Stark County sauce maker Mid's simmers back to profitability - Crain's Cleveland Business

While it's a global brand today, Coors beer had a cultlike status as a regional treasure in the 1970s. Consumers east of the Mississippi River couldn't get the popular Colorado brew, and the scarcity prompted East Coast beer lovers to "smuggle" cases from western retailers, even inspiring the plot of the 1977 classic film "Smokey and the Bandit."

Steve Cress muses about a similar trajectory for Mid's, a pasta sauce simmered in Navarre, just 12 miles southwest of Canton. No, he's not expecting a celluloid resurrection of Snowman and the Bandit racing a truckload of marinara across states. But he has heard numerous tales of Mid's jars stuffed in suitcases and crammed in care packages bound — in this case — for far west destinations.

"If you take a 60- to 70-mile radius of Canton, Mid's is probably the No. 1 pasta sauce in supermarkets like Acme, Heinen's and Giant Eagle," said Cress, who is majority owner and principal of the 65-year-old company. "And while we've made a lot of headway in expanding our (geographic) reach in the last few years, we are not in stores west of the Rockies."

That means, he said, Northeast Ohio transplants on the West Coast often rely on the kindness of friends and family back home.

Cress and investment partner Scott Ricketts bought the family- owned Mid's True Sicilian Pasta Sauce company in 1997, under their RC Industries Inc. umbrella. By 2016, the duo had expanded the brand's footprint from 80 stores in three Ohio counties to "thousands of retailers in 33 states," Cress said. Soon after, earnings began to flatten.

"We were in many ways a victim of our own success," he said. Employment had swollen from about six mostly part-timers in 1997 to roughly 40 full-time workers in 2016 "to meet growing demand," according to Cress, "and it just wasn't profitable."

RC Industries suspended sauce making in the winter of 2018 to upgrade and automate production lines. After the new lines opened in February 2019, it took another seven months to work out the kinks, upskill the — now smaller at about 20 — workforce and fully realize new efficiencies.

Still, Cress said, Mid's managed to regain profitability in 2019. He expects 2020 "to be excellent, growth-wise." The owner, who declined to provide specific revenue figures, characterized Mid's as "fair-sized."

"It's not a $50 million company, but it is working toward it."

Stark County restaurateur Mideo "Mid" Octavio, who operated a midcentury Italian eatery in downtown Navarre, first began jarring his grandmother's sauce at the bequest of customers. For decades, the sauce was simmered in a large "Jacuzzi-like tub" in what was essentially a two-car garage, Cress said. Workers mixed in freshly cooked meat and jarred each batch by hand.

In 2005, the new owners constructed a 20,000-square-feet plant on the same Main Street site as the original production facility.

"It was our first attempt at professional-grade kettles and better packaging," Cress said.

Capacity, however, did not keep up with demand, and the process remained too labor intensive. Multimillion dollar upgrades in late 2018 were aimed at increasing output. The plant was stripped down to its bones and modernized with computer-driven simmering kettles and automated mixing and packaging equipment.

Cooking volume increased from 1,300 gallons to 3,200 gallons per batch, according to Tom Bonk, director of operations. Production rose from 70 to more than 200 jars a minute.

"We built this plant for the future," Bonk said, noting how uniquely "compact" the operations are. "The production space is 4,000 square feet and packaging is another 2,000 square feet, so in 6,000 square feet, we could produce 65,000 jars of sauce a day if we wanted to."

Even with the automated equipment, Mid's owners "haven't toyed with the family recipe," Cress said. Mid's sauce is still simmered for hours, unlike larger brands, which steam their sauce in minutes. The company's meat varieties also include a heaping, 11- ounce portion of "fresh, never frozen" beef or pork, he said. Most other sauce makers use so little protein in their meat sauces, they have to say "meat flavored" on their labels.

Then there's the jar size. Mid's continues to market its sauce in 32-ounce jars, while most of the field has moved to the more standard 24-ounce size. That means that while Mid's is a bit pricier per jar than national brands, "we are pretty competitive when it comes to value," the principal said.

Cress added that the higher price point translates into a stronger connection and more co-promotional opportunities with grocers, who "would rather make 30% on a $4 or $5 sale than a $2 sale."

With new capacity up and running, the company plans to refocus efforts on maximizing supply relationships with its current customers, as well as moving into new markets. Just as Kroger and Publix brought Mid's into supermarkets along the East Coast and across the Midwest and much of the South, Cress sees opportunities for greater footprint expansion through new prospects like Costco, Whole Foods Market and The Fresh Market.

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Stark County sauce maker Mid's simmers back to profitability - Crain's Cleveland Business
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