One of the Northeast’s largest foodservice marketing agencies chooses FirstLight for fiber-based Internet connectivity and hosted phones at its new corporate office
Albany, NY – September 9, 2020 – FirstLight, a leading provider of fiber-optic data, Internet, data center, cloud, and voice services to enterprise and carrier customers throughout the Northeast, announced today that A.J. Letizio Sales and Marketing, Inc. has selected FirstLight as the fiber-based Internet and hosted phone provider for its new Windham, New Hampshire corporate office.
A.J. Letizio is a leading sales agency for retail consumer packaged goods as well as foodservice and disposable goods. The company sells and markets all classes of food and non-food products to customers based in New England and Upstate New York. As brokers, the company serves mainstream foodservice companies, as well as K-12/school nutrition programs, convenience stores, and non foods/disposables and janitorial sectors.
With the trend in restaurants and grocery stores of securing food as fresh as possible and locally or authentically sourced, the company needs to stay in close contact with its customers and suppliers more than ever, explains Sandy Neals, Vice President, Finance and Technology. “That requires dependable, high-speed, low-latency Internet. That’s an important factor to our success. We need to constantly update our suppliers, vendors, and customers regarding inventory and delivery at moment’s notice.”
The company has been in the midst of a multi-year renovation project which required them to raze their old building and build a new, 20,000-square-foot Enterprise Center, complete with a modern test kitchen. A .J. Letizio also purchased 40 new hosted phones from FirstLight. “We had to move to a temporary location during construction where FirstLight service was unfortunately not available,” added Neals. “When it was time to move back to our new office, I needed to make sure that we had not only the required speed, but absolute reliability. Outages in my business are not acceptable. For that reason, we chose FirstLight.”
Looking toward its future growth, A.J. Letizio may consider FirstLight services such as cloud or disaster recovery solutions for its growing business needs. The company has been a customer of FirstLight for nearly a decade.
“FirstLight is proud to have a food services marketing customer of the caliber of A.J. Letizio,” says Matt Jancovic, FirstLight’s Chief Revenue Officer. “The food services industry is increasingly global in scope, as customers look for exotic foods and expect timely delivery of fresh food, especially when a product’s shelf life is measured in days if not hours. Meeting those high expectations requires reliable connectivity for coordination among suppliers, distributors, and marketers. A low-latency, reliable service is an essential ingredient that keeps them all connected.”