Becoming known for quality does not take a day, a week or a month. A strong reputation must be earned over the course of years and after hundreds of interactions with customers. For more than two decades, importer Netuno USA has prided itself on delivering quality products in the seafood market and maintaining that reputation has fueled its success. “Within the industry, it gives people a lot of comfort when doing business with us,” co-founder and President Luciano Bonaldo says.
Bonaldo and Guilherme Colaferri founded Netuno in 1993 as an importer and wholesaler that fills the niche between inexpensive, mass-market seafood products and the premier items served at high-end restaurants. “We’ve been around for 20 years so we have a very well-recognized brand,” Bonaldo says. Annually, Netuno brings approximately 20 million pounds of seafood into the United States. Most products come from suppliers in India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico, Guyana and Brazil. Netuno also imports lobster from Hondorus, Brazil, the Bahamas and Belize and squid from China.
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The key to the taste of a Mi Rancho tortilla lies in its modern-day implementation of the hundreds-of-years-old tradition of nixtamalization. The tortilla-making method begins by cooking whole corn kernels in lime and water for up to 10 hours and then using hand-carved lava stones to grind the cooked corn into fresh masa. The process is labor intensive and typically only used by smaller food producers.
Mi Rancho has learned how to employ nixtamalization on a large scale, enabling the Californian company to produce 4.5 million tortillas each day. “The overall process of Mi Rancho corn tortillas is what truly sets us apart from our competitors,” says Alexa LaVere, sales and marketing supervisor.
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After nearly 70 years, LeVecke Corp. has become a “builder of brands” in its industry, President Joe LeVecke says. “When you look at our company, we bring in about 100 new brands to market every year,” he says, noting that this includes private-label brands, brands it co-manufactures for owners, and even its own that it manufactures at its own micro-distillery in Hawaii.
Based in Mira Loma, Calif., the company as it stands today, is a manufacturer of distilled spirits. But it was not always that way. LeVecke notes that his great-grandfather and great-uncle started the company in 1949 as a beer distributor.
“The myth goes that they bought their first tanker of beer and it took them six months to sell their first case,” the younger LeVecke explains. “At that point, they continued to build good relationships with small regional retailers in the area.”
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The name of JBT probably isn’t one that comes to mind for most people while in their kitchens, but there’s a very good chance that JBT has been involved in their preparation of their food in some way. As one of the world’s leading manufacturers of sterilization and processing equipment for the food and beverage industry, the company has a scope that puts it in most of the world’s food processing facilities. “About 50 percent of the world’s canned goods or packaged foods are sterilized on our equipment,” explains Global Marketing Manager Carlos Saavedra.
The company’s roots can be traced back to the 1880s, when John Bean invented a continuous spray pump he used to treat his almond orchards, and which he soon began selling to other growers. Over time, the company grew through organic means as well as through acquisition, adding new capabilities and product lines that range from continuous freezers and citrus juicers to airplane de-icing systems and airport baggage carts. In 2008, JBT Corporation was founded to spin off the company’s food processing and airport equipment divisions under a new, independent structure.
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The requirements for food labeling are constantly changing and often becoming more stringent. So continual innovation is a familiar business model for Inland in La Crosse, Wis. Earlier this year, the company dropped “Label” from its name to indicate the broadening of its business model and signal the company’s rebranding.
Inland produces labels in cut-and-stack, in-mold, pressure-sensitive, blow-mold and shrink varieties and offers offset, gravure and flexo printing. It produces labels for the beverage, food and consumer products markets. Inland helps its customers select the correct label substrate, size, shape, ink, coating and print press combination to reduce waste and eliminate costs from the entire supply chain. It says it often saves its customers 1 percent to 3 percent annually through value-engineering.
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