Photo | Courtesy of Howard Products Inc.
Martha and David Hawley, owners of Howard Products Inc.
November 10, 2020
Q&A: Worcester manufacturer has served the restaurant industry for decades
Precision sheet metal manufacturer Howard Products Inc. in Worcester is a family-owned company, which has been in business for over 70 years. The company, which has 15 employees, works with clients in a multitude of sectors, including the automotive, transportation and wastewater treatment industries. The company produces The Shortening Shuttle Waste Oil Carrier, which is widely used in the restaurant industry to remove oil waste from fryers, and is owned by Howard’s daughter company, Worcester Industrial Products, which markets the product. Martha Hawley, majority owner and vice president of business development for both companies, spoke with WBJ about what has helped the company last more than seven decades, as well as what it’s like manufacturing such a widely used product.
Can you tell me a bit about how The Shortening Shuttle came to be and how the company obtained it?
There was a client: He and his wife were cleaning restaurants, and they were constantly burning themselves using these plastic pickle buckets. And he put together this metal thing, and brought it into my husband and said, "I want to make this work." My husband looked at it, and decided what material to make it out of -- aluminum -- and what kind of a design to make it safe. We bought it from him, patented it and formed Worcester Industrial Products in 1989.
People have tried to knock us off in the past, and I can look at a piece and tell you why it's not safe and why it makes me very nervous. I won't give away proprietary information, but I can tell why it's going to fail and it makes me very nervous. Ours is very safe. To my knowledge, we have never had an equipment failure and someone get hurt. We've never had that happen.
So, he worked with the inventor, they came up with this design, and we started to make it. One of our earliest customers was KFC.
The Shortening Shuttle isn’t automation, right?
Think of it as a mousetrap. The Shortening Shuttle lies under the drain in your kitchen aisle. You open the valve, it drains out your oil, you shut it off, you stand up The Shortening Shuttle and roll it along on its wheel, you pivot up against a Dumpster or a barrel, and you empty it like that. There’s no automation, nothing to break. It’s just that simple, and that’s why it’s caught on, because it is that simple.
What is it like managing a legacy product?
Difficult. Somebody’s always got something better. It’s not the easiest. We’re a small company, and every penny matters. We have to be very careful with our expenditures, and people are very aware of costs. There is a price point, and you have to know what that is and what the market will bear.
We're doing okay. We found a price point people are willing to pay. It's a matter of keeping current with that. That's part of why I like to go to the National Restaurant Association meetings, because that's where you meet the executives. You can cut through six months of trying to get through middle management, because the executives are there and see the product, and they say yes, that's what I want. It'll fast track it. So that's one of the best strategies we've ever done.
How has it been weathering COVID-19 and other downturns over the years?
Photo | Courtesy of Howard Products Inc.
Howard Products Inc. in Worcester
There is something in the order of 200,000 new restaurants starting every year, so COVID clearly put some of those off. But at the end of the day, the ones still open, still have to empty their oil. So, are our sales behind? Yes. Are they terribly behind? Not as much as you would think.
Being around 70 years old, we've been through a number of downturns. We've watched as people have fallen by the wayside, and those who fell by the wayside first were people who had all of the interests in one sector. So if the transportation sector went down, they crashed. They weren't spread among the sectors, so there was a buffer in case one went down, they could ride on the other.
We've been very fortunate in that respect. We've been able to be diverse enough in product field, that when one went down, fortunately, another came back up. It's worked very well that way.
Is there anything else you want the manufacturing community to know about Howard or Worcester Industrial?
We're always looking for work. We're always looking to take on projects people might have they would like to bring their product to market. That's one of our value adds, our engineering experience. We probably have more than 70 years of engineering experience we bring to every quote. We'd just like to see more of them.
This interview was conducted and edited for length and clarity by WBJ Staff Writer Monica Busch.
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