Last year, Joel Brodman was looking for a new, larger headquarters for Casanova Meats, his West Babylon-based wholesale meat delivery company, but at the time, he was undergoing treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Hospital in Manhattan for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Then, one day, the phone by his hospital bed rang. There was a possibility of a building available in Hauppauge.
“My wife said, ‘You can’t go anywhere,'” Brodman said in an interview with the Press. “But I masked up” and headed for Hauppauge.
A deal was soon sealed, Brodman’s Casanova Meats Inc., is to move soon into a 50,000-square-foot building on Wireless Boulevard, dwarfing the 16,000-square-foot structure it has occupied since 2011.
“It’s a big move for us,” the 62-year-old Brodman said. “It’s nerve-wracking at the same time.” I have my two sons in the business.”
He is grateful for the help, he said, but the move is imperative.
“Here, we’re bursting at the seams.” He said.
Casanova Meats’ move had the support of the Suffolk County Industrial Development Agency, which earlier this fall awarded the company tax breaks totaling $563,000, including $395,000 off property taxes over 10 years.
The award will come in handy. The new building will cost Casanova Meats $19 million.
Brodman said that as a result of the IDA award, the company will be able to add another 20 people to its current payroll of about 82.
Without the IDA’s help, Brodman said, Casanova Meats had planned to move out of state, possibly to New Jersey.
The meat business is very much in the blood of the Brodman family.
Brodman’s great-grandfather operated a slaughterhouse in Germany before he and his family were forced to flee the country from the Nazis and the Holocaust. His grandfather opened a store on Casanova Street in Brooklyn in 1945, thus the name of the company. His father, too, was in the business. So were uncles, brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law.
Brodman’s two sons, Hunter and Skyler, now work at the company.
Brodman had worked in the meat business since he was a teenager.
“I always knew I was going to be in this business, even though my father didn’t want me to be,” Brodman said. “But I loved the business. I used to come in at 3 in the morning to work. I loaded the truck, did everything.”
At one time, Brodman had retail stores, but they gave way to the wholesale business. That’s because one time, a customer came in and asked for oxtail and kidney fat. Brodman began supplying oxtail to restaurants and chicken and veal cutlets to others. In effect, Casanova Meats became a wholesaler.
His wholesale business kept growing. He and his sons told the Suffolk IDA board that re-locating to the bigger Hauppauge building would allow more space for refrigeration and meat cutting.
The IDA board agreed, saying this is the kind of business the county wanted to help grow.
The IDAs in Nassau and Suffolk counties have been quite busy, according to a new report by New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli. According to DiNapoli’s report, Long Island ranks No. 1 among the state’s 10 regions in the number of jobs created by industrial development agencies.
The report said that about 46,000 people were added to Long Island payrolls as of Dec. 31, 2022 through expanding companies, housing developments and other projects that received tax breaks through the Island’s eight IDAs in recent years.
Nassau’s IDA fueled the hiring of about 13,870 people, while Suffolk’s was responsible for 13,085 new jobs.
Brodman said he does not think about retiring from Casanova Meats.
“This keeps my brain going,” he said. “It’s never about the money, It’s about family. All of my staff is family, I take care of them, they take care of me.”
“It also provides a quality of life for my boys,” he said. “They know their responsibilities. But I’m not going to make them come in at 3 o’clock in the morning like I did.”
As for himself, Brodman said, “I take it a little more easy now. I don’t set my alarm clock. I come in at 10 o’clock in the morning now.”
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