OCEANSIDE, N.Y. — Oceanside Institutional Industries, one of the two largest laundries on Long Island, will close its doors and shut down operations on June 15, according to company principals.
The second-generation members of the family who have been operating the business decided to sell its lucrative routes, its laundry machinery and its modern laundry building on Long Beach Road in the south shore community of Nassau County.
There is no heir apparent in the third generation who would have an interest in operating the business, the owners say.
At its peak, Oceanside employed more than 450 workers and processed more than 60 million pounds of goods a year for approximately 125 institutional accounts, including hospitals and nursing homes, in New York, Long Island and the Tri-State Area. The plant still employs 150 full-time employees and produces 40 million pounds of goods per year.
American Laundry News was recently given the exclusive opportunity to meet with the current principals of the plant in its executive offices and to take a guided tour of the 76,000-square-foot plant, one of the most modern and efficient plants in the industry.
The second-generation principals include Dominick and Jack Ferrara, vice presidents, and Francine Boyle, the director of human resources, who are part of the family of Frank Ferrara, one of the two founders; and Randi Gertler, vice president, and Sherri Klipper, who are part of the family of Walter Hermann, the other founder.
“We’re tired,” says Dominick Ferrara. “Forty years in business is long enough. We are ready to begin the next phase of our lives.”
The business owners would not disclose the terms of the sale of their laundry routes, the building or the equipment, because the transactions are still in progress, they say.
However, it is clear that the laundry routes, machinery and building will be sold in three separate transactions.
“It was one of the most well-designed laundry operations in the industry,” says Ron Hirsch, president of Direct Machinery, a distributor of laundry machinery based in Hicksville, N.Y., which will be selling off the equipment. “It is a clean, well-run operation. The plant was always extremely well-maintained. That’s one of the major reasons why they were able to obtain the higher productivity from their laundry equipment.”
At its peak, the laundry produced some 15,000 pounds of clean goods per hour in its plant, a two-story building dating back to the early 1980s. Its fleet consists of eight tractor-trailers and six 24-foot-long trucks.
Soiled linen arrives on the plant’s loading docks and is loaded onto elevators and carted to the second-floor sorting station. The goods are weighed to the 110-pound capacity of the modules of the tunnel systems on the first floor. Soil sorters toss the batches of linen into enclosures, which lead to the chutes of four 20-module Senking tunnel washers.
Senking extraction presses form the washed goods into 110-pound wash cakes, which are then loaded onto one of two two-tier Norman shuttles. The shuttles automatically load the clean wash cakes into any of seven 450-pound-capacity Norman dryers or two 500-pound-capacity Milnor dryers. Each dryer accepts four wash cakes.
“The linen is not touched from the time it is loaded into the tunnels until the time it is fed into the finishing equipment,” says Hirsch, who accompanied American Laundry News on a tour of the plant.
Items such as resident clothing are processed separately through three 400-pound-capacity L-Tron washer-extractors and one 200-pound-capacity washer-extractor.
Clean sheets are fed directly into one of eight American Laundry Machinery ironers. In addition to the ironers, the plant’s finishing machinery includes nine small-piece folders, manufactured by G.A. Braun; five Edge spreader-feeders and three Edge Maxx spreader-feeders, made by Chicago Dryer Co. (Chicago®), which feed the ironers; and one Chicago® Blanket Blaster, which spreads and feeds blankets.
The plant’s owners take pride in the productivity of the company’s employees. Employees on the finishing end feed up to 1,100 clean sheets per hour into the ironing systems.
It is not known how many of Oceanside’s 150 employees may be absorbed by other area laundries. There is only one other laundry of comparable size and scope on Long Island—FDR Services Corp. of Hempstead, N.Y., a major healthcare laundry.
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