washington business
What about the food service side of the business?
So, when the restaurants were shut down, our customers were basically out of business
and sales in our new food service business dropped dramatically. Our customers…they
didn’t need to order food anymore. They’re trying to go through the food supply they
had on hand.
They began to reopen for takeout only. So, the business ultimately settled in there
for a little while at about 30% of our normal volume. That left us with extra trucks,
extra labor resources. And the last thing we want to do as a family company is lay
people off and make substantial cuts. So, we saw this Eastern Washington opportunity
…as something our team could focus on, that was positive. It was taking our company
forward, it was helping others and, ultimately put people to work that might have
otherwise been laid off. So overall, that was a plus.
It certainly seemed out of balance, between the food service and the
wholesale divisions.
While the retail items were out of stock at the manufacturer, we were having a hard
time fulfilling orders. We had the opposite effect with the restaurant inventory.
Restaurants are shut down. We have a warehouse full of perishable food, and we
had truckloads of food still coming into our warehouse because we order from our
vendors with about a two-week lead time. There were already trucks on the road
when we shut down that were inbound to our facility that we couldn’t turn away.
So, we see this inventory is ballooning, it’s perishable…This is a disaster here. We’ve
got our retail store customers we can’t supply at an adequate level and we’ve got our
restaurant customers with all this inventory and we can’t sell it to anybody because
the restaurants are shut down.
We looked at our business and thought, ‘What can we do to help the community
during this time?’ We realized the resource that we had to contribute was this excess
food and in a lot of cases, perishable food that would have gone to waste without us
doing something. So, we quickly spawned a program called
Harbor Cares, and we started assembling food boxes to
donate to people in need during this time. We always believe
that philanthropy starts at home. So, we wanted to make
sure our team members at Harbor were taken care of.
We put together care packages for all our employees
at our three distribution centers, distributed those out on
grandfather
Saturdays for a couple of weekends in a row. Then, we
decided to support the out-of-work restaurant employees.
We went to a handful of our customers and worked with
them to set up operations to distribute these food boxes out
to employees that they had laid off.
I think through that initial effort, we were able to support
about 500 families with 6,000 meals, just in the restaurant
community.
justin erickson at a glance
CEO of Harbor Foods Group, a company founded by his great
Has served in nearly all aspects of the business including
transportation, warehousing, merchandising and sales.
B.A. in Business Administration from the University of Puget Sound;
MBA from Saint Martin’s University
What do you want your family to
remember about this time, years
from now?
A lot of different things. One, be prepared for the
reality that things like this can really happen.
We’ve all been through those disaster planning
exercises…and you put these plans together and
certainly hope you never have to enact them.
But it’s always good to remember when leading
a company that these things can happen and to
be prepared for it, and make sure you’re in a
position of strength to weather the storm.
Two, from a family business ownership
standpoint, family first. Not only with our own
family that owns and operates the business, but
for the families that work with our company and
understanding that they’ve got their own crises
to work through personally, with their kids and
everything else going on in life outside of just
trying to help us manage through this.
Lastly, our strong values that include
communication and transparency are critically
important. Our years of serving our team well,
and treating people right helped us build the
loyalty necessary to weather the storm. Our
team understood the difficult decisions we had
to make and supported us enthusiastically.
summer 2020
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