washington business
In Their Words
Pandemic or not, Justin Erickson’s job is to supply small
grocery stores and restaurants with a fresh and reliable
food supply. Erickson is the CEO of Harbor Foods Group, a
family business started by his great-grandfather in 1923.
There are two subsidiaries. Harbor Wholesale serves
about 3,000 convenience stores and small grocery stores
in the Pacific Northwest. And after a major acquisition
late last year, the company created Harbor Foodservice to
manage the needs of about 1,800 restaurants.
Today, the company’s employees are managing three
facilities and 110 trucks to make sure restaurants and
grocery stores are stocked throughout Washington,
Oregon, Idaho, Northern California and Alaska.
He recently discussed the turbulent spring of 2020 with
Washington Business.
Justin Erickson
Things moved really fast this spring. I
remember thinking, it’s time to stock up
the freezer. It’s been a blur since March.
What’s happened at Harbor since then?
It was interesting, you bring up a good point.
You weren’t the only one that decided it was
time to stock up the freezer or make sure you
have enough toilet paper for the next century.
Things like Clorox wipes here became a hot
commodity. In terms of our wholesale business
that supplies retail stores, we were slammed
immediately — demand went up, sales went up,
we started having supply chain issues with the
manufacturers, not being able to get enough
inventory in the warehouse to fulfill customer
demand. Stores that we serviced that you
wouldn’t think of (when you think of going to
load up with those things, you think of Costco
or these big box stores) but what people were
also doing is visiting their neighborhood store,
their local country store or community store to
buy these products.
And how did that play out?
And in some cases, there’s a comfort level with going there because
it is small neighborhood store…Another thing that unfolded that was
interesting, URM wholesale grocers in Spokane, they supply supermarkets
throughout Eastern Washington, Northern Idaho and Montana. They were
so overwhelmed by the demand that they were unable to service the small
grocers and restaurants that they typically delivered to. So going into this,
one of the leaders over there at URM called me and said, “We can’t get to
these customers. We can’t service them. Can you step in and service these
customers for us?”
What happened?
This was not a small undertaking. It was about 200 customers in total — call
it 100 retail grocery type customers and 100 restaurant customers. And we
jumped in to provide service to those rural communities throughout Eastern
Washington that really depend on those small stores. There was nobody
else out there, and the nearest big box store, in some cases it’s 30, 40 miles
away. So, in 48 hours, we were able to turn around and have an operational
plan up and ready to go do that. Today URM is back up and running in that
business once again, so it was a real unique time, when two companies were
able to partner together, that would ordinarily be competitors to make sure
that these communities were receiving service.
We’re all proud of that. We were able to provide more jobs in some cases
where we would have had to lay some people off, which I guess brings me
to the other half of our business.
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