Today, Prime Equipment Group is known worldwide for its reliable, innovative and effective poultry processing machines. But the company has humble beginnings.
It starts with the Gasbarro family, which still runs the company today. In 1939, Vincenzo Gasbarro immigrated to the U.S. from Italy with his wife, daughter, Mary, and three sons, Nick, Geno and Alio. Vincenzo started a small business to sell live chickens to customers.
Within a few years, they were selling cleaned birds, as well, from their Washington Poultry company in Columbus.
The brothers entered military service during the Korean war, and returned to join the family business. By 1953, the brothers had taken over the operations of the company, with Geno focusing on developing machines that automated chicken processing. They sold Washington Poultry in 1967, and by 1969 started a joint venture with Col. Saunders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken to develop... (more)
It was a classic “a-ha Moment” for Geno Gasbarro.
The inventor already held many patents for poultry processing machines, and had even built a company with Col. Saunders that helped Kentucky Fried Chicken become what it is today. But when he was looking for a new process to streamline in the late 1980s, the answer was right in front of him.
“When you walked into a chicken plant at the time, it wasn’t hard to see that you had 10 or 20 people working at tables pulling skins off chickens,” he says. “It was hard, repetitive work. You see that, and you realize pretty quick that there has to be a better way.” (more)
(From the March-April issue of Meat Packing Journal - read the full story here)
While Henry Ford didn’t invent the car, he changed forever how the world drives. Thomas Edison – he took a 50-year-old idea, made some improvements, and lit up our evenings. And then there’s Geno Gasbarro.
While Gasbarro didn’t invent chicken processing, he might as well have. For nearly 70-years Geno has been changing the way the world eats poultry. MPJ editor Velo Mitrovich talks to the founder of Prime
Equipment Group, about tinkering, inventing, Colonel Harland Sanders, and why at 84-years-old he still shows up at work every day (more...)
(A video produced by The Columbus Dispatch, Columbus, Ohio, 2013)
For a deeper look inside Prime Equipment Group, check out this video produced by Prime's hometown newspaper, The Columbus Dispatch.
