Thirty-five years ago, we started in a home kitchen. We haven't lost that kitchen-table feeling since.
Our story
In 1989, Bonnie Lavorato started hand-bottling her own BBQ sauce in her Rochester, NY kitchen, selling it under the name Bonnie's Gourmet Chick-n-Ribs. The demand didn't stay small for long. By 1991, we'd outgrown the kitchen entirely and became Private Label Foods of Rochester, a real production facility built to keep up with restaurants and grocery chains that kept coming back for the same thing: consistency they could count on, batch after batch.
In 1998, we moved into the former Ragu facility, trading a bigger footprint for faster production without losing what made Bonnie's sauce good in the first place. Today, we manufacture out of a 125,000 square foot, SQF-certified facility, but the goal hasn't changed since day one: a sauce that tastes right, every single time.
The goal hasn't changed since day one:
a sauce that tastes right, every single time.
What drives us
We're always working on two things at once: keeping our private label customers' costs down without cutting corners, and pushing our co-pack partners toward more ambitious, higher-end products, custom packaging included. Innovation, for us, doesn't mean chasing trends. It means figuring out how to make something better while staying true to the recipe that got us here.
That same instinct drives us beyond the facility walls too. We're building our own house brands into new markets, always looking for the next product our customers didn't know they needed yet.
Our people
None of this works without the people who show up and make it happen. We're a company that puts people, safety, quality, family, and community first, not because it looks good on a wall, but because Bonnie built it that way from a home kitchen, and we've never seen a reason to change it.