Any business venture can find a way to settle into a niche perfectly if it understands its customers and Torani’s history of building a community is a noteworthy study in success. Since 1925, the family-owned Bay Area business has built a business of flavor, experimenting with ingredients and tastes that are both familiar and unique for their customers. Bringing Italian taste to California, Torani has slowly expanded its range of syrups and sauces, quickly establishing a business based on the future of taste. 

Torani’s experimentation with flavor could have stopped at its original product lines but the company has grown with modern times, embracing the era of cafes and eateries and allowing it to reflect in its product line. It is here that Melanie Dulbecco has thrived, having spent 32 years shaping and molding the company to continue its rise upwards. It’s not every day you meet a Leader with a serious commitment to a “100 percent retention” of their team, but Dulbecco knows a little something about making it happen. 

Industry Leaders: It’s been a long run as CEO of Torani. Can you tell us about a few milestones that have defined your career?

When I first walked through Torani’s doors 32 years ago, I was inspired by this tiny family-owned company in San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point Neighborhood with just eight people in manufacturing. They were creating local jobs and approaching business with a people-first mindset.

I dove in headfirst, and three decades later we’ve grown an average of 20 percent year-over-year consistently for 32 years, hired hundreds of people locally, and we’re just getting started!

An early milestone that defined Torani—and ultimately my career—was inventing the flavored latte and shifting our business model towards our “Café Era.” We knew this delicious discovery had the ability to bring many more people into the coffee fold. We partnered with coffee roasters as distributors, reimagined our portfolio, focused on our new “killer app,” the vanilla latte (which nobody had ever heard of!), and eventually grew into a global company and household brand.

Another defining milestone for us is when Torani became a certified B-Corp in 2019. This validated our nearly 100-year commitment that business can be a powerful force for good. It also created a new platform for us to learn and share practices with like-minded businesses to make an even stronger collective impact.

A recent milestone that I’m exceptionally proud of is that we were able to successfully relocate our headquarters and manufacturing from South San Francisco, which had been our home for 25 years, to our new 30,000-square-foot Flavor Factory in San Leandro during the early days of the pandemic. This was Torani’s biggest investment in our long history—the kind that takes your breath away when you sign the bank loan documents—with an ambitious goal of 100 percent retention of our team members. We had to juggle the move and commissioning of production lines amid the shelter-in-place orders and global supply chain craziness, but we did it together and we ended up succeeding with flying colors.

Industry Leaders: You’ve probably seen many careers begin with their first steps at the company, tell us a little more about what it’s like working with young talent.

One thing I love about Torani is that we have all kinds of jobs and team members from all kinds of backgrounds, including socio-economic, educational, country of origin…you name it. We have team members who come from a whopping 35 countries around the world. Each team member brings their unique flavor to Torani.

Working with young talent is inspiring. They’re having a great impact on business as are bringing new ideas and pushing us to think differently, especially around our work lives. One thing I’m seeing is that our younger Gen Z team members are pushing harder for more work-life balance, and while this is an area we’ve always excelled at, they are bringing a valuable new perspective. I don’t think they necessarily want anything different from previous generations, but they’re confident enough to push to make it a reality. My generation threw ourselves into working long hours. It was the way we proved ourselves. Now we’re ALL benefiting from this workplace paradigm shift, thanks in part to our youngest team members. As leaders, we can listen, adjust our policies and practices, and then lead by example, celebrating that we have integrated lives within and outside work.

Industry Leaders: There may have been many changes you’ve witnessed in the workforce with every passing year. Is the Gen Z workforce very different?

One inspiring thing I’m seeing from our Gen Z team members is their desire to learn, develop, and take a more meandering career path. Previous generations often picked one job and worked their way up a traditional ladder. This new way of thinking about work creates learning and development experiences and opens new, unexpected opportunities.

At Torani, we have a practice called Career Mixology that’s perfect for team members who want to experiment and try new things. We encourage team members to pursue different opportunities within our organization with learning and development and to even transition into new roles across departments. For example, a team member at Torani might begin their career as a food scientist and later express interest in marketing, work on a project, and then move to that side of the business. We love this and believe businesses can and should create more opportunities for people to bust out of traditional career thinking.

