Small bakery in Utica innovates over 100 years, now ships all over US
It all started with a hand-built coalfired oven on Lansing Street in East Utica. One hundred years later, like yeasted dough left to prove, DeIorio's Foods has grown and grown.
In 1924, Giovanni “John” DeIorio and Pasquale “Pat” DeIorio started a bakery in their backyards. The immigrants from the Abruzzi region of Italy began by baking just one product, fresh, authentic Italian bread, and delivering it to their neighbors.
The brothers married sisters, Frances and Elizabeth, whose parents immigrated from Calabria, and the quartet worked together seamlessly.
John's son Ben DeIorio, who ran the business from 1968 to 2007, said his father was the master baker, his Uncle Pat had a knack for fixing the equipment, his Aunt Elizabeth took care of the books and his mother cared for the children – Ben, his brother John Jr., and their five cousins.
“They got along that way,” Ben said. “It was a great combination.”
Ben is now 84 and lives in Vero Beach, Florida, operating a small bakery out of his garage.
Rising in the industry
The DeIorios originally delivered their fresh-baked Italian bread in wicker baskets to homes and small grocery stores in East Utica. Once they realized that the delivery trucks' fumes could impact the loaves, they became the first company to bag Italian bread.
Another invention: sliced Italian bread. The DeIorios were the first to do it.
Pat DeIorio wondered why they couldn't slice their product like Wonder Bread, and he and John Sr. visited Hartmann Slicing Co. in New Rochelle, where the owner said his slicers wouldn't work for Italian bread because of its rounded edges. Pat had an idea: He could adapt the tool and insisted on buying a slicer.
“And Mr. Hartmann said, ‘ OK, I will sell it to you on one condition: You cannot bring it back.' And Uncle Pat said, ‘Don't worry, we're not going to bring it back.'”
When Hartmann didn't hear from the DeIorios, he called them to ask how it was going, and Pat showed him how he had developed a mechanism to knock the ends off the Italian loaves and produce perfect slices. Ben said Hartmann was so impressed that he purchased the design and started selling it to other
Italian bakeries.
As the DeIorios found success with their breads, they moved fto a 10,000square-foot facility on Elizabeth Street.
They were able to dismantle and rebuild one of their ovens from Lansing Street, an oven that Ben said was another innovation. It had traveling shelves which employees would load with raw dough at the door. The shelf would then travel to the back of the oven, where the dough would bake into bread in 30 minutes.
The original DeIorio brothers sold the bakery to a friend of theirs named Harold Tracy, with whom they had collaborated on some products, in 1955. Ben and his brother John helped out at the bakery, but starting in high school, they formed a doo-wop quartet called the Daytones, and in 1958, Ben began pursuing a philosophy degree at Utica College.
Ben said that the Daytones dueted with Tony Bennett, performed at the opening of the Utica Memorial Auditorium and almost secured a record deal with Columbia Records. Throughout the 1960s, John Jr. and Ben went back and forth between club dates in New York City and helping out at the bakery under Tracy's leadership.
When the record deal fell through and they heard that Tracy wanted to sell the bakery in 1968, the brothers went to see him about returning it to the DeIorio name.
“It was a hard decision to disband [the Daytones],” Ben said. “But after the Columbia contract failed, John was getting older, his kids were getting older and going to school, all that stuff, so we decided we better just go back to the bakery and make the best of it. And we did.”
Change in the air
In 1976, Ben DeIorio walked into a P&C grocery store in Syracuse and inhaled the unmistakable aroma of bread baking.
“They took me right back to the deli department – that's where they put their ovens,” Ben said. “And I said, ‘Look at this.' They're making Italian bread, rye bread, hard rolls. We had commanded the markets then, because we were baking bread – the German bakers, the Italian, the Polish bakers – we were making breads that the American bread bakers couldn't make. So we really commanded our own space in the market, because our breads were popular. But we would start at about four o' clock in the afternoon to have all our bread ready for our trucks to leave at five o'clock in the morning. But with the in-store bakeries, they were baking bread on the day they were selling it.”
Sensing a sea change, Ben and John started transitioning to frozen dough. They would mix and form the dough, put it in a blast freezer and then sell it to grocers for them to bake in-store.
“We didn't go to the supermarkets to sell it,” Ben said. “We went to the independent grocers that needed to compete with the supermarkets, like we had to compete with the supermarkets in some way, so the way was to get into frozen dough.”
Life of a salesman
Ben made a point of maintaining close relationships with his clients. Rather than using third-party brokers, DeIorio's had salespeople located in different markets, from Utica to Pennsylvania to Maine, with the technical knowledge to train clients and resolve any issues on the spot.
“The customers knew that if they had a problem, within 24 hours, it was solved,” Ben said.
Ben spotted another opportunity in the late 1980s. Convenience stores were starting to sell more hot food like pizza, and did not have the capacity to make their own dough onsite. They needed frozen dough, and DeIorio's had it.
From there, the frozen pizza dough sales exploded, with DeIorio's expanding into other areas, such as entertainment venues and even national pizza chains.
Bob Horth, vice president of business development, said that DeIorio's now ships to all 50 states and beyond, including Puerto Rico and Central America.
The creativity continues
When Ben sold the business in 2007, the production floor was running eight to 10 hours a day, five days a week. Now, it runs at maximum capacity: 22 hours a day, six days a week, with 240 production employees in a 200,000-squarefoot building on Bleecker Street.
DeIorio's began selling gluten-free pizza shells in 2007, including shells made of nontraditional ingredients like cauliflower. They have a dedicated, hermetically sealed room in the facility where they make gluten-free and kosher products.
A company founded by immigrants in a city with a rich history of welcoming those from overseas, DeIorio's continues to employ many immigrants today. Jim Viti, vice president of marketing and product development, expressed pride that the company is able to offer secure, good-paying jobs with benefits to these folks. He recently did a survey and found that employees speak 15 different languages from around the world – Bosnian, Chizigula (a Bantu dialect spoken in Tanzania and Somalia) and Burmese, to name just a few.
“Utica is known as sort of an immigration city for people to get started,” Viti said. “That's how DeIorio's got our start, with Italian immigrants, and here we are 100 years later with new people getting their starts.”
Ben also expressed his appreciation for the immigrant populations that have helped DeIorio's thrive. “Without them, I don't think we could have run the plant, to tell you the truth,” Ben said. “When I hear people complaining about immigrants – this country was built by immigrants. My father and uncle built this bakery, and they came from Italy. And the story goes on and on and on.”