NEW YORK  – With a new generation assuming leadership and doubling down on the company’s accelerating transformation from a New-York-based supplier of veal and lamb to a multi-protein, value-added retail, and foodservice supplier with national reach, Mosner Family Brands is The National Provisioner’s 2023 Processor of the Year.

The new direction for Mosner Family Brands is being charted by the company’s third generation of leadership, siblings Seth Mosner, president, Ben Mosner, CEO, and Jessica Mosner, executive vice president of strategic sales.

Their titles also cross over to New-Jersey-based Great American Foods, which they acquired in December 2022 right after completing their succession plan to assume leadership of Mosner Family Brands in November of 2022. The acquisition was a calculated step in their turn toward growing the company’s capabilities and reach as a value-added supplier, thanks to Great American Foods’ largely automated production process, which offers faster speed and increased scalability.

Closer to home — and also in December 2022 — Mosner Family Brands purchased neighboring space at its longtime Bronx home in the Hunts Point Cooperative Market, expanding from 20,000 square feet (that currently is largely devoted to lamb and veal fabrication) to add an additional 17,000 square feet.

While the Bronx operation will continue doing lamb and veal carcass fabrication (along with some beef, pork, and poultry portion cutting), it soon will be doing a great deal more.

“The next iteration of Mosner in the Bronx facility is also being able to process value-added proteins as well, whether it be julienne strips for a stir-fry or a marinated spatchcock chicken,” Seth said, adding that the addition will free up more capacity at the Great American Foods facility for other projects.

“This new space is well positioned to alleviate some of the future bottlenecks we are expecting in New Jersey,” he said.

Construction on the Bronx expansion is scheduled to begin in June 2023, with the project wrapping up in fall of 2023.

“Fortunately, we're not building a new structure from the ground up, but extensively renovating an existing facility” Seth said. “We'll exit the year with our expanded footprint in full operation.”

Some of Mosner Family Brands’ strongest growth is happening beyond its New-York-City home — in Florida, Texas, and other areas of the U.S. where there is robust population growth, he said.

“One of the great changes that has happened along this repositioning is Mosner is no longer protein-specific with a tristate area distribution range, but now its manufacturing solutions are oriented to scale with a national distribution base,” Seth said.

Great American gains

The Great American operation enables filling very specific needs for very specific customers, Ben said. “In order to scale the company, we wanted to create more efficiency.”

The Great American Foods facility, which is SQF level two certified, offered Mosner Family Brands greatly expanded opportunities for value-added products, such as the capacity to grind multiple proteins as well as inclusion products — for example, bacon and cheese in a burger patty — as well as a variety of other marinated and seasoned multi-ingredient and ready-to-cook lines.

Great American Foods’ employees brought with them some key skills needed to help Mosner Family Brands in its growing value-added emphasis, including knowledge and experience working grind lines and knowing how to grind many different proteins, whether it be poultry, beef, pork, lamb, or veal.

Incorporating this operational efficiency skill set to its expanding production footprint at its Bronx location meshes with Mosner Family Brands’ evolving culinary-inspired value-added products focus, which currently includes raw multi-protein blends, single-ingredient raw, ready-to-cook — and even some ready-to-eat products as well. Mosner Family Brands works with a co-packer to supply some fully or partially cooked products, Seth said. “Right now, they're co-packing for us, but the Great American partnership began the same way."

The Great American Foods acquisition was a successful proof of concept, Seth said. “It was an important piece that we added on, and we will continue to look for more strategic partners to be able to build upon our capabilities and strengthen our offerings.”

Middle market opportunities

Mosner Family Brands services everything from the white tablecloth restaurant all the way down to pure institutional accounts, with a big part of the business supplying private-label products for retail grocery and foodservice clients, Seth said.

“In addition to private labeling, we support third-party brands,” he said.

“There is a great demand for middle market processing, which we call niche at scale,” Seth said.

In serving the middle market, Mosner Family Brands and Great American Foods are positioned to take on types of processing that may be too small or inefficient for larger companies to build whole plants around but are really of a strategic volume for a middle market manufacturer, Seth said.

