It’s a good problem for a manufacturing company when its 90,000-square-foot facility starts to look too small.
Earth Friendly Products, maker of all-natural cleaning supplies, is planning to move its Garden Grove manufacturing operations to a bigger location in Orange County soon, pending decisions on its bids on potential buildings.
“We need at least 110,000 square feet and more docks,” said Executive Vice President Kelly Vlahakis-Hanks, who oversees the OC operations for the Addison, Ill.-based company, which her father, Van Vlahakis, started in 1967.
The Garden Grove factory has long been the biggest producer for Earth Friendly, which operates other U.S. plants in Illinois, Florida, New Jersey and Washington. The company recently opened its first international location in Athens, Greece. It has 300 employees, 65 of them here.
Its employee base has grown by 30% over the past few years.
The company makes more than 150 products, including laundry detergents, window cleaners and hand soap. All manufacturing is done in-house, where chemists create various liquid mixes, which are blended and put through quality control tests. Lab checks ensure pH neutrality of the formulas, among other measures, before the liquid mixes are packaged and shipped.
That’s about 21,000 tons of products a year coming from the Garden Grove plant, or about 30% of companywide volume.
Most Earth Friendly products are sold under its own brands, such as Ecos and Dishmate, while about 20% are distributed under private-label contracts. The company sells domestically and in Canada, Europe and Asia. Its customers include large grocers, such as Trader Joe’s, Costco and Sam’s Club.
Vlahakis-Hanks declined to disclose revenue figures but said companywide sales grew by 10% last year. The revenue increase over the same period in Garden Grove was 13%.
“Incredible amounts” of business growth came “over the last five years,” Vlahakis-Hanks said, citing increased consumer demand for “green” products and the company’s growing brand recognition among major retailers.
“Consumers [are] more aware of the benefits of ‘greening your cleaning’ and demanding retailers carry all-natural cleaning products,” she said.
A recent partnership with the Walt Disney Co. also provided a boost. Earth Friendly last year rolled out its Disney Baby Ecos product line of laundry detergents and stain-remover products, which feature Winnie the Pooh on their labels.
Greek Connection
Another avenue of potential growth for Earth Friendly is its place in Greece, the Vlahakis family’s homeland. Having a physical presence there is expected to help “better serve” its European and Middle Eastern customers, Vlahakis-Hanks said.
“We’ve only had our offices in Greece for a few months now, and we’ve already landed great new accounts there in that short time,” she said. Van Vlahakis, the family patriarch and owner of the business, said in a recent statement that he has a “special connection” to Greece and expects the company’s entry into Athens to “encourage other Greek-American businesses to consider getting involved in restoring the Greek economy.”
He currently serves as Earth Friendly’s chief executive and splits time between the OC and Florida locations. His children—Kelly and John—run the different units.
Van, a native of Crete, immigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s and earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Roosevelt University in Chicago, attracted by the Greek root words. He spent a decade or so in the janitorial services industry, where he saw firsthand the potential for safer and more effective cleaning supplies. He took up the task himself and started Venus Laboratories in Illinois in 1967, focusing on industrial cleaning products. He grew the business and purchased a production facility in 1971.
California Dreaming
Van made a trip to California the following year to visit a customer and “instantly fell in love with the weather,” his daughter said.
“It was 10 degrees at that time in Illinois and 80 degrees in California. He never turned back after that,” buying a manufacturing facility here in 1977 and making Huntington Beach a home for himself.
Other expansion efforts followed, and Van established Earth Friendly in 1989 as an entity within Venus to narrowly focus on environmentally friendly products as awareness of chemicals’ affect on the environment was increasing.
Earth Friendly’s growth and business model have attracted “tons of interest from private equity” investors, Vlahakis-Hanks said, but it has kept close to the family-run model.
Further growth is expected as “more and more medical studies are conducted” and as more information about environmentally friendly products and chemical manufacturing is released into the market, she added.
Doing As It Says
Access to information, as well as the growing capacity of Earth Friendly’s in-house research and development group, has helped the company operate in earth-friendly ways and encourage staff to pay more attention to sustainability, said Nadereh Afsharmanesh, director of sustainability at the company, and leader of its efforts to reduce waste.
“It’s not only the finished product that is eco-friendly, but every part of the [manufacturing] process has to be also,” she said.
Earth Friendly last month announced it achieved carbon neutrality, now removing as much carbon dioxide as it releases into the environment, or nearly 54 million pounds a year.
The company also installed 265 solar panels on the rooftop of the Garden Grove facility about five years ago, a $250,000 investment.
Vlahakis-Hanks said the panels generate about 60% of the electricity needed for operations, and the company won the Governor’s Environmental and Economic Leadership Award in 2010 as a result of the project.
Vlahakis-Hanks said Earth Friendly’s Florida and New Jersey plants will follow suit and install or retrofit 300 solar panels each.