RISING BREAD BUSINESS Ghossain's outgrows location

Landlocked, the longtime city business is moving to Boardman to expand.
By CYNTHIA VINARSKY
VINDICATOR BUSINESS WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- Fred Ghossain's business has problems. Luckily they're the positive kind, he says.
Orders for Ghossain Mid-East Bakery's flat bread and pita bread specialties have gone through the roof, especially since the ethnic breads have become menu staples for dozens of popular restaurant chains.
Most local supermarkets stock its products, and outside the area, there are big customers like Disney World and the Columbus-based Brio and Bravo restaurant chains as well as individuals who order regularly by mail or by phone.
The problem? The 33-year-old business Fred and his brother Nick Ghossain share has run out of space at its location on Market Street in Youngstown's Uptown district.
Unfortunately for the city, already plagued by a business exodus, the brothers say they'll be forced to move to Boardman to expand.
Construction is under way at the bakery's new location at Midlothian and South avenues in Boardman, a 3-acre site behind the WKBN radio towers.
The new, 11,000-square-foot facility will more than double the size of the current plant, and new production machinery will enable the business to triple its production of flat bread and pita bread.
Ghossain said owners are investing $1.25 million in the new facility, set to open sometime around Thanksgiving.
"I hate to move out of the city," Ghossain said. "I grew up here. I never had any problems with crime or anything like that. We've always been loyal to the city."
What was tried
There's an empty city lot behind the bakery that the business would have liked to buy to expand at the site, he said, but he talked to several city officials and no one was able to help. The property is privately owned and reportedly tied up in some legal disputes, he said, so it's not available for sale.
Ghossain said he also looked at other properties in the city but none was suitable for his operation.
The partners own the building that houses its Market Street store, and two other businesses are also leasing space there. They've already had inquiries about the space the bakery occupies.
The Ghossain brothers and their father Joe founded Ghossain Mid-East Bakery in 1970, starting out in the garage of the family's home on East Philadelphia Avenue on the city's South Side. Lebanese immigrants, they decided to specialize in Lebanese foods and baked goods because the items weren't available locally.
"We knew how it was supposed to taste, but it took a lot of trial and error to figure out how to make it come out right," Fred Ghossain recalled with a grin. "We threw a lot of stuff away."
The brothers' father died in 1992. Now Fred Ghossain, 55, is president, and Nick, 52, is vice president. "Titles don't mean much here," Fred joked. "I sign the paychecks, but I also mop the floors."
The business has never advertised, he said, but its reputation grew by word of mouth and orders started coming in from outside the Youngstown area, and it moved to Market Street. In 1990, after its original buildingwas heavily damaged by fire, the owners invested $500,000 in their current building.
Who buys
Paging through a stack of orders on his desk one day last week, Ghossain said they run the gamut from a gourmet shop in Manhattan to a country club in Florida to a homemaker in Great Sky, Mont.
For some, cost doesn't matter.
Ghossain told about a Dallas woman who paid $125 in overnight shipping for a $70 order of flat bread.
The bakery's list of 10,000 customers also includes some famous names: Oscar de La Renta and Ethel Kennedy both order regularly, he said.
One reason the business has prospered, he theorized, is that it doesn't depend solely on the local economy. Orders from outside the area make up 60 percent to 65 percent of its business, with local sales representing the rest.
Now operating at full capacity, the bakery produces about 7,200 pieces of flat bread, 1,500 pita bread pieces and 1,000 pita pocket pies with various fillings each day, Fred Ghossain said. "That's all we can make. It's frustrating because we have to turn orders away."
The shop employs six, most of them family members, but owners expect to have a staff of between 12 and 15 when the new facility opens.
What's time-consuming
When large orders come in, workers sometimes have to bake and ship them in two or three phases.
There's no room to store large quantities of supplies, so the bakery can't save money by buying in bulk.
And loading shipments is a major project. The bakery's small parking lot can't accommodate a large tractor-trailer and it doesn't have a dock, so workers have to load up a smaller truck several times, drive it over to a semi parked nearby and reload the goods inside.
The process takes three workers two hours. Ghossain estimated the same job would take a few minutes if they had the space and the proper equipment.
With the new facility opening later this year, the business will have the space to grow, he said. His son Joe, 28, and a recent graduate of Youngstown State University, dreams of expanding to the point that the Ghossain name is in every supermarket in the country.
He's confident, too, that customers who stop by now for a spinach-and-cheese-stuffed pastry or to stock up on Lebanese grocery items won't mind driving to the bakery's new Boardman location.
"If it's something you want, you don't mind driving an extra mile or two," he said.
vinarsky@vindy.com