Hello, and welcome back to Inc.'s 1 Smart Business Story. A century after it was founded, Torani is growing faster than ever—without moving production overseas, selling the company, or cutting staff. The family‑owned syrup maker, best known for its coffee and “dirty soda” flavors, is pacing toward $1 billion in revenue while manufacturing in the Bay Area and sharing ownership with employees. Under CEO Melanie Dulbecco, Torani has quietly compounded growth through multiple consumer trends, resisted blockbuster exits, and doubled down on local jobs and workforce development. Its strategy runs counter to much of modern business orthodoxy, yet the results are hard to ignore. By staying true to its principles while evolving with the times, Torani has positioned itself to endure well beyond its first 100 years.

BY JENNIFER CONRAD, SENIOR WRITER

A century‑old family business grows toward $1 billion by staying local, private, and people‑first.

On a drizzly afternoon last spring, hundreds of New Yorkers waited in line for up to 45 minutes for a free coffee or sparkling water flavored with Torani syrups. The event was part of a cross-country tour, with stops in cities like Austin, Phoenix, and Seattle to mark the flavored syrup brand’s 100th anniversary.  

The crowds were impressive, but even more notable is the story behind San Leandro, California, based Torani, a family-owned company that still manufactures its syrups in the San Francisco Bay Area and is pacing toward $1 billion in revenue by the end of the decade.  

CEO Melanie Dulbecco Torani joined as the first non-family CEO in 1991, when it was under second- and third-generation family leadership. At the time, it was a relatively small-scale operation, with 10 employees and about a million dollars in annual revenue. Under her leadership, the company has grown on average 20 percent per year. In 2025, its revenue was $650 million, up about $100 million from the year before.  

Torani team and the company’s offices. Photo: Courtesy Company

“We could have had a blockbuster exit,” says Dulbecco. The company has fielded offers over the years, but the family—including board chair Lisa Lucheta, the founders’ granddaughter—still holds a majority stake. That control, Dulbecco says, has allowed Torani to stay true to its mission of “steadily growing value for many, not just the few.”

In 2022, Torani took on outside investment for the first time, when the private equity firm Satori Capital (a five-time Founder-Friendly Investor honoree) took a minority stake in the company. Around the same time, Torani converted 10 percent of the company’s equity into an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP), which automatically includes any employee who has been with the company for more than a year.

Torani’s ability to scale today is rooted in decisions the company has been making for generations. Rinaldo and Ezilda Torre, immigrants from Lucca, Italy, began making syrups based on traditional Italian recipes in San Francisco in 1925. The company, originally called R. Torre & Company, has evolved with the times, distilling vermouth after the repeal of Prohibition and creating what it says is the first flavored latte in the 1980s, just as the specialty coffee boom was taking off. More recently, it’s capitalized on the dirty soda trend that originated in Utah. 

Today, Torani’s flavored syrups come in bottles with signature red, yellow, and blue labels, in more than 150 flavors from coffee enhancers like vanilla and hazelnut to fruity options like green apple and strawberry to more exotic offerings like blue curacao and vanilla salt. At about $10 for a 750-milliliter bottle, the syrups have found their way to coffee shops and grocery stores nationwide. 

“It’s unusual to be with the company as long as I have,” says Dulbecco. “We have a lot of people who build their careers here. That makes business so fun and joyful, but it’s hard to grow [at our size]. We have to be really assertive in our strategy.” Here are her secrets to growing while staying true to the company’s mission.  

Stay Local 

In 2020, Torani relocated from South San Francisco to a 330,000‑square‑foot facility in San Leandro that combines manufacturing, distribution, and corporate offices. Leadership was determined to keep production in‑house and preserve Bay Area jobs.

“AI is creating new jobs in the Bay Area, and people think, well, that’s what the Bay Area is about,” says Dulbecco. “We need a healthy economy that has a mix of sectors. There are still a lot of people here who need stepping stones to different kinds of job opportunities.” 

When the company began planning the move, it took into account the commuting distance for its workers. “We’re devoted to being a place that people could count on us being here,” she says. “We won’t move away and leave them without jobs.” 

Every employee stayed on after the move, and the new facility, which also includes a cafe and visitor center, allowed Torani to increase its output by 350 percent. 

Upskill Instead of Restructuring 

Torani, which has more than 400 employees (and intends to hire 115 more in 2026) boasts that it has never had a layoff in its history thanks to its robust professional development programs. “One of our core values is grow, baby grow, and that means people growing and navigating together,” says Dulbecco.  

