 23:26
  then I got into industry after that after my obligation was
• 23:29
  done, I actually didn't even get to serve my full obligation due
• 23:33
  to a medical discharge. So yeah, so I got out of the
• 23:36
  Navy just a little bit sooner than I thought, but got a job
• 23:41
  working. There's there's some of these
• 23:43
  companies that specialize in placing junior military officers
• 23:47
  in the civilian world. So one of them I signed up with
• 23:52
  and got me a good opportunity at a manufacturing company in
• 23:57
  Michigan. This was part of the whole
• 23:59
  Michigan supply chain. This they made antilock brake
• 24:01
  systems and one of the reasons I like the idea of going to
• 24:04
  Michigan was that I know University of Michigan had one
• 24:07
  of the best MBA programs in the country at the time and they
• 24:11
  still do. And I I on a side note, I was
• 24:13
  thrilled when you interviewed the Co founder of Zingerman's,
• 24:16
  Zingerman's Deli and Ann Arbor, because I had many meals by
• 24:22
  Zingerman's, which is great. So yeah, that's that, that's
• 24:26
  kind of a path that I, I took initially, you know, Naval
• 24:31
  Academy and, and the early industry.
• 24:33
  But with going back to your question that I ever think I'd
• 24:38
  come back to the family business and the answer was no, no way.
• 24:42
  Not that I, I respected it. I loved it.
• 24:45
  In fact, even during the short periods I had in the summer,
• 24:50
  during summer leave from the Naval Academy, I would work at
• 24:53
  the park for, you know, even 3 or 4 weeks, you know, run the
• 24:55
  roller coaster, run Space Odyssey, whatever it was great
• 24:58
  affinity, very proud, very happy that, you know, they were still
• 25:03
  surviving after all these years. That's really.
• 25:06
  Cool. And So what were some of the,
• 25:09
  you know, post post Navy discharge that that you were
• 25:15
  doing and and then sort of weave us back to how you got back to
• 25:20
  the Grossos? Yeah, yeah.
• 25:22
  So I'll touch on this briefly. You know, had a couple stints.
• 25:25
  I mentioned I work, went to work in a in the automotive industry,
• 25:28
  started out in a manufacturing plant.
• 25:30
  I was basically a team leader is what they called it.
• 25:33
  I guess they figured if you're, if you can lead a bunch of
• 25:37
  enlisted men on a ship, you can, you know, lead a, a, a shift, a
• 25:40
  factory shift. And that was interesting.
• 25:45
  Learned a lot, learned what I didn't know at the same time I
• 25:48
  started doing my MBA classes at Michigan at night.
• 25:51
  So that was kind of, you know, long made for long days and long
• 25:55
  weeks, you know, working during the day and then going to school
• 25:59
  at night end up getting promoted down to our corporate office in
• 26:02
  Livonia, MI. And there I did account
• 26:06
  management. So we did, I did some program
• 26:10
  management first, then account management, which is my last job
• 26:12
  I had, which was, you know, certain products that we sold to
• 26:16
  whether it was GM, Ford, or you know, whatever car company, you
• 26:20
  know, I was responsible for a piece of that.
• 26:22
  So that was interesting. The Automotive World is, you
• 26:28
  know, there are people who spend their entire careers there.
• 26:31
  I thought it was fascinating, but I knew that's not what I
• 26:35
  that's not what I wanted to do long term.
• 26:38
  I was, you know, going to Business School at night and I
• 26:41
  had known about management consulting and that really
• 26:43
  appealed to me, just solving problems, coming up with
• 26:48
  solutions for companies, whether a strategy, operations and so
• 26:51
  forth. So when I finished my degree, I
• 26:55
  ended up going to work for a company called Accenture in
• 26:59
  their Chicago office. And, you know, it's interesting,
• 27:03
  you know, you think you're going to have this, you know, life
• 27:05
  that's going to go a certain way, right?
• 27:06
  I'm going to be with the consulting firm, retire, you
• 27:10
  know, maybe in my late 50s, you know, very comfortably.
• 27:14
  And that's going to be how it goes.
• 27:16
  Well, there was something that your younger listeners might not
• 27:20
  remember or maybe they've heard about, calledthe.com bubble,
• 27:23
  right? I graduated from Michigan in
• 27:26
  2000, right, when this thing was happening.
• 27:29
  So I was in the strategy practice for Accenture and early
• 27:36
  that I, my first project was in Germany working with Lufthansa
• 27:39
  Air Cargo, helping them solve some of their problems over
• 27:42
  there, which is really interesting.
• 27:44
  Came back and it was clear the work was starting to dry up and
• 27:48
  they had a round of layoffs, then another round of layoffs.
• 27:52
  And then by the time the third round of layoffs, some of us
• 27:55
  were looking at each other, right?
• 27:56
  We're all that's left, right? So I, I was able to get a head
• 27:59
  start and start looking for other work, found work with a
• 28:02
  company called Booz Allen Hamilton in their government
• 28:05
  practice in, in McLean, VA. And then later I also worked in
• 28:11
  the government practice for Deloitte Consulting.
• 28:13
  So a lot of government projects, you know, work in whether it was
• 28:18
  like with government agencies or you know, solving process
• 28:22
  problems, you know, organizational structure
• 28:26
  problems, etcetera. It was interesting.
• 28:28
  Frankly, I liked the commercial side a lot better.
• 28:32
  But coming back to the family business, what happened was in
• 28:37
  19, I'm sorry, 2005, we were expecting our first child, our
• 28:45
  only child who's now 19 years old.
• 28:48
  Her name's Sophia. But we are expecting baby.
• 28:52
  And I happen to be home for Easter.
• 28:54
  And my dad said, hey, did you know that so and so is going to
• 28:57
  retire from their job? A guy named Ralph, he was
• 29:01
  running our private label sales. And I said, oh, that's
• 29:05
  interesting, I didn't know that. And he said, you know, we don't
• 29:08
  know who we're going to fill the place and do you think you'd be
• 29:10
  interested? And I said, I never in a million
• 29:14
  years thought about that. So he said, well, why don't you
• 29:16
  talk to your uncles who are really running the company at
• 29:19
  that time? And so I did.
• 29:21
  And for whatever reason they saw on me, you know, maybe it was my
• 29:26
  consulting work, maybe it was, you know, some other attributes.
• 29:29
  I'm not sure. But they said, you know, yeah,
• 29:31
  we, we'd like you to come aboard.
• 29:32
  What do you think? And I'll be honest, coming from,
• 29:35
  you know, cities like Chicago and downtown DC and my Navy work
• 29:38
  in San Diego, coming back to Little Tipton, you know, that
• 29:41
  was going to be a big lifestyle change.
• 29:44
  But I talked about it with my wife, who was also from the the
• 29:47
  area originally. And we thought it would be nice
• 29:51
  to, you know, to raise a child around, you know, 2 sets of
• 29:54
  families. And I thought also to myself,
• 29:56
  well, gosh, you know, maybe there's something I can do to
• 29:59
  help bring this sauce business to the next level.
• 30:04
  And so it, it, it's still incredibly interesting to me
• 30:07
  that it, it kind of took you by surprise.
