After Amy's birth, they were often too busy caring for the baby to cook. When they had a difficult time finding prepared vegetarian meals from natural ingredients, they thought they smelled an opportunity.
Working out of the old dairy farm in Petaluma where they still live, they started a small business making frozen, organic vegetarian potpies. The first office was their barn.
Amy's Kitchen grew steadily as the Berliners added to their product line. They occupied four buildings in Rohnert Park before moving into their current 107,000-square-foot facility in Santa Rosa in 1995.
At first, there was so much extra space they rented out part of the plant to a winery. Now, their facility is no longer big enough for a firm that makes 120 products, from frozen foods to soups and pasta sauces, and generates annual revenue of $100 million.
The Berliners say they tried to limit growth to 25% a year, but the number of employees has doubled in the last five years. Jobs start at $7.50 an hour. The Berliners offer a 401(k) retirement plan, medical and dental coverage, 21 English classes each week for employees and a scholarship program for employees' children; there's also a company soccer team.
A year ago, the Berliners began looking for a new, larger facility. A businessman in Chico who prints their packaging gave them a worksheet that compared the costs of doing business in California to other locations: Grand Junction, Colo.; Reno and Sparks, Nev.; and Medford, Ore.
The biggest issue for them is workers' compensation. Like many in the high-cost, high-quality end of the food business, Amy's Kitchen has resisted automation; it has employees devoted to hand-folding enchiladas, for example.
Medford, not far from the California border, appealed to them. A workers' comp premium in Oregon to insure a pizza dough maker -- pizza being one of the most popular products from Amy's Kitchen -- would be 70% less than what they pay in California. The estimated annual savings would be $2.4 million on workers' comp premiums alone.
Oregon also boasts lower electricity prices than most places in California. With the cost per kilowatt-hour in Medford less than one-third what Amy's Kitchen pays PG&E Co., the savings would add up to more than $1 million a year. And Amy's Kitchen would save an estimated $225,000 on sales taxes and $148,000 on state income taxes.
In June, Andy Berliner told a local newspaper that the firm might be leaving California.
