Brass City Provisions Revives Food Production in Waterbury

Rosalind Petrakis remembers standing in the empty shell of a former brass-fittings factory in Waterbury in 2014, its high windows letting in dusty light across a concrete floor still marked with bolt holes from machinery removed years earlier. "Everybody who walked through with me saw a liability," Petrakis said. "I saw ceiling height, loading docks, and a building that wanted to be useful again." That instinct became Brass City Provisions, a food production company that now prepares soups, sauces, and ready-made meals for grocery chains and institutional buyers across Connecticut.

Petrakis, who trained as a chef before moving into food service management, started Brass City with a modest commercial kitchen buildout in one corner of the factory, producing small batches of soup for a handful of local grocers. The company has since expanded to occupy the entire 60,000-square-foot facility, employing 112 people across production, packaging, and distribution roles, with product lines now sold in grocery stores throughout the state.

Betting on Waterbury's Industrial Bones

Petrakis chose Waterbury deliberately, drawn by the availability of large industrial buildings at a fraction of the cost she would have paid closer to Hartford or the coast. "This city has all this infrastructure built for a manufacturing economy that moved on," she said. "Food production is manufacturing. I just had to convince people of that." The factory's existing loading docks and heavy electrical capacity, originally installed for metalworking equipment, turned out to be well suited to industrial kitchen operations with only modest retrofitting.

Building Relationships With Regional Grocers

Brass City's growth has depended heavily on direct relationships with independent and regional grocery chains rather than national distributors, a strategy Petrakis says gives the company more control over product quality and shelf placement. "The big distributors want you to compete on price against companies ten times your size," she said. "We compete on being able to answer the phone when a store manager has a question about a recipe."

Tomas Reyes, Brass City's production manager, said Petrakis remains involved in recipe development even as the company has scaled, often testing new products personally before they move to full production. "She still tastes every batch of a new sauce before it goes out," Reyes said. "Some owners would have handed that off years ago."

Navigating Supply Chain Pressure

Like many food producers, Brass City faced significant ingredient cost volatility over the past several years, forcing Petrakis to renegotiate supplier contracts and, at times, absorb costs rather than pass them fully to grocery partners. She says the company's decision to diversify its supplier base across several regional farms, rather than relying on a small number of large distributors, helped cushion some of that volatility.

Brass City recently added a second production line dedicated to plant-based prepared meals, responding to growing demand from grocery partners for expanded vegetarian offerings. Petrakis says the company plans to add another 20 jobs over the coming year to support the expansion. "I didn't get into this to build the biggest food company in Connecticut," she said, looking out over the factory floor. "I got into it to prove this building, and this city, still had something to make."