A loan for a used station wagon

The Mosners date the beginning of the company to its founding in 1957. David Mosner, grandfather of the three siblings, founded the business. Using a $350 loan from his father-in-law to purchase a used station wagon, David Mosner began as a jobber, making pickups from packers in New York City and making deliveries to butcher shops and restaurants. His business grew to where he was able to rent a rail in a cold storage facility, and he moved into his first space on Brook Avenue in the Bronx. Over the next few decades, he specialized in veal. In 1974, Mosner became one of the original tenants of the Bronx’s Hunts Point Cooperative Market, a 65-acre market with nearly 1 million square feet of refrigerated space that houses a number of meat processors and distributors.

Shortly after the Hunts Point move, two of David’s sons — Michael Mosner and Philip Mosner — joined the business. By the early 1980s, they took the business into its first new direction, moving away from southern veal into a milk-fed veal product and added a second protein, domestic lamb. Into the early 2010s, being a lamb and veal packer was the Mosner calling card.

Ben joined the company in 2001, Jessica in 2009 and Seth in 2011. All three did stints in other industries before joining the company, with Ben working on Wall Street, Jessica in fashion and Seth in finance and management consulting.

“Our father and uncle did not face pressure to join our grandfather in business,” Seth said. “Just the same, my siblings and I were encouraged to pursue other career paths outside the business. And for that reason, Ben, Jessica and I had careers prior to this business before we entered it.”

Seth said that while the three siblings are all very different in a lot of complementary ways, they share a deep entrepreneurial drive.

“I think one of the things that particularly distinguishes our family dynamic, second generation to third versus a lot of others, is we were given agency in making changes from relatively early on in our careers,” Seth said.

That meant taking a hard look at operations and pivoting the business to be in line with the trio’s vision for the future.

“By the time the second generation retired, Ben and Jessica, and I were really well situated and had the experiential maturity to take this business to the next level with great vision,” Seth said.

“We're constantly listening,” Jessica said. “It's not necessarily who can be the most inventive, it's who's the best listener. And I think we really found our footing and our next venture by seeing where there was opportunity and what markets were underserved.”

The Great American deal coupled with the Bronx expansion positions Mosner Family Brands to meet unfulfilled demand in the middle market space.

“We can take programs and incubate them, but then have the capacity in-house to scale, as well,” Seth said. “It's really important that our customers know that we're continuously and aggressively expanding through reinvestment in space and larger more efficient production lines.”

Investing in people

Mosner Family Brands has about 80 employees at its Bronx operation and 50 more at Great American Foods in New Jersey.

“The most beneficial investment that we've made is in the form of people,” Ben said.

Being people-centric includes collecting data around workers and job processes to ensure higher rates of productivity, which interplays with job fulfillment. To that end, Mosner Family Brands put in a new ERP system last year. That — along with other proprietary technological assets that have been developed in house or with a third party — has freed up leadership to be off the production floor, thanks to automated and process-driven levels of quality assurance.

“One of our greatest realizations is that the Mosner family had become the bottleneck of our own continued growth and success because all decisions came across our desk,” Ben said. “We've made a very committed effort to investing in people and infrastructure on the human capital side, and [that] probably more than anything else has enabled our sustainable growth and has made it a lot more fun to do what we do every day.”

He said enabling employees to shine goes hand in hand with operational upgrades, and that those together have positioned the company over the past several years to take advantage of new sales opportunities.

“Over the last couple years through a very concerted effort, there's more stickiness of sales,” Ben said.

“We've tripled our business over the last five years,” he said. “We expect to do it again.”

Even though a Great American employee might work on an automated line and a Mosner employee may have a knife in their hand, the commonality is that there is an incredible amount of specialization and cross-training for both employees, Seth said.

There's a lot of crossover between employees, heightening the focus on skill- and knowledge-based growth for every employee.

“Automation doesn't relieve the importance of people and knowledge,” Jessica said. “You don't just buy a machine that makes a great product or differentiates you from your competitors. There’s tremendous attention to detail involved in the expertise and the execution of what our plants do.”

What’s next?

Building off the company’s ongoing transition from being a meat processing operation to increasingly being a food products solutions provider, Mosner Family Brands finds itself open to and aggressively pursuing new growth opportunities.