Operating in the Midwest since 1967, New Horizons Baking has carved out a niche for itself by delivering high-quality baked goods and providing exceptional customer service and price. A Minority Business Enterprise and member of the Northern Ohio Minority Business Council, New Horizons currently serves customers across the country with its highest concentration in the Midwest.

“In today’s market, you won’t see a New Horizons label sitting on a shelf at a local grocery store,” President and COO Ron Jones says. “We instead provide baking services for others, and we do a lot of co-packing.”

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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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