Hartz Mountain Industries (HMI) is a private family-owned and -operated company known for its vast real estate holdings in the New York/New Jersey Metropolitan Area. Its former parent Hartz Mountain Corporation (of pet products fame), was founded by German-American businessmen Max and Gustav Stern. Leonard N. Stern is owner, Chairman, and CEO. It is based at 400 Plaza Drive in Secaucus, New Jersey, in the Harmon Meadow Plaza retail shopping complex in the Meadowlands.
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Max and Gustav Stern emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1926 with five thousand singing canaries (Harz Roller), and began manufacturing bird food under the Hartz Mountain brand in 1932. They later sold pets such as canaries, parakeets, hamsters, tropical fish, and associated supplies throughout the U.S. and Canada, and eventually introduced pet supply departments into more than 30,000 supermarkets in North America and the United Kingdom.
Known as Hartz Mountain Corporation (HMC), this pet products side of the Hartz empire, which had been owned and operated by the Stern family for 75 years, was sold to investment group J.W. Childs along with select HMC management in 2000, although for goodwill purposes it still retains the HMC name. HMC's new owners opted to retain its longtime Secaucus offices, so that HMC is now a tenant of the owners of the building, Hartz Mountain Industries (HMI). HMC was sold to the Sumitomo Corporation of Japan in 2004.
Hartz Mountain Industries, which started as a real estate hobby for the Sterns, began construction of its first speculative industrial building in Bayonne, New Jersey in 1966, and made its first major land acquisition with a 750-acre (300 ha) tract of land in the New Jersey Meadowlands. HMI currently owns more than 1,800 acres (730 ha) of land close to Manhattan, and its real estate activities account for most of its business, with over 200 buildings boasting over 38 million square feet (3,500,000 m²) of industrial, commercial, office, retail and hospitality space. Its own in house staff manages, operates, and maintains its complete real estate portfolio.
Max’s son, Leonard N. Stern, who joined the company in 1959, is the current Chairman and CEO. His son Emanuel Stern is President and Chief Operating Officer, and his son Edward Stern also works for the company.
Hartz Mountain Industries has made energy efficiency a high priority for its real estate portfolio and installed monitoring equipment, powered by utiliVisor software at several of its properties. The continuous energy oversight capabilities now possessed by Hartz property management staff have allowed them to dramatically decrease the energy consumed by HVAC.[1][2]
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) required Hartz to cancel the production of phenothrin-containing flea and tick products for cats after receiving thousands of reports of pet injury and death. As of March 31, 2006, the sale and distribution of Hartz's phenothrin-containing flea and tick products for cats has been terminated. However, EPA's product cancellation order did not apply to Hartz flea and tick products for dogs, and Hartz continues to use phenothrin in a concentration of 85.7% in many of its flea and tick products for dogs.
Consumers reported adverse effects, including pet death, in both cats and dogs after using Hartz flea and tick products as directed.[3]
Hartz Mountain’s businesses also included a publishing company, Harmon Publishing. Hartz purchased New York City’s alternative weekly newspaper, The Village Voice, in 1986, as well as other such periodicals in cities such as Los Angeles, Seattle, Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Orange County, California. The combined circulation of these papers was 950,000. In 1999, however, Hartz Mountain sold the publishing venture in order to refocus efforts on real estate, financial, and investment activities.[4]
Other Hartz Mountain holdings included the Carpet Magic Company, which manufactured and maintained carpet cleaning machine rental departments in 20,000 retail locations, and S.M. Cork, a leading general merchandise service distributor of the United Kingdom. Hartz also no longer owns these properties.