Torani, the century-old syrup company based in San Leandro, California, has never laid off an employee — not during the Great Depression, not in the 2008 recession, and not during the Covid-19 shutdowns that closed the cafes buying most of its product.
CEO Melanie Dulbecco, who has run the company for 35 years, told Fortune the streak is now being tested again as generative and agentic AI reshape entry-level corporate work. 'It is going to dramatically change things, and we're all going to live through this together, but our approach is going to be the same as it has been,' she said.
The numbers come first. Torani was founded in 1925 by Italian immigrants selling hand-crafted syrups in San Francisco. It pivoted to liqueurs after Prohibition ended in 1933 and didn't enter the coffee-syrup business it's known for today until 1982. When Dulbecco joined in 1991, Torani had nine employees and roughly $700,000 in annual revenue. This year, the company expects to bring in more than $800 million with just 500 employees — averaging 20% annual revenue growth over 35 years, according to Dulbecco.
A year into her tenure, Starbucks — then a small Seattle chain — approached Torani about becoming its private-label syrup manufacturer. Taking the deal meant becoming a low-cost producer and swapping cane sugar for high-fructose corn syrup, according to Stanford Business School students Torani brought in to study the decision. The company chose to stay premium instead.
In 2020, that same instinct to protect the business kept Torani in the Bay Area during a planned move to its current San Leandro campus. When California's Covid-19 shutdown order hit mid-move, Dulbecco said her team ran the financial scenarios and concluded the only way to avoid layoffs was to accelerate the relocation and get new equipment running immediately. Business dipped in April, she said, but rebounded as e-commerce and retail demand filled the gap left by shuttered cafes.
Dulbecco said the company applies the same framework to AI adoption now, asking what value existing employees can add rather than treating the technology purely as a cost-cutting tool. 'What we find is our team is more likely to embrace new technologies also because there's confidence and an openness to learning new things because they know we've got their backs and they've got ours,' she said. Torani also runs a wealth-sharing plan on top of 401(k) matching and bonuses, according to Dulbecco.
The closing read: Torani's story is a case study in what free enterprise can deliver without a single dollar of taxpayer bailout money or a government labor mandate. A private company, owned by a family and run by a long-tenured CEO, chose to compound capital patiently — 20% annual growth for 35 years — rather than chase private-label margins by cutting corners on quality or headcount.
That is the market rewarding discipline, not decree. No agency ordered Torani to protect its workforce through the Depression, the 2008 crash, or Covid; the company's owners decided that loyalty and quality were the better long-term bet, and the balance sheet backed them up. As Washington debates how to regulate AI's effect on labor, Torani offers a quieter argument: sound capital allocation and clear ownership, not mandates from Sacramento or Washington, are what let a business keep its people and still grow.
