Food Processor of the Year (Small Company)

Ivars Seafood, Soup & Sauce Company, Mukilteo

You probably know Ivars for its fast-food and sit-down restaurants around the region, and its legendary namesake showman founder, the late Ivar Haglund. A much smaller and quieter offshoot of the company is an operation that was started to make chowder for the restaurants, but which today turns out about 450,000 gallons of chowder and soup each year for supermarkets, warehouse clubs, even other restaurants.

Theyre now sold at most grocery chains in Washington and in stores as far away as Texas. Today, Ivars chowders, soups and bisques can be found at sports venues, on Amtrak passenger trains and Washington state ferries, at casinos, ski resorts, the Woodland Park Zoo, Boeing and Microsoft. Theyre even available online, at ivarschowder.com, for those who want to buy direct.

Ivars has expanded its offerings beyond clam and salmon chowders; it also provides a service to produce commercial versions of custom recipes as well as a line of frozen crab cakes. Ivars invested nearly $1 million in the packaging equipment needed to produce ready to heat cups. That investment is paying off, it says, in the form of record-setting sales in spite of a weak economy.