Their business is sizzling
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Pitco employee Tee Currier (center) assembles a filter system for a frialator at the company's Bow facility. The company is the second largest manufacturer of frialators in the country and has a large base of clients including McDonald's, Taco Bell, and KFC. |
| If you put the declining manufacturing industry together with Americans'
ever-growing obsession with healthy eating, the prospects for a company
that churns out deep fryers don't look so hot. But fryer-maker Pitco
Frialator in Bow has managed to buck both trends, boosting fryer sales
about 30 percent in the past three years.
In part, Pitco's recent growth is due to a dozen new products and organizational changes that have made the fryer-maker more efficient. But (cholesterol hounds, cover your ears) we're also not quite as healthy as we might have thought: Worldwide demand for Pitco's French-fry and donut machines has shot up, Pitco President Phil Dei Dolori said. "There's a lot of truth about the health aspect, but the reality is the fryer market is growing, not declining," Dei Dolori said.At Pitco, where fryer sales have gone from under $58 million in 2001 to $70 million last year - and are projected to hit $85 million in 2005 -skyrocketing figures aren't due simply to expanding appetites. In the late 1990s, the company was bought by refrigerator giant Maytag, which pumped cash into research and development and manufacturing equipment. The Maytag years are generally remembered as dismal ones of centralization, bureaucracy and poor customer relations (Dei Dolori, a 20-year Pitco veteran, left), but they bequeathed to the fryer manufacturer a legacy of efficient operating habits and $5.7 million in top-of-the-line equipment.So when Illinois-based Middleby Corp. bought Pitco and sister company charbroiler-maker MagiKitch'n in 2001 (Maytag sold at a $70 million loss), Dei Dolori returned, and the fryer-maker was ready to crank. In the past four years, Middleby's stock has shot up from under $5 a share in 2001 to about $50 a share now, and Dei Dolori saidPitco has largely been the reason for the explosion. "Pitco is the rocket fuel behind the growth," Dei Dolori said. "We're growing at three times the rate of the industry."Middleby CEO Selim Bassoul said the company first looked to the Bow fryer-maker to round out its offerings of cooking equipment. Bassoul said worldwide demand for fryers has been on the rise, especially in China."Ethnic and fast casual is driving the fryer business significantly around the world, not only in the United States," he said. "There's a huge middle class growing in China. . . . Finger foods are big (there)." Bassoul said Pitco was a good buy because the company can innovate, producing evermore efficient fryers to keep up with fast food trends.Pitco managers said they are now working on making fryers adaptable to some of the healthier oils that fast food companies have decided to try. "They have the ability to take concepts they are very strong in and go into new markets," Bassoul said."Now they are the leader in the pasta cooker in the U.S." Just for the record: Pitco fryers fry up 7 million pounds of potatoes a day.While other manufacturers are shutting their doors and shipping production overseas, Dei Dolori said outsourcing isn't about to become an issue. Materials, not labor, are what drive his costs up. Nor is Pitco Frialator trimming its workforce. The 270-employee company is hoping to be at 300 by the end of the year. There are about 700,000 Pitco fryers worldwide, according to Bassoul, and Pitco managers say they can tell their own right off."If any one of us walks into a restaurant and looks for six or seven seconds, we'll know whose fryer, whose oven, whose charbroiler they're using," Dei Dolori said. Fryer-making comes with perks, too: Sometimes clients, like Kentucky Fried Chicken or Long John Silver's, asks them to test products out.Pitco managers like to recount the time former governor Craig Benson came for a tour of the factory. Benson was dumbfounded, they say, that such a burgeoning company was right in the State House backyard. They put him to work too, frying.They've already put in a request to have Gov. John Lynch stop by and have been told they could get a visit after the Legislature lets out. But they might have to check with his wife, nutritionist Dr. Susan Lynch. After all, they still make the things that make fries.
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