Textile Services Weekly recently visited commercial laundries in Ft. Myers and West Palm Beach, FL, to share insights with readers on how these companies, Premier Linen Services and Gold Coast Linen Service, are managing growth as the tourist season revs up in South Florida. Both companies reported robust sales, despite inflation and fierce competition for trade in textile services at area restaurants and hotels.
“You know I’m a (Florida) native,” said Jason Mitchell, CEO of Premier Linen, a hospitality launderer in Ft. Myers, in the southwest corner of the Sunshine State. “My family came down here in ’53, so our kids are the third generation to be brought up in Southwest Florida. But Florida in general is economically firing on all cylinders. I wouldn’t say it’s just one area of Florida. I think the growth is tremendous; it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”
Statistics on the two metro areas that Premier and Gold Coast Linen serve appear to bear out Mitchell’s bullish take on economic growth in this part of the U.S. As for Ft. Myers, with a 2023 population reported by the U.S. Census Bureau of 105,200 people, that number has risen by nearly 22% since 2020, according to World Population Review. The current annual growth rate is 6.82%. Similarly, on the southeastern coast, the population of West Palm Beach grew by 4.39% from 2020-’21. It currently stands at 116,000 people. Median household income also increased by 3.56% during the same period from $54,603 to $56,549, according to Data USA.
While labor costs recently have risen as well, neither of the two companies we visited reported significant problems with employee recruitment/retention. Both rely on large immigrant populations for staffing their respective plants: Cubans for Premier and Haitians for Gold Coast.
Matt Sebuck, director of service for Gold Coast, said the F&B launderer services a market stretching roughly 150 miles from Vero Beach, north of West Palm Beach to Islamorada in the Florida Keys. This area has long since shaken off any effects of COVID-19 shutdowns, he says, noting that sales this year are up 24%. In 2022, they rose 34%. The plant’s currently running 17 routes, up from a low of three during the pandemic. Independent restaurants are the mainstay for Gold Coast’s customer base. This can be tricky, he says, due to high turnover and fierce competition among restaurants. However, the trade is so lucrative that new players often will replace restaurants that have closed. “The beauty with South Florida is as soon as a restaurant goes out of business, there’s one that goes right in,” Sebuck says. “We see that a lot. Sometimes we’re unable to get our product out. Somebody will close just like that. And then the next week somebody’s going in there and our product’s already there. So it’s an easy sell for us.”
Gold Coast also is experiencing growth in another sector that’s booming in the region: outpatient healthcare. New prospects abound due to the proliferation of imaging centers, cancer-treatment clinics and similar facilities. These nonacute healthcare providers have fueled brisk demand for patient and staff isolation gowns as well as scrubs and lab coasts for employees. To accommodate this expansion, Gold Coast has ordered a second tunnel washer from Pellerin Milnor Corp. “We have one tunnel down there now, and we’re getting another one,” Sebuck says. “The thought is … healthcare in one tunnel; F&B in the other. You know, the sky’s the limit on healthcare here.”
Similarly with hospitality, Premier is expanding its customer base in South Florida by winning new business for its high-tech plant that opened last December in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, Mitchell says. Additional growth is coming online as new properties open up, including a 22-acre, 785-room resort on Florida’s southwest coast that’s slated to open next month, according to Rolando De Leon, general manager of Premier. De Leon, a laundry industry veteran with experience in healthcare as well as F&B laundries, credits Premier’s growth since its founding in 2019 to a dedication to service and quality. He says new wash aisle and finishing equipment from Kannegiesser provides better cleaning of customer-owned textiles than older machinery. Another plus for Premier is its practice of processing stain-rewash items in 900 lb. (408 kg.) Ellis Corp. washer/extractors. The improved mechanical action of these machines gets out tough stains, thus saving hotels money on linen-replacement costs, he says.
On the finishing side, the addition of a laborsaving Vectura stack-management system directs the plant’s customer-owned goods (COG) to designated areas by customer to simplify packout. The COG textiles are tracked, starting in the soil department, so there’s no need for color-coded tags on carts to keep track of COG goods.
Watch for follow-up coverage of both Premier and Gold Coast in upcoming issues of Textile Services magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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