96.5 F
San Fernando
Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Cool Concept

Odds are if you’ve ever shopped in a grocery store, you’ve seen an Anthony International product. From the vending machine in the store entry and on to the floral case, past the cakes behind the curved glass in the bakery, the dairy products in chilled cases, down the frozen food aisle and past the sliding doors that the butcher opened in the deli, you unwittingly took a tour of the glass doors and components a San Fernando Valley-based company manufactures for 95 percent of the national food store chains in this country. “The coolest part of my job is when I’m in an airport and I look around and think, ‘Every one of these people has seen our product,’” said Jeffrey Clark, CEO of Anthony International. Half of the company’s manufacturing is done at its Sylmar headquarters, which opened 55 years ago and employs 1,500 people. Anthony also has expanded its manufacturing operations in recent years to include five additional sites worldwide: Madison, Ga.; Audubon, Iowa; Brantford, Canada; Lucca, Italy, and Shanghai, China. For the past decade, Anthony has been aggressively making acquisitions to expand its business and product offerings. It also has made a concerted effort to be an energy-efficient company and to make energy-efficient products, a strategy that company officials say also has helped it to grow. A $243 million company in 2010, Anthony International’s revenues increased to $271 million the following year and are expected to reach $315 million this year. In June, Clark received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2012 Award in the distribution and manufacturing category for greater Los Angeles. The attractiveness of Anthony’s glass doors has contributed to its success in the marketplace. While the company’s primary market is the supermarket and convenience store industry, Anthony’s glass doors also are found on wine refrigerators ordered for high-end custom-built residences and in cases that store blood in operating rooms, so surgeons can monitor the available blood supply during a transfusion. Ironically, the company goes out of its way to make its products disappear. “We design our doors to close quickly and not fog up,” Clark said. “We don’t want the customer to focus on our product. We want our product to make it easy for them to see what they’re going to buy.” Purchasing power Anthony International began in 1958 with two enterprising young sailors who found themselves in the right place at the right time with the right product. When the men (one of whose middle name was Anthony) brought perishable goods into port, they routinely encountered problems with refrigerated storage. They decided to solve the problem by designing the first refrigerator door with a self-closing mechanism to lock in the cold air. Two years later Anthony’s Manufacturing Co. opened a small facility in Glendale and moved in 1965 to Sylmar, where it has remained. In 2002, the company began its buying spree with the purchase of Ardco, a company that was, at the time, its biggest competitor in North America. “Then we decided to expand our relationship with the end retailer by increasing the menu of items we can supply,” Clark said. That led to the 2004 purchase of Sovis, a French company in Georgia that manufactured curved glass with specialty designs and shapes for deli cases. Acquisitions in 2007 and 2008 of specialty glass manufacturing companies overseas were an important strategic move for the company, Clark said. Anthony bought companies in China — which has faced a major energy shortage and high energy costs — and in Italy. “European customers are very environmentally conscious, and the national (food store) chains wanted our product. But they don’t like to purchase from across the pond, so we bought an Italian company,” Clark said. Anthony doubled its presence there last year to 162 employees and now has 40 percent of the market share in Italy, he said. In 2010, Anthony acquired two companies that refurbish refrigerator and freezer cases, Trausch Industries, in Iowa, and VOS Equipment in Canada. And its acquisition of Big Services in Crawford, Ga., four months ago enabled the company to take the next major step in its development: vertical integration. “We’re not just a manufacturer anymore,” Clark said. “Now we can deliver our product to a retailer and give a level of service through the installation process. It’s like buying a stereo — if you hire the guys who designed it to come to your home and set it up, you get a better result.” Energy efficiency While the company’s geographic expansion will continue, Clark said Anthony will remain headquartered in Sylmar. “Our founders put us in the Valley, and I learned quickly that our human capital is our number one asset,” he said. “There are three generations of employees in Sylmar that know how to get a product out.” Anthony has invested more than $8 million in Sylmar during the past year, mainly in state-of-the-art manufacturing equipment, Clark said. The company recently signed a long-term lease for the Sylmar property and plans to add staff there and at its Madison plant. With current licensees in Australia and South Africa, Anthony is considering expanding to India. Clark has made three trips to India this year and is planning to return next month. “They’re losing 40 percent of the food supply in India to power outages,” Clark said, noting that a product Anthony recently created may help. The product is an “energy-free” glass door for use in low-temperature storage units. It uses inert gases and a special coating to keep the food cold without condensation and without using electricity, which normally is needed to keep glass from fogging up. Anthony has no stock components; all its products are customized by the company’s high-tech engineers. When Clark joined the company in 1990, he said sales were $27 million. Twenty years later, that figure had increased tenfold. “The push behind all this growth was to become a more energy-efficient company with more energy-efficient products,” he said. Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based ISE, a buying cooperative owned by refrigerator contractors across the country, has been doing business with Anthony International for five decades, said Managing Director Steve Lewis. “Anthony is clearly a leader in the glass door industry and has a great variety of products,” Lewis said. “Their products set an industry standard that others try to follow.” With the goal of supporting energy efficiency, Anthony started a highly successful “Close That Case” campaign. Clark said he was spurred by studies showing that 65 percent of supermarket chains have open cases rather than doors that close across the fronts. That causes refrigeration to “pour out” and open dairy cases, for example, lose 63 percent of their refrigeration. “We learned that if the markets would close up their cases, we could save over $1 billion in energy costs per year in North America and improve food safety exponentially,” Clark said. Closed cases are the wave of the future, he said, predicting that by 2020 there will be a law that refrigerated food cases must be closed. Europe already has taken regulatory steps in that direction. France, for example, is in the process of mandating closed cases, and other countries are moving to impose tax penalties for open cases. While the supermarket industry has experienced a financial decline in the past several years, Clark said, Anthony created its own market and helped customers through the ‘Close That Case’ program. The initiative also helped Anthony to distinguish itself among two or three competitors that Clark describes as “aggressive but probably less than 20 percent of our size. “We built up our scale and the ability to deliver product in less than two weeks. That’s a big barrier for other companies

Featured Articles

Related Articles