Business Profile

It was noon on a Sunday, and Stonebridge Gyros and Café was in trouble. Perched atop the Illinois Tollway in the O’Hare Oasis, the eatery had run out of gyro meat. It was a holiday weekend, and co-owner Bob Bozonelos hadn’t anticipated the surge in traffic – and sales.

Desperate, Bozonelos dialed his supplier’s cell phone. Peter Bartzis, CEO and owner of Devanco Foods Inc., picked up even though he was picnicking with his family. Two hours later, Bartzis himself delivered a fresh shipment of meat.

“That is the kind of service no money can buy,” Bozonelos said. “The product is marvelous and his service is outstanding. He’s 24/7, this guy.”

“This guy” is passionate about building relationships with his customers.

Bartzis strives to treat his customers with the intimacy and respect of a small business while Devanco Foods blossoms in size and sales. The Elk Grove Village-based company makes lamb gyro meat for about 400 customers in the Chicago area and about 100 distributors around the country. It also manufactures and distributes Italian beef, Italian sausage, meatballs, rib eye steaks and other Mediterranean food products.

“One thing I want to do with Devanco is keep it running like a small company, like a family business,” Bartzis said. “We want to stay small and nimble, make decisions quickly, meet with customers, assess their needs and then go back home and try to see if we can’t internally fulfill their needs.” At a big company, customers’ requests move through a chain of command and “tend to bottleneck,” Bartzis declared.

There’s a bit of good-humored irony, though, in that Devanco Foods is neither tiny nor family-run. The company has its roots in a Chicago restaurant called Central Gyros. Founder George Apostolou began providing wholesale gyro meat to local restaurants in 1975, so restaurateurs wouldn’t have to make the spiced ground lamb from scratch. In 1986, Apostolou sold his company to Kronos Foods Inc., then opened up an Italian beef company called Devanco Foods five years later. In 1993, Apostolou’s production plants pumped out gyros as well.

 In 2003, Bartzis heard that Apostolou might sell; the restaurateur-cum-wholesaler was ready to retire and his children didn’t plan to take over the business. Bartzis, who had spent 18 years at Kronos Foods, quickly assembled a super-squad of former employees to take over the business: Kronos’s former  chief financial officer, vice president of national sales and marketing director all joined forces with Bartzis to purchase Devanco in January 2004.

At that time, Devanco was pulling in about $6.5 million in annual sales. By investing in production, "shifting employees’ mindsets" and drawing in customers with "superior service," Bartzis tripled that number in three years: 2006 revenues were $20 million. What’s more, Bartzis said he hopes to bring in $40 million to $50 million annually by 2010.

 Though growth is steady, it hasn’t been easy, Bartzis admitted.

“The challenge is getting people that’ve worked at a company for years to buy into this strategy of growth,” he said. “You don’t buy a company to maintain it, you buy it to grow the sales and earnings. And in doing so, there were employees that had been there for ten years and were used to working in a small environment. But in order to grow, it’s my job as CEO to get everybody on board.”

Some staff replacements and heavy capital expenditures showed that Bartzis and his team were serious about their goal of eventually topping $50 million in annual sales. They spent $1.5 million updating their facilities in the last two and a half years, bringing in new technology and improved production methods.

With an up-to-date production plant in place, Devanco is creating and seeking out markets for both innovative new products and old favorites.  The company’s poised to release a new chicken gyro product, one that’s less ground meat and more whole muscle meat, like "authentic European gyro meat." It is a product that has taken two years to develop, but one that Bartzis feels will catch on quickly.

“Gyros haven’t changed much in 30 years, but this product is revolutionary and should open up some new opportunities for us,” he said.  Devanco is also “opening up doors that may have been serviced by competitors,” primarily by differentiating itself with service.

“You try not to just be price-competitive but to be service-oriented,” he explained. Superior service breeds customer loyalty, and personal attention and strong customer relationships give Devanco the advantages of a small, family-run business, he said.

Bozonelos is living testimony that Bartzis’s approach is working. “I do have people that knock on my door and offer me a lot of money in free products to switch,” he said. “I don’t do it because I deal in my life with a lot of people, and this guy is the king of service.”

Of course, Devanco Foods also strives to maintain a competitive edge by keeping prices low, monitoring material and labor costs per pound and keeping operating costs to a minimum. Rising prices of corn, cattle and other commodities have driven up the input costs of Devanco’s products, perhaps permanently. Just as consumers have grown accustomed to spending a whopping $3-plus for a gallon of gas, the days of food being inexpensive are over and the food industry will have to adjust, Bartzis said.

“We’ve had to increase [prices] this year, and in my 20-plus years in the business, it’s always been difficult to raise,” Bartzis explained. “Part of what we want to do is help them through this, helping our customers to promote their businesses so that they can survive this overall food inflation.”