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Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Changing With The Times

By Thom Senzee Contributing Reporter The story of Sun Valley Food traverses the decades between 1925 and the present, and showcases the one-time slaughterhouse as an example of a business that evolved instead of going extinct as did so many of its local competitors. Indeed, there were once dozens of slaughterhouses located across the San Fernando Valley and, moreover, throughout Los Angeles. Then came the real estate boom. Few meatpackers could resist the temptation to sell their stockyards and poultry pens while neighboring farmland was fast becoming suburbia. The value of Valley land skyrocketed. The competition succumbed. But Sun Valley Foods endured. Begun as Verda Poultry by John Verda nearly 85 years ago, the company’s original nomenclature survives as the name of the parent of company of Sun Valley Food. “The company was started by my wife’s grandfather,” said Wilbur Clunen, owner and general manager of Sun Valley Food. “I never planned on doing it in the first place, and I definitely didn’t expect to stay here long.” Clunen took over operations at Sun Valley in the early 1990s, after beginning in the company’s sales department in 1987. With a degree in business management and 15 years of experience running a print shop as his foundation, Clunen said he saw the writing on the wall for the company not long after taking over its reins: Sun Valley Food had to change,or die. “I was able to use my management skills in the early ’90s to gear it up for the next century; we had to evolve,” he said. Any Southern Californian who ate turkey during the 1980s or earlier almost certainly has consumed the company’s product, according to Clunen. Sun Valley packed whole turkeys for distribution under many different labels, including Foster Farms, Zacky and Shelton. Long-defunct Fedco Stores, Dales and Hughes Markets were among the retailers who sold Sun Valley Food’s poultry products under the wrappers of several famous brand names as well as its own label. The heydays for Sun Valley as a packager of whole-body turkeys and chickens began in earnest during World War II, when the company’s founder landed government contracts to feed the armed forces. That success was built upon in the post-war years. John Verda’s son Cesare Verda eventually took over and shepherded the company into the ’70s and ’80s. “It was a boom-and-bust situation for us,” Clunen said. “Very few slaughterhouses were left, and things were changing quickly.” Clunen said a major shift in the regulatory process,especially in the arena of inspections,caused the industry to undergo major regrouping by the early 1990s. Of course, that was just about the time Clunen took over Sun Valley Food’s daily operations. “The government kind of came in and said, ‘Okay, you do all of the work of inspecting, and we’ll supervise you,” Clunen said. “They even told you, in labor hours, how much of a burden each task would be.” At first, new regulatory compliance and documentation requirements necessitated the hiring of personnel just to keep up, said Clunen. Another change that fundamentally effected Sun Valley Food’s business was the fact that it sold mainly whole-body poultry. “Meanwhile everyone else was beginning to sell sausage patties and other processed products,” he said. “That’s when we began our renaissance, in 1995.” Whereas the Verdas had built the storied company on slaughtering and packing poultry for others, Clunen would completely invert that business model in order to save the company. “It would have taken a lot of capital to buy all the equipment necessary for processing if we wanted to stay in the packing business,” he said. Instead, Clunen steered Sun Valley Food in the opposite direction. “At first there was some resistance to the idea of selling other companies’ poultry,” he said. “We had been the one selling everybody else’s labels with our product inside up ’til then.” But in the end, Sun Valley decided to outsource its poultry supplying, while continuing to distribute turkey and chicken products under its own brand, a practice known in the industry as “co-packing.” Prior to its foray into co-packing, 80 percent of Sun Valley’s sales had been turkey, with chicken making up most of the other 20 percent. Since the transition, however, that ratio has inverted. But there were some labor problems along the way to the more profitable co-packing-chicken business. “At first it was hard to keep people,” Clunen said. “They were used doing it one way, and this was new for us.” Also, the process of procuring bids and sourcing vendors turned out to be time-consuming and fraught with lessons to be learned. “We tried to keep our suppliers in California,” Clunen said. “But, even though going out of state kind of goes against best practices, we did have some out-of-state poultry at a certain point.” However, unless you are eating in an institutional environment,such as a school or a nursing home,or you buy your chicken and turkey from a specialty butcher, you probably have not had any of the company’s Golden Harvest or Sun Valley-brand products recently. According to Clunen, the changes not only saved the company, they have helped it grow. In an industry whose margins are measured in increments of seven or eight cents per unit, Sun Valley has grown into a company pulling in nearly $20 million in sales each year; something that makes Clunen proud. And, things have settled down in terms of personnel. “We have 20 employees, and very little turnover,” he said. “I don’t have commission sales people; they are all team players.” In addition to Clunen’s desire to maintain an all-on-the-same-team atmosphere, Sun Valley Food’s commission-free sales department is necessary because of the company’s longevity. “We’ve been around a long time, and some of those customer relationships go back so far it’s hard for anyone to claim this account, or that account,” he said. Sun Valley Food has no plans to downsize in the face of new economic realities. In fact, the firm is opening a new warehouse in Sun Valley. “The next ten years look good,” said Clunen. “In fact, I’m hoping my son will take over one day.”

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