• 30:10
  Wow, hadn't really, really truly hadn't thought about coming, you
• 30:14
  know, back to the family business.
• 30:16
  And I guess, you know, it just been framed well, you know, from
• 30:19
  your family early on, Hey, small business, big family, we don't
• 30:22
  have space for everybody. You guys kind of, you know, have
• 30:24
  to do your own thing. So as you think about those
• 30:27
  experiences that you got from, you know, the few years of
• 30:29
  consulting that you did there, maybe just pick one thing.
• 30:33
  What's what's one thing that you learned there that you were able
• 30:36
  to bring into a very different environment in the family
• 30:39
  business? Yeah.
• 30:41
  You know, we were, we were so focused on being good
• 30:43
  manufacturers in this regional brand that, you know, you don't
• 30:48
  have a lot of inputs other than what kind of comes across your
• 30:51
  desk, right. So what do you hear from
• 30:53
  suppliers? You know, what do you hear from
• 30:55
  maybe some of your customers? But a much more global view is
• 30:59
  not coming to you automatically, right?
• 31:01
  We weren't paying for like syndicated data to understand,
• 31:04
  you know, what were the trends in the marketplace.
• 31:06
  And in fact, honestly, a lot of things in pasta sauce are
• 31:10
  traditional, right? You're not always chasing the
• 31:13
  latest trend. You know, there are some major
• 31:16
  trends that happened over time very slowly, like size reduction
• 31:19
  and so forth and ingredients. But you know, some of these
• 31:23
  bright shiny things, you know, they're, they're not really a
• 31:26
  factor like they are saying the tech space or, you know, other,
• 31:29
  other industries. So you know, I would say in
• 31:37
  terms of just what I brought to the company was just a broader
• 31:42
  understanding of, you know, a strategic viewpoint.
• 31:45
  Where do we need to position ourselves?
• 31:47
  What assets can we bring to bear?
• 31:49
  What are we good at and where can where is the market headed
• 31:53
  and where can we best position it.
• 31:54
  So honestly, it was nothing brilliant, but it was just a
• 31:59
  different perspective. And so as I understand, part of
• 32:02
  that different perspective was coming up with a new brand, the
• 32:07
  higher end brand, La Familia del Grosso.
• 32:09
  Yeah. So, you know, that was an
• 32:11
  interesting, I'll never forget. It was a December, early
• 32:14
  December of it was about two months after I had arrived and I
• 32:20
  had this big presentation. I was so nervous, right,
• 32:23
  Because, you know, we had this beloved brand, this regional
• 32:26
  brand that we had been making at that point for what, over 50
• 32:30
  years, almost 60 years. And, you know, it was yeah, I
• 32:36
  knew it was going to be a challenge.
• 32:37
  So I basically I tried to share as much data as I could and
• 32:41
  saying like, look, here is, you know, look at some of these
• 32:43
  brands and look at the retails, right?
• 32:47
  These were 789 dollar jars of sauce on the in the shelf.
• 32:52
  And I knew that that was going to be a mind, mind shift from,
• 32:55
  you know, our dollar dollar fifty sauce, right, You know, 10
• 32:59
  for 10 on special, you know, dollar fifty everyday kind of
• 33:02
  thing. So I guess I brought enough data
• 33:06
  and brought enough facts with me and maybe a little bit of
• 33:08
  passion that they said, yeah, sure, go ahead if you if you
• 33:11
  think you can make this work. And I just I just went to town.
• 33:15
  I really loved it was probably one of the most fun processes
• 33:19
  I've ever been involved with is creating this brand work with a
• 33:23
  really skilled designer who also had some great ideas.
• 33:27
  And this is kind of fun because one of the things I do annually
• 33:32
  now is I lecture to colleges, whether it's, you know, Penn
• 33:35
  State pretty much every year and and some other schools across
• 33:37
  Penn, Pennsylvania. But we do a case study and I
• 33:41
  kind of present like, OK, we decided in this direction and I
• 33:44
  kind of throw it back to the students, OK, what, what should
• 33:48
  this brand be? What should the packaging look
• 33:49
  like? What should the label read?
• 33:51
  What should we call it, etcetera, etcetera.
• 33:53
  And one of the things I do is I show them all of the brands in
• 33:57
  the, in the speciality or the premium space back then, you
• 34:01
  know, what they looked like. And I show all these pictures
• 34:03
  because what I actually did, in fact, is after I got the green
• 34:06
  light, the first thing I did is I went that back to DC, which is
• 34:10
  the, the last place I had lived that had, you know, lots of
• 34:13
  grocery stores, lots of speciality offerings.
• 34:16
  And I bought $600.00 worth of spaghetti sauce of every brand,
• 34:19
  every high end brand I could find.
• 34:21
  And I brought it back and I put it on this big, we have a in our
• 34:25
  lab, we have all these counters and I had it, everything laid
• 34:28
  out with the pricing in front, what I paid for it and so forth.
• 34:32
  And it was a big eye opener for everybody.
• 34:34
  But the, the thing it allowed me to do was seeing all these
• 34:38
  brands. What were, what was their
• 34:41
  approach to branding? So most people know about Reyos,
• 34:45
  right? That iconic Harlem restaurant,
• 34:47
  right, That you can't get into unless you know somebody, right?
• 34:51
  You know, Reyos and a few others had this, you know, we're a,
• 34:54
  we're a famous restaurant by our sauce, right?
• 34:57
  You had a whole bunch of brands with a person's face, like a a
• 35:00
  single person, whether it was like, oh, this is my grandma or
• 35:03
  this is my mom, or this is like a little peasant girl or this
• 35:07
  is, you know, some fictitious woman, or it could be like
• 35:10
  males. It was like this famous chef or
• 35:12
  this was my grandfather and so forth.
• 35:14
  There were a lot of those that had a, a single person's picture
• 35:17
  on it. And then there were there was
• 35:20
  another sort of category. It just like trying to make it
• 35:23
  look beautiful, right? With, you know, pictures of like
• 35:26
  a Italian countryside. Maybe it was kind of like
• 35:29
  artistic and maybe a little bit like modern looking, but not
• 35:33
  really storytelling, Just sort of like, here's a beautiful jar.
• 35:37
  So I put these in front of the students and I said these are
• 35:39
  these three categories. And I said, here's a question
• 35:41
  you have to ask yourself. Should we imitate one of these?
• 35:44
  Should we do a slight different take or should we try to be
• 35:47
  completely different? Should we have a look that when
• 35:49
  the customer goes down the aisle, they say that stands out,
• 35:52
  That is completely different than everybody else.
• 35:55
  So the students will often give me some, you know, great ideas.
• 35:59
  They'll say, well, maybe you should put a horse on it for the
• 36:01
  amusement park. Maybe you should, you know, put
• 36:02
  a carousel or something. You know, a lot of really fun
• 36:05
  ideas. What we ended up going with was
• 36:08
  what we are, the story that we can tell that nobody else can
• 36:11
  say, which is we're America's oldest family owned sauce maker.
