“Things are looking pretty good this year,” said Bruce Klein, director of marketing for the third-generation, family-owned enterprise. “Business has been strong because there’s always a demand for garlic.”“Some places, such as Spain, have been producing more garlic, while a place like California is at its limit due to production costs,” he said. “We’ll have both of those, garlic from Argentina, Chinese garlic for people who want that. There’s also Chile. There are just many different growing regions, and we handle them all.”
Maurice A. Auerbach works with an array of customers — retail chains, foodservice distributors, ingredient companies and various markets such as Hunts Point and the Philadelphia Market.
“It’s a day-to-day business and everyone works hard to make sure we are doing our best for our customers,” Klein said. “You need to give your customers what they want — good quality, a fair price and product when they need it.”
The biggest challenge today is logistics, and Klein noted sometimes there’s just nothing you can do.
“You don’t have control over that,” he said. “Boats can be late, the ports have been problematic, so you have to have product on hand and you can’t count on when a boat docks that you will get the product the next day. That’s definitely the toughest part of the business right now.”
The company continues to expand and grow when it makes sense. “We’ve added some new people,” Klein said. “We’re trying to make everything work. There is definitely some growth in our business. We tend to stick with what we know best but if an item makes sense from a growing region that we’re already buying from and it makes sense and we can do things the right way, we will consider adding it.”
Behind the scenes, Maurice A. Auerbach has been updating its computer and labeling systems in an effort to stay ahead. “There’s always been a lot of technology and things are always evolving, and we make sure to use the technology in the right way,” Klein said. “Adding scales, weight-check points and things like that so we don’t have any issues at the retail level. We make sure to have checks and balances here.”
