On the Bronx border in Mount Vernon, N.Y., the dirty laundry of Greenwich Hospital gets a complete airing, but only after a complete wash, soak and spin. Ninety-two-year-old Unitex does the job.
Said company director of marketing Seth Gershman, “In Greenwich, Greenwich Hospital is a client as is the entire Yale New Haven Health System which they are a part of. Also, North East Medical Group and all of their off sites (also part of Yale/New Haven Health System, with facilities in Stamford, Bridgeport and New Haven), so our client base covers a great deal of the area.”
On the crowded plant floor at Unitex Textile Rental Services Inc., linens from regional hospitals are trundled in carts, piled on conveyor belts and swung overhead in canvas bags on automated tracks between processing stations. They pass through computer-controlled, 18-chambered, 75-foot-long washing machines ”” two European imports with $500,000 price tags ”” and on through fully automated dryers mounted on a mezzanine at the rear of the processing floor to reduce discomfort from their heat and noise for union workers in the 165-employee plant.
Sorted, cleaned, ironed, tagged and bagged, the institutional laundry is rolled in carts onto tractor-trailers bearing the Unitex logo at the loading dock for delivery to hospitals and other health care customers.
It was far less high-tech in the beginning for this fourth-generation family business.
In a conference room overlooking the plant floor in Mount Vernon, David Potack, vice president of sales and marketing at Unitex, pointed out a framed ledger page ”” “an Excel spread sheet from 1923,” he said. That was Max Potack”™s first year in business as the owner of A&P Coat, Apron and Linen Supply in Manhattan. The Polish immigrant, David”™s great-grandfather, acquired the business the previous year from two uncles for whom he had worked.
“It was an industry driven by horse and wagon transportation,” Potack said. Restaurants and small grocery stores were mainstay customers.
Max”™s first business expense inked in the ledger: a $67 payment to a New York City stable for rental of a horse and wagon. The business then was doing $1,200 a month in revenue.
Today the family company, exclusively serving the health care industry, earns $150 million in annual revenue from others”™ dirty laundry. From that first horse-and-wagon rental, the company”™s leased transportation has grown to include 125 Ryder vehicles. Unitex employs about 1,500 workers at 11 plants in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. It processes 4½ million to 5 million pounds of linens per week.
“We”™ve made a capital commitment to handle that kind of capacity,” Potack said. The company has invested $70 million over the last 10 years to build and upgrade its plants, he said. “The goal in the business is to be the lowest-cost provider with the best-service model.”
Potack”™s grandfather Bernard and a great-uncle moved the company to Brooklyn in 1936 and relocated again to the Bronx in 1947. Unitex was headquartered there until 2003, when it opened its newly built 42,000-square-foot plant in Mount Vernon. Potack works there beside his father Michael, president and CEO, and brother Robert, vice president of operations.
In 2008, the Potacks opened a 60,000-square-foot plant in Newburgh, N.Y., an approximately $22 million development, where about 200 workers are employed.
Since 2011, Unitex also has opened two laundry facilities in New Brunswick, N.J. The larger 60,000-square-foot facility supplies hospitals and nursing homes while the other serves surgery centers and outpatient medical offices. The company”™s service reach has expanded to include clients in northern Delaware, the Philadelphia market, southern New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, Potack said.
“It”™s part of the changing landscape in health care,” he said. “It”™s part of our strategic plan, how to work with large-scale providers” emerging from consolidations of hospitals and of physician practices.
Home health care, a key element in reforming health care delivery under the Affordable Care Act, remains an untapped source of business for Unitex.
“It”™s certainly a growing market in the future,” Potack said. But the logistics of “the return loop” ”” transporting dirty laundry from patients”™ homes to Unitex plants ”” poses problems.
“We”™re trying to figure out how to do that in a cost-effective manner,” Potack said. “The problem is how to do that with scale, because each customer is one person. I think it”™s certainly doable. We”™re trying to figure out the model.”