• 36:15
  Nothing says that better than a multi generational family
• 36:20
  picture. So when you look at La Familia
• 36:22
  del Grosso, which is the brand that we came out with, you'll
• 36:26
  see a family picture on it. But there's another element to
• 36:29
  it that is unique because you don't just have a marinara or a
• 36:33
  basil or an RB Otter, so forth. You have Aunt Marianne's Sunday
• 36:38
  marinara, that's the name on it. You have Uncle Fred's firework
• 36:42
  sauce, right? So we're telling these stories
• 36:46
  about the family members. So I'll give you an example.
• 36:48
  Uncle Fred's firework sauce. Fred was my father.
• 36:51
  You turn the side of the jar, there's a little portrait of
• 36:54
  Fred, and there is a short story talking about, you know, each
• 36:58
  person, their sauce in a tradition or occasion when it
• 37:01
  was served. So in my dad's case, every 4th
• 37:04
  of July, we have a big firework show at the amusement park,
• 37:07
  right? Or we call it Summer Thunder.
• 37:09
  And my dad would make a special recipe.
• 37:12
  He would get zucchini from his garden, get some garlic.
• 37:15
  He'd put some crushed red pepper flakes and white pepper in
• 37:17
  there, create this slightly spicy sauce.
• 37:20
  And the whole fireworks crew and the whole family loved it.
• 37:23
  And they started calling it Uncle Fred's Fireworks Sauce,
• 37:26
  right? So you take these family
• 37:29
  traditions, put them in a jar, and you introduce this and you
• 37:33
  share it with the world. And that was the idea of family
• 37:36
  traditions. Never tasted so good, right,
• 37:39
  that, you know, you're not just connecting with a, a flavour,
• 37:43
  you're connecting with a, a family and a, and a specific
• 37:47
  person who created that. So that was the, that was the,
• 37:51
  the line that we came out with with the blessing of the family.
• 37:55
  And then I had to figure out how to sell it, which was we could
• 37:59
  have a, we could have an entire hour conversation about, you
• 38:02
  know, getting your product into grocery stores around the
• 38:06
  country. But that in and of itself was a
• 38:08
  big, big learning, learning experience because most of the
• 38:13
  channels, many of the channels I should say, are not the same as
• 38:17
  some of the local grocers that we were.
• 38:19
  We were already in with our original line.
• 38:21
  OK. So it wasn't like you guys had
• 38:23
  leverage because of the original brand having the relationships,
• 38:28
  having the sort of the the name cachet.
• 38:30
  You guys had to kind of figure out sort of a different
• 38:34
  distribution model because of the players are a little bit
• 38:36
  different. So there I I don't want to
• 38:38
  dismiss this. There was some overlap.
• 38:39
  So you know, the three larger chains in you know, they were
• 38:42
  based in Pennsylvania. Yes, that definitely helped,
• 38:45
  right. They gave me an early look.
• 38:47
  Some of them were the first to bring us in.
• 38:49
  So that was very helpful. The other really key piece
• 38:53
  though was our private label relationships, right?
• 38:56
  Not always, but sometimes it did allow me to get a foot in the
• 39:00
  door. So if you look at, well, can't
• 39:02
  name them, but a large retailer in the Southeast, for instance,
• 39:07
  you know, we were doing their private label for several years
• 39:09
  and they granted me an appointment.
• 39:10
  I have no doubt because we were the private label producer.
• 39:14
  And I said this is a brand that I think would do real well here.
• 39:17
  And they're one of our biggest customers to this day with the
• 39:20
  brand. So that all did help, but most
• 39:23
  of it I did have to figure out, you know, on my own because, you
• 39:27
  know, there were these distributors that carry only
• 39:30
  natural and specialty products. We had no relationship with
• 39:34
  them. So if I wanted to do business
• 39:36
  with, you know, you know, chain XY or Z in, you know, Michigan
• 39:42
  or California or New England, I had to learn this system and
• 39:46
  understand all these, you know, funny charges.
• 39:48
  Sometimes you get all of the the slotting fees that you have to
• 39:52
  pay and how they don't, you know it.
• 39:54
  There's a lot of things that you think you have a preconception
• 39:57
  of how they should work and then you find out how they actually
• 39:59
  do work and it and it's tough. So yeah, it's I get, I get a lot
• 40:04
  of people always referred to me as like, oh, you should talk to
• 40:06
  Michael. You know, he, he's been through
• 40:08
  all this and, and people with new brands and new ideas and,
• 40:11
  you know, it's a big eye opener for a lot of people.
• 40:14
  And I talk about some of the expenses that are involved in
• 40:17
  doing business with not just the distributors, but some of the
• 40:20
  chains in general. So.
• 40:22
  Yeah, it was. But it was a great experience.
• 40:24
  A lot of trade shows, a lot of cold calls, a lot of, you know,
• 40:28
  chance encounters. So yeah, it it definitely,
• 40:32
  definitely was a process. And so what's different about
• 40:36
  the product itself? How was the sauce?
• 40:38
  That's a good question, right? So what?
• 40:39
  You know what, how do you differentiate a, you know, a 7-8
• 40:42
  dollar jar of sauce? In a word, tomatoes.
• 40:47
  There are other things, but the most important cost factor in a
• 40:51
  jar of sauce is the type of tomatoes you use.
• 40:54
  So tomato paste, you can get cheap tomato paste, you can get
• 40:59
  like better quality tomato paste, right?
• 41:01
  There's a range, but tomato paste tends to be inexpensive.
• 41:05
  Diced tomatoes, there's crushed tomatoes, there's ground
• 41:07
  tomatoes, there are heirloom tomatoes, there are pear
• 41:12
  tomatoes from California, there are whole plum tomatoes from
• 41:15
  California, like from the San Marzano region that people are
• 41:18
  familiar with. So these all have a wide range
• 41:21
  and those San Marzano style tomatoes are on the priciest
• 41:25
  side of the equation. So you use that you use all
• 41:29
  other premium ingredients to go along with that.
• 41:31
  And yeah, that's that's where you're typically getting your,
• 41:35
  you know, 789 dollar jars of sauce.
• 41:37
  Now I will say there are some whether they're celebrity brands
• 41:40
  or just other people putting, you know, 6-7 dollar price tag
• 41:44
  on something with tomato paste and diced tomatoes.
• 41:47
  I'm not sure where that comes from.
• 41:49
  But yeah, on a, on a high end product like, you know, some of
• 41:53
  the brands that you may know of or, or ours, La Familito Grosso,
• 41:56
  yeah, you're, you're getting these this really light fresh
• 41:59
  flavor from these these whole plum tomatoes from Italy.
• 42:02
  OK. That was going to be my
• 42:03
  question. I mean, you're talking about
• 42:04
  more expensive tomatoes, but clearly they must have a
• 42:07
  different flavor profile and that's what you're after.
• 42:10
  Yeah, they do. They're naturally sweet so that
• 42:12
  you, we don't add any sugar to those recipes.
• 42:15
  And you know, it's not just the tomatoes themselves, but it's
• 42:17
  getting them here, right? You buy tomato paste from
• 42:20
  California arrives on a £3000 tote, like a like almost like a
• 42:26
  crate looking thing on a rail car.
• 42:28
  That's a, that's a lot more efficient than a little #10 can
• 42:32
  that you can hold in your hand. That's coming on a, on a boat
• 42:35
  from Italy, right? I mean, you know, those
• 42:37
  transportation costs that a lot too.
