Stephen Hirzel is well aware that in order for his family business, Hirzel Canning Company and Farms, to have lasted 100 years, they had to have been doing something right. 

“One of our values is resourcefulness,” Mr. Hirzel, the company’s president, said Friday, “that runs pretty deep in the DNA of a lot of the Hirzels that are involved. It has carried over into the culture of what we call our Hirzel Family, or our employees. It is a resourcefulness that is always being able to adapt to what is going on in the market.”   

Headquartered in Northwood, Hirzel Canning overcame humble beginnings to become a major player in the national tomato product market.  

Founded in 1923, the company, with plants in Northwood, Pemberville and Ottawa and a farming operation near Luckey, now distributes in 36 states from the midwest to Florida and Texas. 

The story goes that family patriarch Carl Hirzel, an immigrant from Switzerland was living in Buffalo, New York, when he lost his job as a brew master due to Prohibition. He then moved to northwest Ohio, where his brothers already lived. 

The elder Mr. Hirzel would purchase 60 acres of farmland near what is now Northwood, and started to farm. 

First came cabbage, turned into sauerkraut through his fermentation expertise, which became the product that got the family their proverbial foot in the door, as the large German and Polish populations of the area came to love the high quality of the product he made.

They initially had trouble hawking their fresh products and breaking into an established produce market, but that changed after a local butcher who liked the family sauerkraut, told them that there was an untapped market for canned vegetables.

“Father came back and told mother what the butcher said,” Carl’s son Karl told the Blade in 1980. “My mother, being a woman of action, immediately began peeling tomatoes.”

Hirzel now produces dozens of different varieties of tomatoes and sauerkraut and produces jalapeno and Hungarian peppers for use in their salsas and other products as well. 

“It was an everyday affair,” Steve, Karl’s grandson, said of his upbringing. “You would go out after school and report to your dad and you do work. As you get near high school you think, ‘do I want to be doing this my whole life?’”

Mr. Hirzel initially thought he did not want to be a part of the family business and spent time working in California after college, where he noted that a significant amount of the world’s tomato production is located.

Eventually, he felt the call to return and moved back to northwest Ohio in the 1990s. He then officially started at the family business with a position in sales and worked his way up through the ranks to company president, a position his dad Karl Hirzel, Jr., held for three decades.

He said that the resourcefulness that has kept the company going manifests itself in multiple places, including the way that while cans will always be the bread and butter of the company, they now do glass jars, pouches, cartons, and industrial bags.   

“You have to be an expert in your industry,” Mr. Hirzel said, noting that nine members of his fourth generation of Hirzels, four members of the fifth generation, and two uncles from the third generation still work in the administration of the business. “You have to understand it, study it, and live it. That has been embedded in the culture for a number of years and that carries over into the process.”

Mr. Hirzel said the biggest challenge for the company nowadays is meeting consumer demands, how they want things to taste and how they want to access things after the company brings them to market.

This is largely accomplished through one-on-one interactions with customers and getting the taste of something exactly how they want it. Mr. Hirzel described this as little adjustments that add up to something great. 

“Most people can do it on the table top in the kitchen, but it is a different story when they want to take it into manufacturing,” he said. “That is where we shine.”   

The family does a large amount of private label service for customers like Gordon Foods or other companies that either use Hirzel products in their own products, or resell in large quantities to places like restaurants.  

Of the three main retail labels the company itself puts out, Star Cross, a sauerkraut brand, is a reference to the family’s Swiss-American heritage. 

Silver Fleece, another sauerkraut brand, began independently as Clyde Kraut Co. almost 100 years ago itself, and was bought by Hirzel in the 1970s. 

Dei Fratelli, meaning “the brothers” in Italian, is an Italian-leaning tomato brand the company has been producing since the 1980s. 

It refers to the way in which the Hirzel brothers were instrumental in the company’s initial growth after Carl died in 1933. 

Steve said he feels the weight of that family legacy fairly often. 

He knows Hirzel products are not always the cheapest and he takes pride in that, as the company does not sacrifice quality.  

“My understanding with those first tomatoes was that it was great product,” he said of his great-grandfather’s first canned tomatoes. “There was something he did with the recipe, just with the whole tomato, that separated it from everyone else. People said that is good, we have to have this.” 

He said that stories are important in a company as old as Hirzel Canning, and he noted something his uncle Joe, now into his 80s and still chairman of the Hirzel board, said at a board meeting held Thursday. 

“He said ‘whatever you guys do, do not forget quality,’” Mr. Hirzel said. “At the end of the day, if someone has two choices and they are both the same price, you are going to pick the one that has the best flavor. I do not think we have ever lost that in the culture.

“I would say the industry looks at us as the Hirzels: very credible, do what they say they are going to do, and quality is right at the top,” he said.  

This quality is something that customers notice too. 

Churchill’s, the local grocer whose founding predates Hirzel’s by six years, has been a customer of the company for almost their whole existence. 

“They are good people,” Walt Churchill Jr., the store’s President and CEO, said of the family Thursday. “We have a happy, long history with them and we are looking forward to moving forward with them for many more years.” 

Mr. Churchill said that his stores work a lot with Associated Wholesale Grocers, a warehouse based in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which is not exactly close by. As such, he said that what he actually has brought to Northwest Ohio to stock in his stores needs to meet a very high standard, which he said Hirzel products like Dei Fratelli always meet. 

“They have a very integrated operation,” Mr. Churchill said of the Hirzel product. “It is good tomato country around here so the quality of their product is very good.” 

Mr. Hirzel’s cousin Jessica Hirzel, is manager of the Northwood plant, and supply chain manager for the company and said Friday that this legacy of quality is something she thinks about often. 

“It is about stewardship,” Ms. Hirzel said. “The people before us built this, we have been here long enough that there is a piece of us here too but you feel like you have to caretake. You have to make sure that all the success that came before you is not being washed away by your activities. You want to make sure that you are building on the reputation of the family. It is a responsibility that I think we all hold.” 

Ms. Hirzel oversees around 50 employees at the Northwood plant, a third of the employees at the entire company, and echoed something her cousin mentioned about treating employees right, as a last ingredient of that “magic formula” for long-term viability as a company, especially in an industry that demands long hours once the harvest comes in the fall. 

“I have only been in this role for three years but I have been in the company for a lot longer and I know a lot of these people,” she said, mentioning that Hirzel now has some employees who have been in the company for three-plus decades or have had multiple generations employed at the plant. “To me, it is about respect. I try to continuously think of better ways to show that respect.”

She mentioned how the long-term employees bring so much knowledge and experience and that needs to be cultivated, whether that is asking their opinion about a taste of something, or looping them in for ways to increase safety on the factory floor.  

“It is showing the respect for them gathering that experience but also making them understand that they now have something to give back that is of value,” Ms. Hirzel said. “A lot of it is about communication and how do I talk to people so that they know I value them.”    

First Published February 26, 2023, 1:30 p.m.