For Steve McKeon, one of the keys to a successful business is having a talented group of “young people” running it who work as a team. Steve, majority owner of Family Fresh Pack LLC in Belleville and Monticello, is proud of the fact that some of his key managers worked their way up in the company from doing part-time shift work during high school.

“We have a young, innovative group of people running the business. The average age is around 30,” he says. “They understand that sales and growth is the key thing. Our business is sales driven. We spend a lot of research and development money looking for new ideas.”

For Steve McKeon, one of the keys to a successful business is having a talented group of “young people” running it who work as a team. Steve, majority owner of Family Fresh Pack LLC in Belleville and Monticello, is proud of the fact that some of his key managers worked their way up in the company from doing part-time shift work during high school.

“We have a young, innovative group of people running the business. The average age is around 30,” he says. “They understand that sales and growth is the key thing. Our business is sales driven. We spend a lot of research and development money looking for new ideas.”

Steve, along with co-owners Jim Natzke, Paul McShane and Fermo Jaeckle, founded the company in Belleville in 1995. The purpose was to cut and wrap cheese from bulk packages into retail packages. “Our business has grown in double digits ever since we started,” Steve says. “Our expectations are that the growth will be 15% to 20% this year because we have a lot going on.”

Family Fresh Pack, which employs about 65 people at its peak, predominantly cuts and wraps various specialty cheeses for 22 area cheese companies that have their own private label products. The company also produces cheese spreads and cheese balls, all of which are sold through Sugar Brook Farms, headquartered in Verona.

“The break-even point in this business is huge,” Steve says. “The one piece of machinery we have in Belleville is a $300,000 piece of machinery with 15 people on it. If we’re not running it 10 hours a day, we’ll lose money.”

Yet that is exactly what has brought Family Fresh Pack much of its success – the fact that it is so expensive for the companies that sell cheese retail to cut and wrap their own products. In a single day, employees at the Belleville facility cut and wrap 15,000 to 20,000 pounds of cheese. Production also takes place in a facility in Monticello that Family Fresh Pack purchased after the company that had owned it “went belly up,” Steve says.

“We were running five lines (in Belleville) and people were bumping into each other,” he says. “Last year was our first full year operationally out of both locations. We had a very good year, and were able to increase our lines again.”

Family Fresh Pack, which earlier this year received the Green County Development Corp.’s Outstanding Business of the Year Award, has been working for a number of years on its own version of a type of packaging called MAP packaging (Modified Atmosphere Packaging). MAP packaging increases the shelf life of cheese and other perishable products by lowering the amount of oxygen that gets into the product. “We have a three-plastic laminate we use,” Steve says. “The residual oxygen within this package is less than 1%.” Cheese products that would normally mold in seven to 14 days due to the amount of oxygen getting in will last 120 days in this type of MAP packaging, he says.

Family Fresh Pack already has many plans for the future. The company recently purchased a state-of-the-art cutting/wrapping machine that operates much faster than its older equipment. “Our plan is to move our cutting and wrapping from Belleville to Monticello. Then next year, this building (in Belleville) will be used solely for producing cheese spreads and cheese balls,” Steve says. “We are also committed to building a dry storage facility in Monticello that will ultimately hold 500 pallets. This will allow us to make more space available there for manufacturing.”

By Barbara Mulhern