Photo by Bill Bittar
Ansonia Mayor David Cassetti at a ribbon-cutting at Stani Dairy in mid-July.
ANSONIA — City officials held a ceremonial ribbon cutting for a fast-growing, family-owned yogurt manufacturer.
Stani Dairy makes authentic Greek yogurt from a family recipe. The company opened at 5 Howard Ave. in 2016.
Now the company’s Greek yogurt is distributed beyond Connecticut’s borders, reaching store shelves and restaurant kitchens in Boston, New York and New Jersey.
“We hope to be a national brand from Connecticut,” said Ignatios Vasilellis, the company’s co-founder. “That’s the goal.”
The city marked the growth with the ribbon cutting, which was attended by city leaders, including Mayor David Cassetti, and Valley business people.
Vasilellis and his wife, Meni, own the business with Meni’s parents, Stylianos and Kali Emmanouil.
Stani Dairy has eight employees, six of whom are family.
Meni Vasilellis said the company wants to hire more employees to meet its recent growth.
“We have morning and evening shifts and production continues seven days a week,” she said.
Click here for Stani’s website.
Kali Emmanouil, one of the owners, thanked the city officials in attendance for their assistance when Stani first opened. He also thanked his landlord, Brian Calvert.
“Mr. Calvert and his family made this an easy place to do business,” she said.
The Calverts have own Calvert Safe & Lock in Derby since 1972.
Frank A. Hoinsky, owner of Frank A. Hoinsky Real Estate Inc. in Ansonia, credited Calvert with breathing new life into what he said was once a rundown car dealership (the former Cherney Pontiac, according to The New Haven Register) on the Howard Avenue property.
Photo by Bill Bittar
(Left to right) Mayor Cassetti, Stani owners Ignatios Vasilellis and Kali Emmanouil look on.
Kali Emmanouil thanked Hoinsky and his broker, Richard Bialokoz, for helping her family find the property. She also thanked Robert A. Mezzo, of Ion Bank in Naugatuck, for securing Stani’s loan for its yogurt-making machinery.
In terms of Greek yogurt, Stani Dairy’s credentials are legit.
Ignatios Vasilellis grew up on a family farm in the town of Kalloni on the island of Lesvos, Greece, and studied for two years at Galaktokomiki College of Ioannina, the only college for dairy producers in Greece and the Balkans.
He moved to the U.S. in 2015 and started Stani Dairy the following year. Vasilellis said Stani means barnyard or sheepfold, reminding him of the family farm he grew up on, of every day traditions and wholesome living.
At Stani’s headquarters in Ansonia, Vasilellis showed visitors the stainless-steel yogurt making equipment from a window inside the facility, including filler machines for the single serving size yogurt containers and for the bulk 10-pound containers. He said it takes Stani three days to make its yogurt due to the lengthy straining process, making it different from other producers.
Stani has plain, honey, strawberry, blueberry and peach yogurts and is in the process of coming up with new flavors.
The fruit comes from growers in New York and the milk from Guida’s Dairy in New Britain.
The closest places Stani yogurt is sold in the Valley is Adams Hometown Market and Common Bond Market, both in Shelton.
“There’s no preservatives,” Vasilellis said. “It’s only milk, culture and fresh fruits.”
Ansonia is classified by the state as an economically distressed city. It lost much of its manufacturing base, once the primary driver of the local economy, by the 1980s. Those decent-paying jobs were replaced locally with lower-paying retail jobs, to some extent.
But there have been bright spots in recent years.
Better Packages, another manufacturing company, moved to Ansonia in 2014.
The city managed not just to keep The Farrel Corp. in the city — it helped lure them into a new building at 1 Farrel Drive. The company’s roots in the Naugatuck Valley date back to 1848. The company is now known as Farrel Pomini. The state lauded the city’s efforts in 2015.
In 2017, RugPadUSA announced it was moving to downtown Ansonia. The company manufactures rug pads.
In other areas of economic development, the city’s Main Street downtown has become a dining destination for its eclectic fare.
Meanwhile, the city’s retail sector is faltering, to some extent. The Big Y supermarket is “relocating” to a new space on Route 34 in east Derby, and a long-discussed retail development next to Target has failed to materialize. And the city still has a glut of outdated of hulking old factories in the area of Main Street and North Main.
