San Leandro's Torani flavored syrup company celebrates 100 years

Torani flavored syrup company celebrates 100 years

San Leandoro's Torani flavored syrup company celebrates 100 years

SAN LEANDRO, Calif. - The idea came from Italy with Italian sodas. They are now in cocktails, mocktails, and lattes. 

And all these creations, filled in colorful bottles, were made at Torani in San Leandro, now celebrating 100 years in business.

"We’re celebrating our 100th anniversary," said Torani CEO Melanie Dulbecco. "And it’s finally our coming out party, so finally people know that we are made in the bay for 100 years."

The Tori family is from San Francisco. 

They went to visit relatives in Lucca, Italy and brought back recipes for Torani syrups, and started making them by hand in North Beach. 

"It was a wife and husband team," Dulbecco said, "stirring it up, pouring it into the bottles and then going out and selling it in the neighborhood."

In the beginning, Torani was making products during the Prohibition in San Francisco, so company officials thought it was wise to have a "brand experience that spoke to that time," Dulbecco explained. 

After the Prohibition was repealed, Torani expanded into liquors and cordials, but didn't stop there.

"Fast-forward to the 1980s, a retired coffee veteran was in Café Trieste," Dulbecco said, "and saw Torani behind the counter, asked about it, and bought a few bottles and stirred up the first flavored latte. We even taught Starbucks how to make flavored lattes."

Innovating and staying current helped drive sales, and that meant Torani was bursting at the seams.  

"In the last 34 years, we’ve grown on average 20 percent a year," Dulbecco said, "which means we’ve doubled in size every four years, and we are continuing on that pathway."

They hired a team to look into the pros and cons of staying in the Bay Area or leaving. They decided to make the employees the priority. 

"Here's a zip code map of where our team members live," Dulbecco said. "This is the radius that we're willing to consider. Our goal is 100 percent retention when we move."

Employee Carla Huerta agrees that Torani cares about the workers.

"That's what I love about them," Huerta said. 

Francisco Santos, the production lead at Torani, said he is close to retiring after 23 years at the company, but he said: "I’m having so much fun, I’m not thinking about retiring."

Torani makes about 500,000 bottles of flavored syrups a day, said Greg Philips, director of manufacturing, who explained the process of assembling the ingredients and mixing them up. 

A large portion of those ingredients is sugar. 

"The two largest tanks here are sugar," Philips said. "We go through about a half a million pounds of sugar every single day."

There are 160 different syrups at Torani, which are invented through ideas, trends and food scientists who develop a flavor profile, and something called a gold standard tasting.

There are even flavors called "rose," "white peach," "salted caramel," "dragon fruit" and "champagne vanilla," said Torani food scientist Mailyne Park.

"I think people don't realize how many flavor profiles there are," she said. 

Dulbecco said that the variety of flavors shows what Torani is all about. 

"Flavor for all, opportunity for all," she said. "Flavor is, of course, what we make. It's also what each of us brings."