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WEEKLY FOCUS: MANUFACTURING, Page 12 VOL. 40, NO. 40
OCTOBER 7 - 13, 2019
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Fallout from HTM closing runs deep Home Team clients, employees wonder where money went By Kevin Kleps kkleps@crain.com @KevinKleps
and Indonesia as a way to make income for those lucky enough to have the right kind of land at the right elevation in the right temperate zone. “When you look at that pyramid, around 12 million are smallholder producers,” Ott said, “so you’re talking about less than 2 hectares (just under 5 acres) of land. So they’re very small.” Smucker might deal with nearly any of them and does deal with thousands each year, she said. Companies such as Smucker are taking steps to ensure that growers, many of them impoverished and with limited resources, can thrive. Ott has visited several. Before taking her current role in 2016, she spent 10 years trading coffee for Smucker and Procter & Gamble’s Folgers brand, which Smucker acquired in 2008 for a little less than $3 billion in mostly stock. With the sharp reduction in the number of growers, it’s little wonder Smucker spends a great deal of time, energy and resources securing the sustainability of its supply of beans, and Ott said the company's efforts are broad.
Erin Telisman only worked at Home Team Marketing for about a year. It didn’t take long for Telisman to realize the company — which shut down on Sept. 25 after 18 years in business — wasn’t being honest with its clients. “When there were check issues, I thought it was the person in the finance department,” said Telisman, who was an account manager at HTM’s Cleveland office. “But she was basically just following the lead of Steve (O’Neill, the CEO). It was always the same thing: ‘I sent it already. I’ll resubmit.’ “I’m thinking: Is she just setting these checks in a drawer and not doing anything with them?” That theme — clients, the majority of whom were schools and nonprofits, not getting what they were owed — was a common one at Home Team Marketing, according to more than 10 sources who spoke with Crain’s. The groups are holding out hope that they will be reimbursed, which is why some say they’re hesitant to speak on the record. Thus far, though, their calls have mostly gone unanswered, as HTM’s offices and website have shut down and O’Neill isn’t responding to messages. At its peak, Home Team Marketing — which connected brands with thousands of schools across the country (many in Northeast Ohio) and, via a partnership with Eventbrite, had a digital ticketing platform called TicketRoar — had more than 40 of its 50 employees based in Cleveland.
SEE SMUCKER, PAGE 7
SEE HOME TEAM, PAGE 19
MANUFACTURING
WITH A SUPPLY CHAIN LIKE SMUCKER’S ... J.M. Smucker Co. deals with about 15 million growers of coffee plants, like the ones seen here, around the globe. And because the Orville company wants its coffee business to thrive, it’s taking steps to help growers do the same. (Contributed photo)
In business of coffee, Orrville company must navigate complicated brew of suppliers By Dan Shingler dshingler@crain.com @DanShingler
If there was a contest to determine which company manages the most complex and difficult supply chain — or one that’s the most important to its future — the prize might go to J.M. Smucker Co. in Orrville. It’s not the berries and peanuts of the jams and peanut butter that are the greatest challenge; it’s the beans — as in the Arabica and robusta beans that go into Folgers and other
brands of coffee that Smucker owns. Because whereas there are relatively few major suppliers for peanuts and a manageable number for berries and most other U.S. food products, coffee comes from literally millions of individual farms that circle the world in a geographic band around the equator. “Around 15 million growers is sort of our best estimate these days,” said Rebecca Ott, Smucker’s director of sustainability and its point person for helping to keep as many of those growers and their businesses healthy as possible.
Entire contents © 2019 by Crain Communications Inc.
(Bloomberg)
She’s not joking or even exaggerating, either, casually adding that “that number had generally been 25 million” as she thinks back on 15 years in the industry. The vast number of suppliers exists because throughout much of the world, coffee is a cottage industry of sorts, grown on small plots in Africa or on hillsides in Central America
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