When a company produces only a single type of product, competition with a rival manufacturer can be fierce. It’s especially tough when a small business is up against a large corporation. Nonetheless, family-owned Gabriele Macaroni Co. Inc. has survived for over 70 years. Chief Executive Victor Fusano spoke with Karen Teitelman about his company’s survival in the current atmosphere of consolidation.
Gabriele Macaroni was started in 1928 by my grandparents, Leucio and Anatolia Gabriele. They started the company, after coming here from Italy, out of a small storefront in the Little Italy area of downtown Los Angeles. They began by producing product mainly for the immigrant population. As they grew, they moved into successively bigger facilities.
The company manufactures dry pasta products, mainly for the food-service, retail and health-food service industries. We do a lot of private labeling here. We will manufacture a product and put it into other people’s packaging. You may not go into a store and see a package of macaroni labeled Gabriele, but you will probably buy our product under another label.
One of the main problems we’ve faced here, and one that goes back for about 30 years, is consolidation. When Leucio started in 1928, there were about 10 or 12 pasta businesses owned and operated by immigrant Italian families. Between 1960 and 1980, large national companies came in and bought out all the family-owned businesses companies like Quaker Oats, Pillsbury, Hershey’s and Borden. That is just a microcosm of what is happening all over the country. Now there are a small number of national companies producing most of the pasta products distributed throughout the whole United States.
Being a small player like we are, we’ve had to diversify our product line and find niches. Nowadays most of our product is produced for the health-food industry, private labeling, or food processing specially formulated products. This means that we make pasta that would go into a canned soup or frozen dinner. We send it down the line to a processor who mixes the pasta with sauce and packages the product that way.