• 42:39
  But it is considered the best tomato in the world.
• 42:41
  And when you, when you're going after that premium customer,
• 42:45
  that's what they expect. So yeah, that's what we did.
• 42:48
  And and it's it's, it's a lot of fun.
• 42:50
  So you came in kind of one of the first things you did is
• 42:53
  worked on the La La Familia de Grosso brand, the premium brand
• 42:58
  that you guys are running with now.
• 43:00
  And then was it once you created the brand that you sort of
• 43:05
  shifted into this other role of like being in charge of sort of
• 43:09
  the whole sales direction of the company?
• 43:11
  Yeah. So what happened was, you know,
• 43:13
  initially I was responsible for private label and this, right
• 43:17
  And I kind of had, you know, created something that I didn't
• 43:19
  realize would take up so much time.
• 43:22
  So luckily we had just kind of out of the blue an application
• 43:27
  for a job that didn't exist from a young woman named Terry Fubio.
• 43:33
  And Terry now is our Vice President of private label
• 43:36
  sales, doing a better job than I ever could have.
• 43:39
  She's so detail oriented, she takes care of our customers so
• 43:42
  well. And that left me free to put
• 43:45
  most of my time and effort into growing this specialty brand as
• 43:50
  well as marketing for overall for the company.
• 43:52
  So marketing for our original Del Grosso brand, we have a
• 43:55
  partnership with Penn State, the Penn State Red Zone.
• 43:58
  So you go to a Penn State game, you'll see a big jar of our
• 44:00
  original Del Grosso, tip over and fill up the screen with
• 44:04
  sauce. You know, when when Penn State
• 44:06
  gets in the red zone, you know, we have, we have things like
• 44:08
  that. We have events, you know,
• 44:10
  different parts of the state that we do.
• 44:12
  So I wear both hats. I think most sane people would
• 44:15
  divide that into at least a couple people.
• 44:18
  But I guess, you know, I don't mind having weekend after
• 44:21
  weekend eaten up by special events and trade shows and, you
• 44:25
  know, wine and food festivals around the country.
• 44:27
  So I kind of do a little bit of everything.
• 44:30
  Say, say more about some of those things you just mentioned
• 44:32
  like the different festivals and whatnot, because I'm always
• 44:34
  curious, you know, kind of the growth strategies that different
• 44:38
  companies find have worked best for them.
• 44:41
  Yeah, So, you know, if you think of and this going back to these
• 44:44
  these case studies I give the college students, I actually
• 44:48
  after we've created the brand, I say to them, all right, let's
• 44:52
  identify our target customer. So I take them through a whole
• 44:54
  exercise and we basically come up with this kind of rich foodie
• 44:58
  mom, you know, profile for the new sauce, right?
• 45:01
  You know, and, and I say, OK, what are you going to do to get
• 45:05
  brand awareness with this target customer and how are you going
• 45:09
  to induce trial? OK, how are you going to gain
• 45:11
  trial with this customer? So they come up with all kinds
• 45:13
  of great ideas. I love when college students,
• 45:15
  you know, put their brains together and, you know, some of
• 45:18
  them are things we've done, some of the things we haven't, but
• 45:21
  most of them do. Think of this idea of wine and
• 45:23
  food festivals, which is something we latched onto pretty
• 45:25
  early. And there's a couple reasons for
• 45:27
  that. Number one, your target
• 45:28
  customer's there, right? If you're going to go to an
• 45:32
  event where someone's paying $150.00 a ticket to sample food
• 45:35
  and wine, yeah, they're probably, there's a good chance
• 45:37
  they're in that target customer of somebody who's going to pay
• 45:39
  $8 for a jar of sauce. The other thing though, too, is
• 45:45
  I think we get far more mileage out of an event like that than
• 45:50
  any normal brand because what is our brand?
• 45:54
  La Familia, The picture? La Familia, I'm Michael Del
• 45:58
  Grosso. This is La Familia Del Grosso.
• 46:00
  You're part of the family, part of the family.
• 46:02
  So when somebody comes up to a wine and food festival, we don't
• 46:05
  just give them a, a, a sample and have them walk away.
• 46:08
  We're like, hi guys. You know, we're the Del
• 46:10
  Grosso's. I'm Michael.
• 46:11
  That's my sister, that's my cousin and so forth, right?
• 46:14
  And it just, you can see the wheels turning.
• 46:15
  Wait a minute. This is a real company, right?
• 46:18
  And we have, you know, all the, the portraits of the family
• 46:21
  members, Uncle Fred's fireworks sauce, Aunt Marianne's marinara,
• 46:24
  Aunt Linda's Alfredo, you know, on and on.
• 46:26
  Like all these are all real people, right in the story.
• 46:29
  So it, it, it becomes real to them.
• 46:31
  And then they taste the product. Now they have a connection.
• 46:34
  And I, I know that people, other brands use these types of events
• 46:41
  to create a connection, but that's our unique connection
• 46:44
  that nobody else can really do on on that big of a scale.
• 46:48
  So I'll give you an example. The South Beach Wine and Food
• 46:50
  Festival, that's the biggest show we do each year.
• 46:54
  We'll serve almost 5000 people over the course of a few days.
• 46:59
  And those are just super valuable connections that it's
• 47:05
  really hard to do it through a marketing campaign, through a,
• 47:07
  you know, even a digital campaign.
• 47:10
  No, it's, it's pricey. It's, you know, it's a lot of
• 47:12
  people you're flying. It's expensive to get people
• 47:15
  down there to, to sponsor this whole thing.
• 47:18
  But again, it's what can you do that's number one effective and
• 47:22
  position yourself in a way that other brands can't.
• 47:25
  So that's who we are. We're a family still making
• 47:28
  sauce after 78 years. These are our family recipes.
• 47:32
  And so, you know, this is who we are, this is what we've got.
• 47:36
  I'm curious, when you do one of those events like in South Beach
• 47:39
  that you were mentioning, can you see an uptick in sales in
• 47:44
  that region in the days or weeks afterwards?
• 47:47
  Or do you not look at it like that?
• 47:49
  It's more like the long play of building the brand and just kind
• 47:53
  of establishing yourselves more and more.
• 47:56
  Yeah, You know, old advertising used to say you need to make an
• 47:59
  impression 8 times on people, you know, for it to have an
• 48:02
  effect, right. I don't know if we we need that
• 48:05
  many, especially when we have such a powerful one-on-one.
• 48:07
  But it does say that it is a thing that happens over time,
• 48:12
  right? It is a process.
• 48:14
  It's not one and done. I used to have these simplistic
• 48:17
  equations that I would use. If we can reach X number of
• 48:19
  people and retain, you know, this fraction of them and they
• 48:22
  buy, you know, we should see these kind of say, well, gosh, I
• 48:24
  was I was so I didn't know what I was talking about.
• 48:26
  I tried to take an educated guess but but.
• 48:28
  You're bringing in your management.
• 48:29
  Consulting experience, I was, I was trying to do these case
• 48:32
  studies, you know that they, they, they throw you in the
• 48:35
  interviews. But yeah, it wasn't exactly
• 48:37
  relevant. So, you know, there are things
• 48:39
  you can do. You can track coupon redemption
• 48:40
  if you're handing out coupons. You can obviously watch for
• 48:43
  trends over time, but there are so many other dynamics that are
• 48:47
  playing that are, you know, that that are coming into it as well.