Industry Leaders: We’re fascinated by the innovative ideas of combining Torani’s products with energy drinks or beverage ideas for a “Galentine’s Day.” What inspires these ideas, and is there an eye on trends that are shaping the industry? 

At Torani, we are “flavor geeks” and our team of trend experts tracks flavor and beverage trends from around the world, looking at everything from grocery store shelves to fine dining menus to street food fare. We take these insights to help our café partners build menus that appeal to young consumers, create new on-trend flavors, and develop recipes for holidays like Galentine’s Day!

We just launched our Flavor of the Year 2024, Torani Puremade Galaxy Syrup, which is our first foray into the world of “fantasy flavors,” aligning with consumers’ desire for escapism. The concept was brought forward by our trend research teams and takes the concept of “traveling with your tastebuds” a step further (this trend also inspired our 2022 and 2023 Flavors of the Year, Salted Egg Yolk and Toasted Black Sesame). This flavor is particularly interesting because our team was inspired by scientific research on what space “tastes like,” and combined that with the rising interest in fantasy. 

Industry Leaders: For Torani, “Everything starts with people.” Can you tell us a little more about the people-centric culture at the company?

Our purpose is Flavor for All. Opportunity for All. Flavor is not just what we make, it is also what each of us brings. And we believe that businesses can and should create more opportunities for our team members, customers, partners, and community to not just “make it” but to thrive. At Torani, we’re focusing on opportunity onramps and workforce development for our team members and are exploring how we can extend this to our customers, consumers, and local communities.

For us, people-centric is not just one of many decision-making filters, it is the first and most important lens at every crossroad. Whether it’s a global pandemic or a business bump, we ask ourselves “When we look back at navigating this, what will make us proud?” Using this people-first approach, we’ve never had a layoff in our nearly 100-year history, we have remarkable tenure, and our business is thriving.

Our Internal Opportunity Practices focus on learning and development (with programs like Contribution Management and Career Mixology) and income and wealth inclusion (with compensation philosophies, Skill Block programs, ESOP, bonuses, and profit sharing for every single team member)—we all share in the successes together. 

Industry Leaders: We’d love to know more about Torani’s work with the non-profit organization SHE-CAN, and what that was like for the company.

Torani’s purpose is “Flavor for All. Opportunity for All.” We love to support organizations that create opportunities and SHE-CAN (Supporting Her Education Changes a Nation) is a long-time Torani partner that does exactly that. SHE-CAN supports amazing young women from post-conflict countries like Rwanda, Cambodia, and Guatemala to earn U.S. college educations and then return to their countries to be change makers.

Many of Torani’s female leaders have been SHE-CAN mentors, a five-year commitment to support a scholar through her journey, and recently we supported the Make A Change Program. This program empowered 10 young women to return home during their summers to create service projects to address their communities’ challenges. Our team members were honored to support these women with their projects. Each exuded creativity, ranging from establishing women’s agricultural co-op with bookkeeping classes in Cambodia to challenging menstrual taboos in Liberia.

Industry Leaders: Before we close things off, do you have any advice for aspiring leaders who will define the workforce in the upcoming years?

There’s a lot of opportunity to rethink the way business has worked traditionally. Business holds the potential to be a much more powerful force for good. We’re excited to be part of the community of leaders pushing boundaries, and count on aspiring leaders to challenge the status quo!

Melanie Dulbecco Bio: Melanie’s mantra is “Grow, baby, grow!” That’s exactly what she’s done for over 30 years as Torani’s CEO. Torani, the fiercely independent flavor maker and B-Corp, has averaged double-digit, year-over-year growth in that time, flavoring cafés around the world. Melanie’s passion and expertise are in organization development and scaling social impact companies. She’s committed to shaping business to be a force for good, creating opportunity and development for people from all backgrounds. Melanie earned a BA in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA from Stanford. She feels a strong connection to Rwanda through her involvement in the NGO SHE-CAN as a Board Member and mentor to Rwandan scholars studying in the US.

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