New owner returns life to
former Ragu factory

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The mothballed former Ragu Foods Inc. factory will see new life as a multi-tenant business park.
Buckingham Properties LLC acquired the idled spaghetti-sauce plant in August, re-naming the property the Gateway Business Center. The firm so far has leased nearly half of the 600,000-square-foot structure to three separate tenants, and is negotiating leases with several others, Buckingham principal Laurence Glazer said.
“We think this is a very exciting development for the city,” he said. “Just the three leases we’ve signed so far are bringing a couple hundred new jobs.”
The largest tenant at the center is Menlo Postal Logistics, a Palo Alto, Calif.- based freight firm that will employ 160 to 170 people at a Priority Mail distribution center under contract to the U.S. Postal Service.
Other tenants are the San Francisco-based Fritz Cos. Inc. and Gould Paper Corp., a New York City-based paper distributor.
Fritz, a freight-forwarding company that has a facility in Webster dedicated to Xerox Corp., is adding a 78,000-square- foot operation at Gateway Business Center to serve the Johnson & Johnson Clinical Diagnostics facility at Canal Ponds Business Park, Glazer said.
Gould Paper has leased 23,000 square feet to house a paper-distribution operation here, he said.
The transformation of the former Ragu facility puts an upbeat spin on what had been a downbeat story.
The plant at 1350 Lyell Ave. in the city has stood vacant for three years since Ragu owner Van den Bergh Foods Co., a Connecticut subsidiary of the British-based Unilever PLC, idled the factory in June 1994.
Originally a Rochester enterprise, Ragu was founded by Giovanni Cantisano, an Italian immigrant whose wife, Assunta, cooked up the first batches in her own kitchen in 1936.
From that humble start, Ragu came to dominate the spaghetti-sauce market, commanding a 65 percent share by the late 1960s.
The firm at one time employed several hundred workers–many of them Italian immigrants.
Giovanni Cantisano’s son Ralph sold Ragu to Chesebrough Pond’s for $43 million in 1970. Chesebrough Pond’s in turn sold the sauce firm to Unilever. At first Unilever ran Ragu as an independent operation, but ultimately it turned the business over to Van den Bergh, which closed the Rochester operation.
Glazer said Unilever had leased the facility from a New York City developer under an 18-year agreement that still had several years to run. He and partner Harold Samloff paid $6.5 million for the plant, acquiring it from Unilever, which first bought it from the New York City owner.
In the three years the plant stood idle, it suffered considerably from neglect, Glazer said. When Buckingham took it over, much of the old sauce-making equipment remained but had been so damaged that it could be sold for only a fraction of its worth. Some was fit only for scrap.
Some of the salvageable equipment went to Cantisano Foods Inc., a Fairport company started by Ralph Cantisano in 1978 that now gives Ragu a run for its money.