“We look for new opportunities that get created through our growth rather than doing layoffs,” she says. “If there are issues or somebody isn’t the right fit, I get it that there can be individual conversations. But I think we should turn over every possible stone to find solutions for people to make it. It’s worth it because then we have trust in each other, people aren’t afraid to grow, to learn, to take greater risks, and raise potential issues so that we can address them.” 

Too many companies, she says, look at slashing jobs as a way to get to a healthy balance sheet. Torani looks at how developing its workforce can support the bottom line. The company emphasizes training and upskilling—one of the many advantages to having everyone from management to production working in the same place. “It creates what we call career mixology,” she says. One employee who started in manufacturing last year became the office receptionist. Another worker who began in the warehouse, and took a role in customer service before moving on to the accounting department.   

“When you look at the momentum that we’ve had, you don’t mess with that,” she says. “That comes from the ability of our team to work so well together.” That resilience was critical when the company prepared to move to its new facility right as Covid hit. “Our team knew exactly what to do and how to operate together. We were able to get our team moved in the course of six months,” she says. “I think had we been moving to another state, we probably would’ve gone under.” 

Share the Good and Bad 

Dulbecco personally onboards every new employee at Torani, covering the company’s history, future plans, growth strategies, and core values. The company also hosts regular town halls, where the leadership shares financial information, including the company’s profitability and expected growth rate for the year. She also shares challenges the company is facing and headwinds in the broader market environment.  

The company has goals around performance, and everyone gets an annual bonus based on top-line revenue growth and bottom-line profitability. “We all share in the success. It drives a lot of interest in our financials, and it begins to build financial literacy among our team members as well,” says Dulbecco. “What I find is really exciting is when I see a forklift driver talking with our CFO about how our ESOP is doing and what it means to get the customer orders out the door each month and on time.” 

Grow with the Company 

Torani has grown significantly in size and complexity during Dulbecco’s 35-year tenure, which has required her and the company’s leadership to develop new management skills as the company expands. 

“What I found over the years is that there are certain inflection points where things change quite a bit, not only in the way that I need to lead, but in our ways of operating,” she says. Each time the company’s revenue doubled, she found the company had to rebuild itself to sustain growth. 

Up to about $50 million in revenue, a leader can have visibility into most of the business and can operate with just a few good managers, she says. “To go into the deep end, past $100 million, you can’t know it all and you can’t run it all,” she says. “You have to build the ability of the business to operate well so that it’s not reliant upon you to be involved in every decision.”  

That requires building a strong executive team that can work collaboratively. “We look for someone who has big company experience and ideally also small company experience when you’re growing at those stages,” she says. “What are the challenges that we’re going to face at this next stage of growth?”   

“If you look at the CFO role, it might be more basic at a certain level, but the ability to help set up an ESOP, work with investors, and look at the financing and how we’re going to finance our own growth to a billion dollars, that takes a different skillset than somebody who can help you bootstrap to $50 million,” she says. 

Now they’re discussing what the leadership at Torani needs to look like as it closes in on its next revenue milestone. “In 2025, as an executive team, we did what we call a learning journey around how executive teams and leadership teams operate at a billion dollars and beyond,” she says. “We study together, we do readings, we talk to people who’ve been there, done that.” 

Chase New Markets 

Torani focuses on staying on the forefront of trends in beverages, from flavored lattes to dirty sodas. “We look at consumers who are really excited about flavor,” says Dulbecco. “We call them flavor seekers: People who love to travel with their taste buds and experience flavor. Then we look at where people are doing that.” 

“We look at what’s selling in the morning, afternoon, and evening, and what young consumers are looking for in particular so that we can keep following and driving those trends,” says Dulbecco. Torani also works with drink shops and cafes to help them stay on top of those trends. 

When she started in the early 1990s, flavored coffee drinks were just taking off, so Torani collaborated with coffee roasters to get their products into cafes. Torani was even in Starbucks stores before Starbucks started using private label syrups.  

“Then we said, all right, that’s been a fantastic era of growth,” she says. “Cafes are core to us. We love them, we’re going to continue to work with them, but what’s happening with consumers right now?” Torani saw an opening to get into customers homes, so the company focused on retail.  

Now, she says, “everything has moved cold.” People want energy drinks, matcha lattes, cold brew, and dirty sodas they can customize to their tastes. Botanical flavors are also trending right now—Torani’s flavor of the year for 2026 is forest pine. 

“If you look at drink shops across the United States, it is a huge growing, trend, particularly at drive-through drink shops,” says Dulbecco. “They are so fun and experiential. It’s an affordable indulgence that can be a daily thing or a multiple times a day experience.”  

“You get to go have something made the way you like it, and you can share it on social as well,” she says. “We find there’s a lot that’s happening in the world that mixes real life and virtual and the connections that people make across those two spaces.”