Boardman food manufacturer trying to keep up with demand during coronavirus pandemic
BOARDMAN, Ohio - When bars and restaurants shut down in Ohio, consumer spending on food shifted towards grocery stores and it didn't take long for stores to run out of stock on certain items. Pasta sauce was one of them.
Summer Garden Food Manufacturing in Boardman, which manufactures barbecue and pasta sauces like Little Italy and Gia Russa, was forced to take production up a notch.
"We were working, roughly four days a week, 12 hour shifts. That jumped up to 5 days a week, 12 hour shifts, so they're working about 60 hours a week," said Director of Manufacturing, Rick Coradini.
With more people eating at home and pasta being a Valley favorite, pasta sauce was flying off the shelves. Coradini says it caught them off guard.
"Couple truckloads a day is what we're doing out here," Coradini said. "Lot of stores calling us right now taking anything we can make right now in truckload volumes that they're gonna be taking."
While keeping up with demand is a good problem to have, manufacturing during a pandemic has its fair share of challenges.
"It's really hard to do right now every different product that we make because as soon as you get something made, you send it out and then it gets in the stores and they buy that up and by the time you get to the next product they're already in need of another, let's say tomato basil sauce, so we're trying to keep everything filled," said President and CEO Tom Zidian. "Getting some of the same ingredients you used to get. The lead time used to be 2-4 weeks and then all of a sudden it becomes 4-8 weeks."
Through it all though, Zidian credits his employees for keeping the business going.
"I tell our workers who have been working 60 hour shifts that we're kind of right behind the front lines of the hospital workers because if people don't find food on the shelves, they're in a panic," said Zidian. "I mean look how they panicked about toilet paper but during that spike, pasta sauce and pasta was actually up over 200% and toilet paper was only up 100%."
"We understand as a company that we have to take care of the community of people outside also. We understand the healthcare industry is above and beyond call of duty right now and what we're just trying to do is make it easier for people to go to the grocery stores and find what they really need, while they're staying home," said Coradini.
To help with demand, Summer Garden is hiring. They are looking to add about a dozen people. To apply, just search Summer Garden on LinkedIn.
