VinCenzo International
div. VVGI Corporation
Founded:
1988
Home Office:
Chicago, Illinois
President and CEO:
Keith Armato
a.k.a. The Big Vincenz
Partner Factories:
Shenzhen, China
Osaka, Japan
Tokyo, Japan
Seoul, Korea
London, England
Barcelona, Spain
Paris, France
In 1904, a Sicilian immigrant arrived at the port of New Orleans with the hopes of making a start in a wonderful and exciting new country. He hoped to earn enough to pay his sponsor for his transit, and then later save for the passage of his young wife. A family that had come from the same village years before did him a great kindness by offering him a room, and he began his new life.
Soon, however, he found an insurmountable obstacle to his success: olive oil, or rather the lack of it. This precious commodity was unavailable in his new country. How could he live without this fluid that was as necessary to him as his own blood? He asked his host and his coworkers how such a rich land could be without such a necessity and they all agreed that it was almost impossible for a Sicilian to live without olive oil, but that he, like everyone else, would just have to get used to it.
Melchior Armato was not about to get used to it. He worked hard by day, and at night he organized a revolution. Within a few years he had put together a band of co-conspirators - the owner of a small olive grove in his home town of Sambuca, a barrel maker who lived in the next town, and a master of turning ripe olives into oil. Melchior moved to Chicago and put together the necessary machinery to manufacture tin cans so that the olive oil, which arrived in large barrels by ship from his native country, could be packed for sale to his fellow countrymen. The year was 1912, and in Chicago he founded the first Armato family can company.

Two generations later, the company had made its last olive oil can, but was busy producing decorative tins for chocolates, hard candies, fruit cakes, and an innovative new product. The new product was a can made with lead coating to hold high voltage tubes for an amazing new invention, the Color Television. The lead coating was necessary because these special tubes gave off dangerous radioactive waves, and had to be shielded from those young children sitting up close to watch every move of Howdy Doody or the Lone Ranger, or especially the new Disney show, "The Wonderful World of Color."

Color television was an enormous success, and soon every television in every home was equipped with a can made by the company that Melchior Armato had founded forty-five years earlier. Melchior had long since left this world, but his two sons, Albert and Philip, were benefiting from his labors and the color TV boom. This new product had grown to constitute nearly half their sales. The company kept expanding to meet the demand, and as it expanded it became more and more profitable. Then came another event that would forever change the company Melchoir founded - the invention of the transistor.

The words "solid state" struck fear into the company's management. It was now 1966, and within two years the last TV tube can would be made. Into this company's uncertain future came Keith Armato.