• 48:51
  But I want to go back Anthony and and talk about one of the
• 48:55
  interesting side effects that happened once we created this
• 48:58
  brand. So I mentioned, you know, a lot
• 49:01
  of these shows and a lot of more trade shows we are going to.
• 49:04
  So in the first couple of years, you know we're out trying to get
• 49:08
  this product out into the marketplace.
• 49:10
  Right before that we did one major show a year.
• 49:14
  It was called the private label show pre LMA show in Chicago.
• 49:18
  And that's where a lot of people looking for Packers will come.
• 49:21
  You'd have discussions and then the show would be over, right?
• 49:24
  Sometimes we would get contacted sort of out of the blue by
• 49:27
  either a a, a retailer or a brand who wanted something done.
• 49:31
  But that was pretty rare. Well, because I'm now at the
• 49:36
  fancy food show. Actually, they used to have
• 49:38
  three fancy food shows. You know, they still have one in
• 49:40
  New York. They still have one in on the
• 49:42
  West Coast. They used to have one in
• 49:44
  Chicago, right. Natural Products Expo W Natural
• 49:47
  Products Expo East various distributor trade show.
• 49:51
  So you know, in, in in our peak, you know, say going back 10
• 49:55
  years, 1215 years ago, you know, I was doing probably 1 trade
• 49:59
  show a month. I mean, it was really a lot, but
• 50:03
  an interesting thing started to happen.
• 50:05
  We were more visible. So there was a very large
• 50:12
  company that everybody's heard of that came to us at one of
• 50:15
  these shows. It was actually in Chicago and
• 50:17
  it was me. And they said, do you guys pack
• 50:19
  this kind of product? And I said, yeah, we do.
• 50:22
  And OK, we, you know, we're we're searching for another Co
• 50:26
  Packer. We'd like to, you know, just,
• 50:28
  you know, we're gathering some information.
• 50:30
  OK, let let's let's bring in, let's have you come to our
• 50:33
  factory. Well, they eventually did and
• 50:35
  that led to our single biggest contract that we've ever had
• 50:38
  with a big brand, right? And what this brand brought in
• 50:43
  to us though, was a level of expertise because they had a
• 50:46
  whole team, because they have supplier, they have probably
• 50:48
  dozens, if not 100 suppliers around the country that they,
• 50:53
  you know, this management manufacturing team works with.
• 50:55
  So they were able to say, hey, this part of your process, we'd
• 50:59
  like you to do this. We'd like you to have an X-ray
• 51:01
  here and not just here, we'd like you to have XY.
• 51:04
  So they've really elevated our process.
• 51:07
  They not only gave us more volume, but they gave us more
• 51:10
  expertise, right? Well, that creates A virtuous
• 51:13
  cycle now because now you've got attention from other people who
• 51:18
  maybe thought you were too small for them or so.
• 51:23
  I guess the point is coming out with this brand, yes, it was
• 51:26
  good margins, good sales for it's time.
• 51:29
  But what really happened is it got us a lot of attention.
• 51:32
  So you start to Fast forward now throughout the next 15 years,
• 51:37
  right, Not only did our volume in our red sauce increase, but
• 51:40
  we started getting a lot of interest in other products which
• 51:43
  we couldn't make unfortunately at the time.
• 51:46
  So the big thing in red sauce and tomatoes is they're acidic,
• 51:51
  right? They have a low pH and they're,
• 51:55
  the process you use is something called hot fill and hold.
• 51:59
  As long as you fill a jar at a certain temperature, a little
• 52:02
  over 190° and hold it for a short period of time, right and,
• 52:06
  and slowly cool it, bacteria won't grow in that jar.
• 52:09
  It's a safe product. OK, so there's a lot of people
• 52:13
  who do that in North America, right?
• 52:15
  A lot of sauce makers, salsa makers, other types of acidic
• 52:19
  products. It is, I'm not going to say it's
• 52:20
  easy, but it's not super technical.
• 52:23
  As long as you have the basics and you have you control for
• 52:26
  these different points, you can do it.
• 52:28
  So then it's a matter of can you create, you know, product that
• 52:33
  that number 1 is a good formulation.
• 52:34
  Can you do it consistently? Can you do it on time and all
• 52:37
  those other things that any business has to do.
• 52:40
  But then there's another type of sauce that needs something
• 52:43
  called a retort process. So the big question we always
• 52:48
  get is can you make Alfredo? Will you make an Alfredo?
• 52:52
  And this is a massive investment, right?
• 52:54
  Because if you think of all the parts you need to make a red
• 52:57
  sauce factory, right? You need all those, plus you
• 52:59
  need this extra really big technical, expensive part in the
• 53:05
  middle, and it's called a retort.
• 53:07
  What's a retort? So the way I describe it is when
• 53:10
  you're making red sauce, you have to cook the sauce once.
• 53:13
  You cook it in a kettle, which we use kettles.
• 53:15
  There are other ways to do it, but we think kettle cooking is
• 53:18
  more authentic and tastes better.
• 53:20
  Cook in a kettle, you fill the jar, you're done.
• 53:22
  God, I mean, that's simplistic, right?
• 53:24
  In a retort process, you have to cook the product twice.
• 53:27
  You cook it in the kettle, you fill the jar, cap the jar, and
• 53:31
  then after that jar is filled in cap, you have to cook it again
• 53:35
  for a long period of time, often like 30 to 40 minutes.
• 53:40
  So if you've ever kind of walked into somebody's canning, like
• 53:43
  your grandma and my mom still cans each year, she cans
• 53:46
  Peaches, right? And you'll, you'll see a big
• 53:48
  boiling, you know, pot of that on the stove, you know, and she
• 53:52
  has these, you know, jars with the lids, you know, cooking
• 53:54
  there. That's what they're doing.
• 53:54
  They're basically they're retorting and can I ask?
• 53:57
  You real quick, Michael, why do you have to do this sort of
• 54:00
  second cooking process? Yeah.
• 54:02
  So for the bacteria or is. It because that's exactly right.
• 54:06
  So even if you fill it and you're, you know, everything's
• 54:10
  sterile at the time, right? Bacteria will grow.
• 54:13
  So you have to continue cooking an Alfredo or a queso dip or,
• 54:17
  you know, so many other types of products.
• 54:19
  You have to continue cooking that to kill any bacteria that
• 54:22
  could grow. Then it becomes shelf stable.
• 54:24
  So what does a retort look like? Imagine a big stainless steel
• 54:28
  torpedo tube. OK, the Hatch opens and racks of
• 54:33
  racks and racks of this product go in, right?
• 54:35
  the Hatch closes, it fills up basically a hot water bath, and
• 54:39
  the whole the whole system rotates.
• 54:43
  So the product is turning upside down and at a slow rate of
• 54:46
  speed. But the little air bubble at the
• 54:48
  top of the jar is basically acting as a as a ladle or, you
• 54:52
  know, a spoon. It's stirring and it's stirring.
• 54:54
  All the sauce inside gets evenly heated.
