By GREGORY ZELLER //
A major-league specialty food distributor with a national scope and a lengthy Long Island legacy is celebrating a big-time Suffolk County expansion.
Ferraro Foods will ceremoniously cut the ribbon Wednesday on its new 230,000-square-foot Edgewood distribution center, which actually began shipping specialty Italian foods and foodservice supplies to pizzerias, Italian restaurants and other end users – on Long Island and beyond – in November.
The Wilshire Boulevard center doubles the capacity of the New Jersey-based company’s previous Long Island distribution center in Melville. Ferraro Foods signed a 10-year lease at the existing Edgewood space earlier this year and has spent millions on renovations – specifically, the installation of state-of-the-art refrigeration units and line-packing facilities “that enable us to rapidly service an even larger customer base quickly and efficiently,” according to Chief Executive Officer Dan Hill.
“This new distribution center is much larger and more versatile than our previous facility,” Hill told Innovate Long Island. “This distribution center greatly increases our share of the world’s largest and most concentrated pizza market.”
Dan Hill: Right place, right time.
That’s more than hyperbolic extra cheese: Except for California (6,000-plus), New York State serves up more pizza stores (about 5,000) than any other state – and factoring in population numbers, has more pizzerias per 10,000 residents (2.54) than even the pizza-crazy Golden State (1.64).
That’s a ton of joints serving up a whole lot of large-with-pepperoni-and-mushrooms – and behind many of them stands Ferraro Foods, which launched out of a Green Brook, NJ, garage in 1975 with a single truck and a dream.
By 2002, the company was occupying a 135,000-square-foot headquarters in Piscataway, NJ (now expanded to 190,000 square feet); in 2004, it opened its first distribution center beyond the Greater New York region, in North Carolina (and has since added a second NC facility).
Today, with deliveries as far afield as Florida and Indiana, the company delivers 14,000 different products to some 8,000 customers in 23 states, with a fleet of more than 200 trucks and roughly $1.3 billion in annual revenues.
Its decades in Melville, beginning the early 1990s, were critical to that growth, according to Hill.
“Long Island is a crucial market for us, largely in part because it is home to more independent pizzerias than any place in America, but also because we have deep history and roots here,” the CEO said. “Growing our presence on Long Island allows us to build on those already existing relationships and make new ones.”
While leaving Long Island was never an option, Ferraro Foods had clearly outgrown its Melville digs, and finding the right space for what the company bills as Long Island’s largest food-distribution center was a challenge.
Room to grow: Ferraro Foods believes its vast new distribution center will engender new growth.
Edgewood – surrounded by major highways at the Island’s geographic center – proved to be the perfect location. And according to Hill, the Town of Islip Office of Economic Development proved to be the perfect partner.
“The Town of Islip’s local government has been very supportive of our progress as we move into this new facility and continue our growth path in the area,” he noted. “We couldn’t be prouder to strengthen our presence in such a wonderful community.”
With the move from Melville complete and the Edgewood facility shipping out products from nearly two-dozen well-respected brands (Bell Harbor Seafood, Steer Ridge Platinum premium meats, Panificio Sapori baked goods, Power-Chem cleaning supplies and more), Ferraro Foods is anticipating even greater growth in the years to come.
And it plans to achieve that growth on its own terms, according to its chief executive.
“Because Ferraro Foods remains an independent company, we have the freedom to operate like a local and regional player in the core pizza states,” Hill said. “[The new distribution center’s] size and location allow us to expand our reach to potential customers.
“And it will improve our already stellar service to current customers.”
