This major American company started in 1925. It hasn’t laid off a single employee since.

The entrepreneurial spirit has always been alive and well in the United States. Starting a business and seeing it succeed is the “American Dream.” One company has been living out the American Dream since it was founded in 1925. Torani, a business that creates and sells flavored syrups worldwide, has some of the biggest bragging rights: it has had zero layoffs since its inception over 100 years ago. If you’ve ordered a vanilla latte or other sweetened beverage, you’ve likely tasted the flavors of Torani that began in the small neighborhood of North Beach in San Francisco, California. Through the Great Depression, World War II, and even the COVID-19 pandemic, the company has never laid off an employee. Here’s how they’ve done it. Torani’s beginnings Two Italian-Americans founded Torani in 1925: Rinaldo and Ezilda Torre. After visiting family in Lucca, Italy, they brought home five unique syrup flavors: Anisette (similar to licorice), Grenadine (pomegranate), Lemon, Orgeat (almond), and Tamarindo. Today, the company boasts over 150 syrup flavors, flavor enhancers, and other drink “enhancers.” Torani’s syrups gained popularity thanks to Prohibition and the passing of the Eighteenth Amendment, which outlawed the sale of alcohol in the United States from 1920-1933. When it was repealed, Torani began to make distilled spirits—with Ezilda becoming the first female liquor rectifier in the United States. The company maintained business and weathered many storms as time went on, eventually striking it big in 1982 when their sweetened vanilla syrup was used to create the first flavored latte at San Francisco’s famed Cafe Trieste. The company shifted to specialty coffee sales, and has continued to expand thanks to its 330,000-square-foot factory in San Leandro, California. The facility produces an average of 450,000 bottles of flavored syrups each day. Zero layoffs since The Great Depression Torani was built on grit. Sadly, Ezilda’s husband, Rinaldo, died unexpectedly from a heart attack in 1938. She was left with two young children but managed to stay at the helm of the company with encouragement from her family. “They said, ‘We’ll help you raise the kids. We’ll help you in the business if you need us, but you can do this’,” Melanie Dulbecco, Torani’s current CEO who joined the company in 1991, told SFGate. “And, of course, we know that she did. But we talk about that because we know that’s in our DNA that when we face tough times, we come together like family.” Ezilda’s decision to sell distilled liquor brought them through World War II. Even in modern times under Dulbecco’s leadership, employees have maintained their roles. During COVID-19, when sales were down due to closed cafes and restaurants that used Torani, the company “ran financials” to save everyone’s roles and stuck to a two-and-a-half-year plan to move into the company’s new facility that would (in the long run) save them more money. Dulbecco shared more details about the decision with the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2023: “We let everyone know two and a half years in advance and told them that our goal was 100% retention. We had a team that was exploring where we could go and they said, ‘If we move to this state, we could save this much on taxes. There are these incentives for manufacturers if we move here.’ And we said, ‘Hold on a minute. Here’s the zip code map of our team. Here’s the radius that we’ll consider, and it doesn’t go past the East Bay.’ We interviewed everybody to figure out how to design this place in a way that they would be really excited to work here.” Simply put, communicating with employees and fully believing in their value led them through the pandemic. “Being committed to our team, whom we care so much about, ends up really being to our benefit to continue to create the momentum and to be resilient in the hard times,” Dulbecco told recently Fortune. Retaining employees in the age of AI Torani has a track record of surviving difficult, changing times. Today, that looks like navigating a world with changing technology, specifically AI. Dulbecco, who has held her role for an impressive 35 years, has played a large role in the company’s continued growth. She joined Torani when the company was a family-run team of only eight people. “It is going to dramatically change things, and we’re all going to live through this together, but our approach is going to be the same as it has been,” Dulbecco told Fortune. “How do we create great jobs through this for everyone?” Instead of looking to AI as a way to “slash costs,” the value has been put back on employees who are “more likely to embrace new technologies also because there’s confidence and an openness to learning new things because they know we’ve got their backs and they’ve got ours,” she added. Putting her team first has paid off. “Most companies focus on their financials, and then people are the tools. We look at it the other way around, and it works really well for us,” she said.