• 54:56
  That's exactly good, good point. Because if you, if you hold it
• 55:00
  steady, you might have scorching on the outside and then and it's
• 55:03
  not cooked evenly. You're exactly right.
• 55:05
  Once that's done, it comes back out and then it kind of resumes
• 55:08
  a normal, you know, labeling and tray packing and so forth
• 55:12
  process. So why do I go into all that?
• 55:16
  Because we've been, we, we've had that request for so, so many
• 55:21
  years. That was never I, I don't want
• 55:24
  to say safe enough, but you know, it's a risky investment,
• 55:26
  right? So we had a couple big companies
• 55:30
  come to us and give us a volume commitments.
• 55:32
  This is about four, almost four years ago.
• 55:35
  And as a board, you know, it was a big discussion.
• 55:40
  You know, this is going to be a $70 million project.
• 55:43
  Wow, which I will tell you, for a company our size was massive.
• 55:49
  This was, you know, even for our size, probably as as big as it
• 55:54
  was to build that original plant back in the 1970s.
• 55:57
  Now you could argue that the risk was lower because we had
• 56:00
  some commitment. So it sure was, but still that
• 56:03
  kind of money was it's a. Lot of cash up.
• 56:06
  Front it is, it is. So you know we work with our
• 56:08
  good, great banking partners and so forth and got this up and
• 56:11
  running. That was two years ago Anthony.
• 56:15
  I will tell you what's happened in the last.
• 56:18
  So we are now 78 years old as a company for a 78 year old
• 56:23
  company to double in size within a space of two years is almost
• 56:29
  unheard of and but that's what's happened.
• 56:32
  So what's interesting is while the brand that you know, I
• 56:37
  helped create and and piloted, while that got us a lot of
• 56:40
  attention and, and the marketplace and it it certainly
• 56:43
  helped us, you know, especially at a key period with, you know,
• 56:46
  good margins, better financial positioning and so forth.
• 56:49
  It's been what's happened since then, the increased private
• 56:53
  label business, additional Co packing and then culminating in
• 56:57
  this most recent expansion, the biggest in our history, of
• 57:01
  course. And it it's, it's dramatic to
• 57:05
  say the least. You know, you go from, gosh, you
• 57:09
  know, 8090 employees to now 185 over the course of two years and
• 57:15
  you have a second plant now the, the second plant is just down
• 57:18
  the road. It's only 6 miles down the road.
• 57:20
  So everything's still relatively local.
• 57:22
  But I, you know, I'll just say it, it's, it's a dramatic
• 57:25
  transformation. Still family run.
• 57:28
  My Uncle Joe is still our CEO. My cousin Matt is still our COO,
• 57:32
  My cousin Joey still does the tomato purchasing and he's
• 57:35
  moving into different parts. You know, I'm still doing this.
• 57:37
  But we have so many talented people and we have for decades.
• 57:41
  And there are, there are some, you know, farther some people
• 57:44
  between them, you know, they've been maybe work for 50-60 years,
• 57:49
  you know, between the two of them.
• 57:51
  So we have a lot of longevity, a lot of technical people.
• 57:55
  And but you know, of course you're bringing a lot of new
• 57:57
  people when you're expanding that much.
• 57:59
  So how's that going to go, right?
• 58:01
  You hear all these horror stories about, you know, younger
• 58:04
  people don't want to work and so forth.
• 58:05
  And sure, you have some turnover, you have some
• 58:08
  challenges, but what this team has done with this new plant has
• 58:13
  been nothing short of remarkable.
• 58:14
  And my cousin Matt, our COO, it was really the one who kind of
• 58:18
  stood this up and got it running and, and where it is today.
• 58:22
  So, you know, it, it's been dramatic.
• 58:25
  And interestingly, at a time when we're on the branded side,
• 58:29
  not the original Del Grossa brand, but on the speciality
• 58:31
  side, you know, we're now facing you.
• 58:35
  You know, I'm sure you've heard of Reyos, right?
• 58:38
  Yeah. So they have been number one in
• 58:40
  that space for a long time. In the high end space, they're
• 58:44
  just now number one, period. If you look at the dollar sales
• 58:47
  of any pasta sauce in America, Reyos is #1 it's no wonder
• 58:51
  Campbell's paid $2.7 billion for them two years ago, right?
• 58:55
  So they've been owned by Campbell's, you know, after they
• 58:58
  went through their private equity, you know, ownership
• 59:00
  phase. So they, and then, and then you
• 59:03
  see other people, they're like, well, gosh, look at that, you
• 59:06
  know, 2.7 billion, if I can get a fraction of that.
• 59:09
  So you have a lot of people really scrambling.
• 59:11
  You know, you, you have kind of Rayo's two point O and a company
• 59:14
  called Carbone, right? The famous restaurant in New
• 59:16
  York. And they have other locations
• 59:18
  around the country. You know, they're, they're kind
• 59:20
  of following the same model and spending, you know, just big,
• 59:24
  big money. So, you know, it's interesting.
• 59:27
  There are several, you know, there are probably 100 brands in
• 59:29
  the high end and we're one of them.
• 59:31
  You know, we're probably in the top 10, but you know, we're just
• 59:34
  one of many and we're all kind of feeling the squeeze of these
• 59:37
  big spends by these much bigger brands.
• 59:41
  So that's been interesting. And you have to say, well, you
• 59:45
  know, thankfully we have this, you know, massive growth on the
• 59:50
  private label and Co packing part of our business.
• 59:52
  Now. It was all, it's always been
• 59:55
  there for the last, since the 80s.
• 59:56
  But now it's, you know, so substantial that, you know, the
• 1:00:01
  worry is more just about making sure every business unit is
• 1:00:05
  profitable in its own right, right.
• 1:00:07
  You're not asking one part to carry the business entirely.
• 1:00:10
  So that's that it's, it's an interesting place where we are
• 1:00:14
  because overall growth in the company is never been better.
• 1:00:18
  But that specialty brand, you know, I am now like fighting
• 1:00:22
  like crazy, you know, to, to stay, make sure we're staying
• 1:00:25
  relevant, staying on the shelves, you know, and, and, and
• 1:00:28
  stay noticed. That's tremendous growth.
• 1:00:31
  I mean a business that's over 70 years old, family owned business
• 1:00:35
  and like you said, just in the last two years doubled in size
• 1:00:39
  is almost unheard of. And I'm sure there are a lot of
• 1:00:42
  people listening and they're like, wow, like tremendous, like
• 1:00:45
  amazing. But we all know what life is,
• 1:00:48
  right? Life comes with struggles and
• 1:00:50
  ups and downs and bumps in the road.
• 1:00:52
  I'd be curious to kind of take a little side Rd. here and hear
• 1:00:55
  about a serious challenge that you've overcome somewhere along
• 1:00:58
  the way. How'd you get through it?
• 1:01:01
  Yeah, You know, it's been interesting, you know, starting
• 1:01:03
  out in this brand, you know, there were so many things that
• 1:01:06
  I, I say I had to figure out myself.
• 1:01:07
  But I did ask around a lot, you know, because I had to learn
• 1:01:11
  very quickly. And I, I found myself at the
• 1:01:14
  beginning thinking like, gosh, you know, I'm never going to get
• 1:01:17
  this off the ground. This is, this is a nice idea,
• 1:01:19
  but holy smokes, what am I, what am I thinking?
