The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
CATERER MARKS 40TH
Normandy catering styles its own 40th anniversary celebration
After four decades of helping countless customers commemorate special occasions, the time has come for Normandy Catering to celebrate its own notable moment.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the longstanding Wickliffe business.
“In 1978, my business partner Jim Carmigiano’s parents purchased Normandy Party Center,” said Chief Operating Officer Ryan Baker.
They later expanded their services beyond the banquet facility at 30310 Palisades Parkway to include off-site catering for rehabilitation centers, summer camps, day care centers, and public and private schools, according to the website.
“It’s all history from there,”
“We do 1 million meals a year and average over 20,000 meals a week.”
— Normandy Catering Chief Operating Officer Ryan Baker
Baker said. “We’ve slowly grown and added more things. We added an express delivery business. We do scholastic food service, so we do K-12.
“We do colleges and corporations. We have 51 different venues that we work out of.”
Normandy exclusively caters for The Tanglewood Club in Chagrin Falls, Notre Dame College in South Euclid and The Goodtime III excursion ship in Cleveland, he saidl.
Although the headquarters is in Wickliffe, Baker said the company has satellite kitchens all across Northeast Ohio.
A few of Normandy’s top clients include Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, Cleveland Institute of Art and Western Reserve Historical Society.
It also has a multitude of mobile kitchens with portable ovens. The mobile kitchens allow food to be prepared on site.
“We’ve done a wedding on a private island with no electricity for 500,” he said.
Baker said Normandy’s success would not be possible without its dedicated staff.
“We have about 115 employees and we are blessed with really some of the best employees that I have ever worked with,” he said. “They have tremendous longevity, which is kind of unheard of in this kind of industry. We do 1 million meals a year and average over 20,000 meals a week.”
The menus vary and are versatile.
“We recently did a large Indian wedding with all family recipes,” he said. “We will do custom menus, which a lot of places won’t do because they want to stay in their comfort zone.”
Normandy has made numerous charitable contributions to community organizations, including regularly donating food to St. James Episcopal Church in Painesville to help feed those in need, he said.
Although food service is a major component of the business, Baker said the company still uses the party center for events.
The center has been renovated and updated over the years.
“We’re always putting money back into it, because it still has potential,” he said. “It’s still a great wedding venue. We still have tremendous business.”
However, Baker said they have outgrown that facility and looking to expand. Future plans may include closing half of the party center to expand offices and additional kitchen and prep space.
“We would also look to open a second commissary somewhere probably somewhere on the south side of the city (Cleveland), so that we could extend our reach down to Akron,” he said. “That would help with logistics, being closer to the city.”
Normandy Catering was the winner of an Established Company award in the 2017 Lake-Geauga Fast Track 50 business awards competition.
The Fast Track 50 is an event that honors the region’s fastest growing companies in Lake and Geauga counties. Winners of the 2017 award were based on a weighted average of 80 percent sales growth and 20 percent employment growth from 2012 through 2016.
“We hope to continue to grow in all areas,” he said.