New Mexico cookie business is a monster

By Milan Simonich

msimonich@tnmnp.com

@MilansNMreport on Twitter

SANTA FE >> Seven workers make 12 million sugar-free cookies each day at a plant in Deming.

Its products, ranging from oatmeal to pecan chocolate chip, are sold in 150,000 stores in 48 countries.

All of this commerce began with a diabetic kid named Joseph Semprevivo, who grew up in Deming and Las Cruces. Forbidden sweets, he saw a global market for sugar-free cookies that tasted better than any pastry and were affordable for any family.

Joseph's Lite Cookies are an American success story in every way but one.

At its peak employment, the factory in Deming had 48 workers. Semprevivo, now 41 and the company's CEO, said he had hoped to expand his staff even more, but getting dependable employees was an insurmountable obstacle to growth.

So, Semprevivo said, he automated his plant. Now, even with a production team of only seven, he finds it difficult to fill all the jobs with reliable workers.

That takes us to the reason that Semprevivo is especially disappointed with modern America's work ethic.

Deming is the biggest city in Luna County, where the unemployment rate was 16.5 percent in the most recent report.

"We should have a line out the door with people who want a job," Semprevivo said in a telephone interview

from his home in Florida.

Finding good workers in southern New Mexico is the biggest problem for Joseph's Lite Cookies.

"We got our plant manager from California. We shifted our office team to Florida years back because we couldn't find workers," Semprevivo said.

That was in 2001. Today, Joseph's has a front-office staff of four in Florida.

At the bakery in Deming, Joseph's is producing more cookies than ever with fewer employees than ever.

Joseph's Lite Cookies starts factory workers at $8 an hour. That is lower than Albuquerque's minimum wage of $8.50 and markedly lower than Santa Fe's minimum of $10.51.

But Semprevivo says too many people in Luna County, where jobs should be coveted, do not want work if it means starting at the low rung of a pay scale. Minimum wage in Luna County, like most of New Mexico, is $7.50 an hour.

For a while, he said, he mandated drug tests to screen out people who would not be dependable. Semprevivo said he spent $60 for each drug test, and nine of 10 applicants failed.

"We were spending $540 to hire one person who could pass," he said.

He revised his system, junking the drug tests and offering pay incentives instead.

A new worker who shows up on time and does his job acceptably for 90 days gets a $1-an-hour raise. That same worker will get another raise of 50 cents to $1 an hour for performing well for another 90 days.

Luna County Commissioner Javier Diaz, a Democrat who has been in office for five years, said Semprevivo and others have a tough job in trying to fill jobs.

People who once told themselves, "I need a job and I know I have to start somewhere" are not so willing now, Diaz said.

Semprevivo says he knows what it is like to be at bottom. After a thief fleeced his parents' restaurant in the early 1980s, they went bankrupt and the family had to start again with nothing. Joseph's Lite Cookies bloomed from that disaster.

After all those years, Semprevivo is one CEO who knows exactly what happens in the trenches.

In these times and in this marketplace, his cookie business is a monster in more ways than one.

Milan Simonich, Santa Fe Bureau chief of Texas-New Mexico Newspapers, can be reached at (505) 820-6898. His blog is at nmcapitolreport.com.

Source: http://www.alamogordonews.com/news/ci_23885929/alamogordo-news?source=rss_viewed

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