• 1:01:22
  I don't have all these relationships.
• 1:01:23
  I don't have these broker and distributor relationships.
• 1:01:27
  And there were sometimes early on where I'm thinking, what in
• 1:01:30
  the world did I even do this for?
• 1:01:33
  This is a, this is a failed experiment, you know, but I
• 1:01:37
  think there's just a matter of you have to give it time.
• 1:01:40
  And luckily we did have an early enough successes with some of
• 1:01:44
  our big customers that have that have stayed with us that that
• 1:01:48
  had, you know, it, it, it, it sold itself to fruition.
• 1:01:52
  And oddly, I'm now back with the situation I just described as it
• 1:01:57
  like a new challenge, a new, you know, I, I'm not going to call
• 1:02:01
  it a failure by any stretch, but like a massive challenge, right?
• 1:02:04
  So what lessons did I learn from the first time?
• 1:02:07
  You know, what lessons can I draw from other experiences I
• 1:02:10
  have to get to get through this time with our brand, knowing
• 1:02:13
  that the company is doing great, But you know, you still care
• 1:02:16
  about this brand, you want it to do well.
• 1:02:19
  And you have these massive brands that are just spending
• 1:02:22
  like crazy and kind of sucking all the air out of the room for
• 1:02:26
  for many of the other brands, you know, on the personal side,
• 1:02:30
  you know, to Draw Something from my life there, it's relevant to
• 1:02:35
  business as well. You know, I about 8 years ago I
• 1:02:38
  got into the sport of triathlon and many people who know
• 1:02:43
  triathlete know that, you know, this takes a lot of time,
• 1:02:46
  effort, you know, on a typical, you know, time period, you know,
• 1:02:51
  you're maybe training 8/10/12 hours a week, you know, some,
• 1:02:54
  some weeks, you know, maybe up to 1516 hours.
• 1:02:58
  So it's a lot of time and effort.
• 1:03:00
  So you get to a race and you know, you want it to go well.
• 1:03:04
  Well, I have had not one, but two really bad accidents,
• 1:03:09
  neither one of them my fault. The first one was about 3 years
• 1:03:13
  ago. I was at a triathlon down in
• 1:03:15
  North Carolina and on triathlon bikes they're they're shaped a
• 1:03:19
  little funny. On the handlebars you have these
• 1:03:21
  arrow bars that stick out. You put your elbows down, you're
• 1:03:23
  kind of hunched down and arrow position.
• 1:03:26
  Halfway through the bike my left arrow bar just snapped, snapped
• 1:03:30
  right off and lost control and I remember just something going to
• 1:03:37
  slow motion and I remember waking up in an ambulance.
• 1:03:42
  I was unconscious according to my Garmin which was tracking the
• 1:03:45
  whole thing. I was unconscious for about 12
• 1:03:48
  minutes and I had a pretty bad concussion and so forth but
• 1:03:54
  nothing major long term which is great.
• 1:03:58
  Well Fast forward a year and a half.
• 1:04:01
  This time my wife was at the race with me because of the
• 1:04:04
  situation before. I'm on the bike again, passing
• 1:04:10
  by an aid station and the guy in front of me was trying to stay
• 1:04:15
  out of the way of somebody else. He ended up running over a
• 1:04:17
  traffic cone. Now he sailed right through the
• 1:04:20
  through the the cone, right? And it was fun, but it popped up
• 1:04:25
  and ran right into my wheel and I took a spill again.
• 1:04:29
  And you know this one, I flipped over the handlebars and I
• 1:04:33
  immediately knew something was wrong.
• 1:04:36
  Turns out in the hospital they told me I had 6 fractured ribs
• 1:04:40
  and a collapsed lung. So that resolved itself only a
• 1:04:46
  couple weeks later when I the lung collapsed again back home.
• 1:04:49
  When I finally got home and they had to put a, a chest tube in
• 1:04:53
  me. That was demoralizing.
• 1:04:55
  I'm not going to I'm not going to lie.
• 1:04:57
  And I thought of maybe never doing triathlon again.
• 1:05:01
  And, you know, the other thing that happened, though, is when I
• 1:05:04
  got kind of down in the dumps, I let all my healthy habits slip,
• 1:05:08
  whether it's eating well or just moving and so forth, you know,
• 1:05:11
  put on a bunch of weight and so forth.
• 1:05:13
  And you know, I kind of got through the initial injury
• 1:05:17
  phase, but left realizing like, OK, I realize you're upset,
• 1:05:23
  you're challenged, but you didn't do everything you could.
• 1:05:26
  So it's when you, when things aren't going your way, are you
• 1:05:29
  going to just fold and just let yourself go say, oh, there's
• 1:05:33
  nothing I can do? This didn't work out for me?
• 1:05:35
  Or are you going to say, I'm going to do what I can do?
• 1:05:39
  You know, I, I, I can't remember who had the quote, but it was
• 1:05:42
  nobody makes a greater mistake than the person who does nothing
• 1:05:45
  because they could only do a little.
• 1:05:47
  And I think that applies to honestly, you know, the the
• 1:05:51
  challenges we're facing right now with making sure our brand
• 1:05:54
  stays relevant, stays on shelves, is that, you know, you
• 1:05:58
  got to do what you can. You got to be innovative.
• 1:06:00
  You got to think of ways that you smarter that you can, you
• 1:06:03
  know, you can do what these big brands can't, right?
• 1:06:06
  So kind of some of the basics you do and generating interest
• 1:06:11
  that way. So, yeah, those are a couple,
• 1:06:14
  couple instances that were very painful physically and and
• 1:06:18
  otherwise that I had to get through and how it relates to
• 1:06:20
  business. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing
• 1:06:23
  that. I I can imagine, I mean, you
• 1:06:25
  have one big spill, you're unconscious for 12 minutes,
• 1:06:28
  concussion. That's a big deal in itself.
• 1:06:32
  You still get back up on the bike.
• 1:06:33
  You still get back into the, you know, the triathlon.
• 1:06:37
  And I can, you know, as I hear you talk about, I can sense the
• 1:06:39
  passion there. It was a big part of who you
• 1:06:42
  were, what you enjoyed doing. It gave you another sense of
• 1:06:44
  drive and purpose aside from, you know, your work and your
• 1:06:47
  family. And now, you know, with the
• 1:06:50
  second spill, it was like, wow, this feels like, probably felt
• 1:06:55
  like part of your identity had been taken from you.
• 1:06:57
  And like, this was a big part of who I was and what I did and,
• 1:07:01
  and, and why I got out of bed in the morning and and now that's
• 1:07:03
  gone. And and so, yeah, you, you, you
• 1:07:06
  fell into a slump, right? And eventually you found a way
• 1:07:10
  to pick yourself up, dust yourself off.
• 1:07:13
  And what was it you said? I'm going to do what I can.
• 1:07:17
  And nobody makes a bigger mistake than the people who do
• 1:07:20
  nothing. I think those are strong words
• 1:07:23
  to live by. What?
• 1:07:24
  What's your physical health like today, Michael?
