Sunseri at your service

People tend to resist change, especially when it threatens to fiddle with the long-standing traditions and offerings of a legendary local institution.

So Bill Sunseri understands why some Pittsburghers might have felt their hearts in their throats when Pennsylvania Macaroni Co. announced on Facebook — seemingly out of the blue on Jan. 2 — that it was under new ownership.

“Is this a good or bad thing?” wondered one longtime customer in the comments section.

“Please don’t change a thing,” implored another. “Penn Mac is perfection.”

“What does this mean in terms of prices, products, customer service?” asked a third.

As the person who’s taken over, Sunseri — whose Sicilian grandfather, Agostino Sunseri, started the Italian grocery store in 1902 with brothers Michael and Salvatore and grew it into one of the Strip District’s iconic retail destinations — acknowledges those are great questions. After all, only about 13% of family businesses survive into the third generation, according to Cornell University.

The Mt. Lebanon native taking over for his retiring brothers, David and Rick, is clear on the answer: It will be business as usual going forward for shoppers of domestic and imported cheeses, olive oil, spices, pasta, cookies and other specialty Mediterranean foods at the Penn Avenue store.

Most stores could use a gentle facelift after a century in business, so Sunseri may move a few things around and/​or add some new features in the weeks and months to come.

Acknowledging many shoppers are are wooed by convenience, he’s looking at expanding next-day home delivery. The father of six (and stepfather of three) also is exploring home meal replacement to better serve customers with busy lifestyles.

“But we’re not going to modernize and turn it into a Trader Joe’s,” Sunseri, 63, insists. “We are an authentic Italian store.”

An inherited passion

Sunseri tried to purchase the company’s food distribution business — which he ran with his brother Robert for 18 years until his death in 2018 — in 2013 and again in 2017, but was unsuccessful both times. (It ended up being sold to Bellissimo Distribution in 2018 and was taken over by Sysco Corp. in 2021.)

“The older brothers wanted to get out of the [distribution] business because it wasn’t as lucrative as retail, and that affected my career, ” he says.

Unhappy with the direction being taken by the equity group, he stepped back from daily operations to help his wife, Fifi, at her Uptown pizzeria, The Original Giovanni’s Pizza.

“There just wasn’t enough room for four brothers,” he says with a sigh.

Buying Penn Mac’s retail business, which he shared equally with his brothers and sister, Judy, was nearly as fraught. It took seven years of negotiating amid a contentious family conflict before he was able to come out on top of what he calls a “family auction” just before Thanksgiving 2024, with the transfer just after Christmas.

Then again, “Billy Joe,” as Sunseri is known by family, always knew he’d eventually follow in his father and grandfather’s footsteps.

One of his earliest childhood memories is of gathering with his brothers and cousins in the store — the entirety of which could fit into the space the cheese and cold-cuts counters now occupy — to stock shelves with chewing gum and olive oil, put labels on spices and most fun of all, grab any snails that happened to be crawling up the walls to return them to their bin for escargot-loving shoppers.

“It was nothing extraneous — just easy stuff an 8- or 9-year-old could do,” he say.

Penn Mac in his DNA

By the time he was 14, he was pulling regular shifts on weekends and during summer vacation. By 16, he was driving one of the many vans that delivered tomatoes, cheese and other supplies to local pizzerias, Italian restaurants and delis. He also was manning the forklift in the store’s warehouse.

“The way we grew up was you come to work, make a loaf of bread and go home,” he says.

Sunseri briefly studied accounting and business at Community College of Allegheny County and Robert Morris University after graduating from high school in1979, but it didn’t really fit and “I just wanted to get back,” he says. So after getting married in 1983 at age 21 and starting a family, that’s exactly what he did.

While older brothers Rick and David worked the retail side and eventually became the friendly day-to-day face of the grocery (another brother, Ronald, passed away in 1978), Sunseri found himself drawn instead to the purchasing and operations side of the food service division, which by 2000 had outgrown its Strip location and moved to a facility in Green Tree. By the time he reluctantly retired in 2018, he had 40-plus years in sales under his belt.

“I liked the hunt, the procurement and the relationships — who to call and when, and how to get it here in the most profitable way,” he says.

Sunseri admits he was “scaling down” before he took over the family business late last year. He thought he had forgotten how much knowledge he had in the industry. But he quickly realized Penn Mac is so imprinted on his DNA that it’s become second nature.

“It’s like riding a bike,” he says. “My mind and memory are back.”

Already, he says, he’s getting calls not just from customers eager to offer congratulations, but also from vendors who ask: “Will you buy?” or “Are you wholesaling?”

He has quite the cheerleader in his 16-year-old son, Massimo, who’s a sophomore at Central Catholic High School and dreams of continuing the business into the fourth generation.

“He was just so adamant about [me] getting into the business of the ‘Pap’ he never met,” says Sunseri.

Mossimo, in fact, was responsible for the “special announcement” on Facebook. He’s since become the store’s “social media man.”

“He just loves being a Sunseri,” agrees his mother, Fifi, who married Bill in 2009, four years after he delivered capicola to her pizzeria. “He’s very proud of his heritage.”

Going forward

Sunseri admits that even with longtime employees like general manager Greg “Fatty” Tenaglia to help guide him, he has some “pretty big shoes” to fill in the upcoming months and years. What’s reassuring, he says, is that Penn Mac has established long-term relationships with a lot of the vendors who supply the store with close to 7,000 specialty products, including nearly 400 kinds of cheeses.

Being able to supply shoppers with exactly what they want, in fact, is his main objective as the new owner of Penn Mac. That, and turning younger Pittsburghers who might not have grown up shopping at the grocery with their parents or grandparents into regular customers.

“I want people to have Penn Mac in their lives,” he says. “I want to get back to personal contact. No third parties. I want customers to communicate with us.”

Sunseri knows he’ll have to keep himself from micromanaging — running a store is quite the change from sitting all day in front of a computer ordering product — but pledges to work “14 days a week” with his wife to improve and complement what Penn Mac already has.

That includes more sales, affordable pricing and a bigger selection of products.

“We’re going to tighten margins and get prices down, and get more competitive,” he says.

And don’t be surprised if you find him parked at the counter across from the spices just inside the big red front doors. That’s where his dad always sat to greet customers before his brothers cut a hole in the wall in mid-2000s to expand the store from around 2,500 square feet to its current 7,000 square feet of floor space.

“There are no rearview mirrors,” he says. “Everything is going to be looking through the windshield forward.”

As for the charming, unassuming interior that reeks of history and feels so wonderfully organically grown?

“I’ll leave some dirt on the floor,” he jokes.