SUCCESSFUL CAREER STORY

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 39, 18 October 1946, Page 7

SUCCESSFUL CAREER STORY

STARTED ON BUSINESS ON “HUNCH” DOZEN ORANGES AND SUGAR Starting in business with a dozen oranges, a few lemons and ten pounds of sugar, a modest but enterprising Buffalo man has developed in the last 13 years a thriving plant which last year produced and sold more than 4,000,000 pounds of jellies, jams, preserves and marmalade. ,

He is Aloysius J. Abels, owner of Colonial Preserves, 1700 Elmwood Avenue. He started in business on a “hunch” during the depths of the depression.

In the early 1900’s, Mr Abels prospered as a manufacturers’ representative, selling machines and other equipment. Later he went into the manufacture of machines, but this business failed. In the lush days of 1929, he entered the investment business when selling stocks was “as easy as rolling off a log.” Shortly after, the market crashed and he lost all his savings. “I was broke and couldn’t get a job,” Mr Abels related. “One day I saw a girl eating bread covered with marmalade. I thought the manufacture of marmalade would make a profitable business. So I bought some oranges, lemons, and sugar and concocted my own.” He sold the first batch among friends who operated restaurants and stores. It was a success from the beginning. It was made first in an apartment, but as business mushroomed, he shifted to the larger quarters of a garage on Fillmore Avenue. Then, in 1939 he leased about 18,000 square feet in the Larkin Warehouse. This still wasn’t big enough. So in April, 1945, he moved to larger quarters in the Elmwood Avenue structure where the company occupies 40,000 square feet of leased space. The present equipment represents an investment of about 100,000 dollars. Colonial’s manufacture of jellies, jams, preserves and marmalade is on a mass-production basis. The ingredients are cooked in a battery of six gleaming kettles, each with a capacity of 100 gallons. These are hooked up with a maze of stainless steel pipes and fittings. From the cooking kettles, the jelly and jam flow into a filling machine which pours the product into glass jars or cans. The filled jams move on a conveyor to another machine where they are vacuum sealed. They continue to move on conveyors into a cooling tunnel where they are sprayed with water. After cooling, they move up to a labelling machine and are made ready for shipment. The plant uses liquid sugar which is brought in by railroad tank car and pumped into three large storage tanks with a total capacity of 32,000 gallons.—The tanks are hooked up with the cooking kettles"by pipes.

“The plant has a capacity of 2000 cases, or 48,000 pounds of jams and jellies a day,” Mr Abels said. “However, we are operating at only 50 per cent, of capacity because of the sugar shortage. About 70 per cent, of the products produced last year went to the armed forces. Every recipe used here I concocted myself by eavesdropping and from textbooks.” The firm has 32 workers, but during the canning season adds about 75 more.