Food Manufacturing Bucking the Decline
Posted on 04. Nov, 2010 by Thomas Chan in Uncategorized
Gillies Coffee Company’s 50 year story from Thomas Chan on Vimeo.
Fifty years ago, Donald Schoenholt’s father did not want him getting into the family business. As Schoenholt recalls it, his father only saw market trends leading to a bleak future for New York’s oldest coffee roaster. The rest of the industry was busy consolidating and seemingly in a move toward instant coffee.
Of course, those troubles didn’t bear out. Market trends instead became a boon, said Schoenhold, now president of Gillies Coffee . Thanks to the growth of coffee bars like Starbucks and continually rising demand for high-quality food – and coffee – Gillies Coffee is currently selling about 1 million pounds of coffee annually. Most of the company’s product goes to coffee bars, upscale restaurants, hotels and grocers, Schoenholt said.
Like Gillies Coffee, many other food manufacturers are seeing the same type of trend in their segment. Despite the long decline in city-based manufacturing and the recession, food manufacturing in New York is doing just fine.
Data from the New York State Department of Labor show that employment in food manufacturing has been relatively steady in the last five years.
In Brooklyn, the number employed by food manufacturers has fallen 5.9 percent to 5,300 between 2005 and 2009 while the average yearly wage has risen 15.7 percent to $35,644. Citywide, the number of employed rose about 0.6 percent to 14,016 and wages have risen 9.1 percent to $34,123.
To be sure, not every food maker is doing well. A number of those contacted for this story have seen their sales fall with the recession. However, those that are doing well are finding themselves buoyed by the overall trend toward “better” food – local, organic, slow, less-processed and the like. While they are usually called “specialty” food makers, what seems unite them is simply the quality of their product.
For instance, TMI Food Group has only grown through the recession, said Marketing Director Ellen Lee. The Asian food manufacturer creates Asian noodles and dumplings out of two factories in Brooklyn and one in Chinatown.
“A lot of the products that we make – dumplings and noodles – are recession proof,” Lee said. “I think we also manufacture a good product. One of the company values is to always provide good quality foods.”
Another company doing well is The Brooklyn Brewery. The craft beer maker gained an extra 20 percent in sales last year, said Marketing Manager Ben Hudson. The company is set to expand its facility and double its workforce to about 70 early next year, Hudson said. When the expansion is complete, the company will be able to brew 12 times what it can now, he added.
The “craft beer movement,” as Hudson called it, began to rise as the demand for local food did, he said.
“Now everywhere you go, there are local craft breweries,” Hudson said. “This is really not seen as a trend or fad, but a return to normality.”
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