PHILADELPHIA

His brother was on the phone. There was a fire at the Philadelphia deli company's warehouse in Burlington County, N.J. "It was bad. As I'm driving up from the Shore, you can see the smoke from miles away. You go numb," Eni said.

The refrigerated warehouse held all of Dietz & Watson's inventory ready for shipping. Besides that, the company had rented space to the company that distributes food to ShopRite supermarkets.

"ShopRite had, I don't know how many, hundreds of thousands of pounds of turkey for Thanksgiving in the warehouse," Eni said. "They lost all of that."

In June 2014, nearly a year after the fire, the firm announced that it would not rebuild in Burlington, instead expanding its Northeast Philadelphia footprint to consolidate operations in the city.

"In many ways, I can look back, and maybe it's just my optimistic nature," he said, "but even though it was tremendously stressful, I think the fire had more positive effects on our business than negative."

Q: How so?

A: We lost all our inventory. We had nothing to sell. It galvanized the company. Monday was a holiday, but we had 80 percent of our people come to work on that holiday and we started producing here in Philadelphia.

Q: Sounds as if it made you appreciate your workforce.

A: It sure did. And our customers were also very understanding. The fact that our customers would take full pallets of every product made life much easier for us.

Q: Can you find workers?

A: That's probably the biggest challenge we have at the moment.

Q: Why?

A: The generation that is coming into the workforce is different from the generation leaving the workforce. Baby boomers grew up working hard, working in factories, and were used to it and were not afraid of it.

Q: Aren't you being an old fogy?

A: I can tell you our turnover is much, much higher than I can ever remember.