Made in Baltimore
Baltimore's manufacturing base has suffered just like everywhere else in the nation — the victim of cheap labor overseas and a changing business climate at home.
What is left of manufacturing in the Baltimore metro area — diminished to about 5 percent of the region's work force from roughly one-third in the heyday of the 1950s — is a small cadre of companies that have found a blueprint for success.
They are large corporations like Under Armour Inc., the homegrown sports apparel maker, and household names such as Domino Sugar, which still operates a factory on Baltimore's waterfront.
And they are also lesser-known but stalwart companies that have chugged along for decades even as the manufacturing base crumbled around them. These niche companies make horseradish and lacrosse sticks and devices to sweep the crumbs from restaurant tabletops.
We take you on a tour of those small manufacturers, and tell the stories of how they started and how they have survived.
-- By Baltimore Sun reporters Andrea K. Walker, Edward Gunts, Hanah Cho, Lorraine Mirabella, Jamie Smith Hopkins and Gus G. Sentementes
Also:
• Take a video tour of the Vanns Spices facility
•
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Tulkoff Food Products
The Tulkoff brand of horseradish and other sauces is very much a regional name, but the Baltimore company's reach spans the country.
Phil Tulkoff, president of Tulkoff Food Products Inc., is dwarfed by a warehouse full of bundles of horseradish roots.  |
Comments (1)
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Bloomin Onion at 8:10 AM January 03, 2011
So STX isn't really a local manufacturer when it says a lot of its work is done abroad. Aren't a lot of Under Armor stuff made in China too? I think the liberal state government with its high taxes discourages industry and business, them plus the general liberals like tree huggers in this state who control Maryland from their base in Montgomery County. We should have done more to keep GM here, to save the Martin aircraft factory and to maintain production at Sparrows Point. Plus a lot of the shipbuilding on the Eastern Shore is declined too. It also took the liberal elites several years to approve slots and delay all the revenue and they still didn't allow table games.
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