• 1:07:28
  Yeah. So, you know, other than some,
• 1:07:30
  you know, recent respiratory infection stuff that's unrelated
• 1:07:35
  to those accidents, you know, I'm, I'm back training now,
• 1:07:38
  looking at some triathlons this summer and maybe a big one down
• 1:07:41
  to Daytona in December. So that's exciting.
• 1:07:44
  And just got a new gravel bike, you know, for all these mountain
• 1:07:48
  roads we have around here. So that'll be fun to do some
• 1:07:52
  writing with my wife on the weekends with that.
• 1:07:55
  I was going to ask, how does your wife feel about you getting
• 1:07:57
  back into it? I think if I told her I was
• 1:08:00
  never going to do triathlon again she would not mind, but
• 1:08:04
  she understands its place in my heart and I think she'll always
• 1:08:08
  want to try to be there when I'm racing when she can.
• 1:08:11
  That's a good partner that you found there, Michael.
• 1:08:14
  So I've just got one more question for you, Michael.
• 1:08:16
  But before I ask it, I want to do 2 things.
• 1:08:18
  First of all, I want to invite all our listeners here to hit
• 1:08:21
  the follow button on their favorite podcast app so you can
• 1:08:23
  continue to get more great interviews like we've had today
• 1:08:26
  with Michael Delgrosso. Also going to let people know
• 1:08:29
  the best way to get in touch with you or the brand.
• 1:08:32
  What would that be, Michael? Sure, you know our brand.
• 1:08:36
  You can visit our website ofcoursedelgrossosauce.com or
• 1:08:40
  you can visit all of our companies amusement park and our
• 1:08:44
  sauce factory and so forth by going to delgrossos.com and then
• 1:08:51
  Instagram and Facebook. You can type in Del Grosso dish,
• 1:08:55
  right? They'll get a lot of good
• 1:08:56
  recipes and some fun stuff there.
• 1:08:58
  Me personally, LinkedIn, Michael Del Grosso and LinkedIn is
• 1:09:02
  probably the best way to track me down.
• 1:09:05
  If you have any questions or any any thoughts you want to share,
• 1:09:08
  I'd be happy to entertain that. That's great.
• 1:09:12
  Last question for you, Michael. Obviously we've heard about a
• 1:09:15
  lot of exciting changes just in the last two years as you look.
• 1:09:20
  Forward. In the next two to three years
• 1:09:23
  coming, what are the big changes in the future that you're really
• 1:09:27
  excited about? Yeah.
• 1:09:29
  You know, I think the fact that we were able to do what we've
• 1:09:34
  accomplished in the last two years has given us a lot of
• 1:09:39
  encouragement that we can do big things.
• 1:09:42
  Now the last thing we want to do is, you know, 2 years from now
• 1:09:46
  make another massive, you know, new factory investment or
• 1:09:50
  something like that. So I think what has given us
• 1:09:53
  success is everyday consistency and operating with integrity.
• 1:09:58
  And those are very much our family values always being there
• 1:10:04
  for our customers. Don't we can just day after day
• 1:10:07
  doing the boring stuff really well because let's face it, you
• 1:10:10
  know, making anything, even if it's something as delicious as
• 1:10:14
  spaghetti sauce, you know, it's not glamorous, right?
• 1:10:16
  It's not, you know, getting all this attention like, you know,
• 1:10:21
  tech companies or finance or, you know, some of the some of
• 1:10:25
  the other things that, you know, people follow on on social
• 1:10:28
  media, right. So I look forward to the, you
• 1:10:32
  know, us leveraging that reputation, our new found
• 1:10:37
  capacity and expertise in this new factory and again, just
• 1:10:41
  slowly advancing that as we've done.
• 1:10:43
  You know, it's funny people say about triathlon like, well,
• 1:10:46
  what's the key? You know, what's, you know, what
• 1:10:48
  are the secrets and so forth. It's just consistency.
• 1:10:51
  It's day in and day out. It's not doing the big hero
• 1:10:53
  sessions that you can post on Instagram and look like look
• 1:10:57
  what I did. I did a 12 hour, you know,
• 1:10:58
  session of this or you know, 7 hour bike ride today.
• 1:11:02
  I mean, those are fine, but it's really what makes the difference
• 1:11:06
  is small things every single day.
• 1:11:09
  What makes a difference in business, whether it's sauce
• 1:11:12
  making or anything else, is this doing the small things extremely
• 1:11:15
  well every day, taking care of your customers, making sure that
• 1:11:18
  you're delivering on your promises.
• 1:11:20
  And yeah, so that we have that awesome foundation, amazing
• 1:11:25
  people working in our organization, on our team, and
• 1:11:27
  I'm really excited about what the future holds.
• 1:11:29
  You know, and, and I think I, I want to point something out here
• 1:11:32
  that that may have gotten a little bit overlooked in you
• 1:11:35
  telling your story. The fact that some of your
• 1:11:38
  customers kept coming to you and asking you to get into this new
• 1:11:42
  line of work that they knew was completely different from what
• 1:11:46
  you were already doing. And they knew that it was going
• 1:11:48
  to take a giant investment rather than going to people who
• 1:11:53
  are well established in the space.
• 1:11:55
  And taking their business to them, I suspect, says a lot
• 1:11:59
  about what they saw in the quality of the work that you
• 1:12:02
  guys do. Yeah, I, I, I think that's a,
• 1:12:05
  it's a nice compliment and I think that's fair to say.
• 1:12:08
  You know, our, you know, the family leadership, you know,
• 1:12:11
  the, the people in there every day that you know, whether in
• 1:12:15
  the quality people in the lab, people writing, you know, taking
• 1:12:17
  orders, people communicating with the customers, even down to
• 1:12:21
  people in accounting and, and every other specialty we have.
• 1:12:23
  Like these are people who care immensely about what they do.
• 1:12:28
  And you know, I, I think of people say, well, what's it
• 1:12:31
  like, you know, the family side of it?
• 1:12:33
  And I said, you know, it's funny because my, my aunt Linda, who's
• 1:12:37
  retired, she brings food in for the employees.
• 1:12:39
  My uncle Joe Saturday when, you know, often it's not uncommon
• 1:12:43
  for him to be making food for the employees.
• 1:12:44
  And he's the CEO of the company, right?
• 1:12:47
  And he'll often be making food for people working on Saturday
• 1:12:49
  or so. So it, it's, it's all those
• 1:12:54
  things that really just mean so much and, and that make a
• 1:12:57
  difference in the end. So I think that has translated.
• 1:13:00
  I think that has translated people feeling like they're part
• 1:13:02
  of something bigger and we're really lucky.
• 1:13:06
  We're really lucky to have the people we have.
• 1:13:09
  Michael, I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing
• 1:13:11
  both your time and your story with all of us today.
• 1:13:14
  I really appreciate it. Well, it's been a pleasure, It's
• 1:13:17
  been enjoyable. Thanks for your, your podcast.
• 1:13:19
  It's been able to listen to many episodes and, and, and you're,
• 1:13:23
  you're getting good content out there and a lot of good lessons
• 1:13:26
  that we can all learn. I appreciate those kind words,
• 1:13:29
  Michael. Thank you, folks.
• 1:13:31
  That's a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast.
• 1:13:34
  Thanks for learning with us today.