Food Service Specialties

In 1985, Food Service Specialties was founded in Columbus, Wisconsin by lifelong best friends Don Leick and Steve Lineer. During a visit to a potential customer, they had been asked to match and scale up a custom pizza sauce in an attempt to create uniformity and consistency in their customer’s sauce from batch to batch. 

This very concept is what blossomed into the successful business that we are today. For over 35 years now, Food Service Specialties has been creating, matching, and customizing a variety of different tomato and dairy-based sauces for restaurants, frozen food manufacturers, and retail applications both domestically and internationally.

After many years of growth, we outgrew our plant in Columbus and in 1998 moved our operation to Red Wing, Minnesota. Here we constructed a state-of-the-art 45,000-square-foot facility.

Basing our operations out of Red Wing has allowed us to double our footprint while also allowing for future expansion. In 2007, we added another 34,000 square feet to our production floor, introducing even more real estate for equipment and process improvement projects.

Today, FSS remains family-owned with the next generation of owners taking on active roles in the business. As always, we at Food Service Specialties embrace our mission to provide safe, legal, high-quality food products to the marketplace.