The Buffalo New York based Delaware North Company was founded eighty-five years ago and the privately-held company has been run by three generations of the Jacobs family ever since then. Delaware North is a food service and hospitality company, running sports venue operations such as Wembley Stadium, the HSBC Arena, as well as concessions in the Buffalo Niagara International Airport. It is also the dominant player in the outsourced concession business in national parks such as the Grand Canyon, the Kennedy Space Center, Yellowstone and Yosemite National Park with all of its natural attractions. The company employs 50,000 people and generates over $2 billion annually from their endeavors yet the company learned a lot of what makes it successful from the demands placed upon it by Yosemite.
The current Jacobs running the firm, Jeremy Jacobs, sees great value in being an environmentally focused business, especially given the fact that much of the firm’s business comes from the national parks across America and has been making strides in that direction for the last fifteen years – long before other companies have been considering employing environmental practices. But the company can’t take credit for driving itself in that direction; it came at the direction of Yosemite National Park which insisted in the mid-nineties that Delaware North Company become more environmentally considerate in its business if it wished to retain the concession businesses in places like Yosemite Valley and Badger Pass Ski Resort – Yosemite’s in-park ski facility. Yosemite forced the company to consider every aspect of its business within the national park, down to the cups, napkins and plastic-ware and the company feels that those early demands gave the company an edge, made it more competitive, and allowed it to leverage such to great effect over the years to get to a position of success.
