American Supply Company has been keeping hotels, schools and restaurants clean since 1951.

In 1930, after immigrating from Italy to the U.S., Louise and Victor Molinari moved from San Francisco to Salinas, and Louise got work cleaning houses. After 21 years of cleaning, she was ready for a more stable schedule, and transitioned with her husband and brother-in-law to making and supplying cleaning supplies.

“Back when they started the business, there was no regulation on these type of things,” says Greg Molinari, one of their grandsons. “They would make their own glass cleaner in the garage.”

Those unregulated days are gone, traded for highly standardized products. They’re stacked in buckets on pallets 30 feet high in American Supply Company’s Salinas warehouse, just two blocks from where Louise, Victor and Joseph Molinari got their start. (Victor’s desk is still left just as it was on his last day of work before he died at 90, in 1995 – a sweater draped over the chair, a paperweight on the shelf, typewriter on the desk.) Alongside the buckets of sanitizers and soaps are pallets of mop heads, paper towels, toilet paper, some 60,000 square feet of it.

In addition to modernizing to more regulated chemicals, they’ve expanded to offer restaurant supplies, with deep fryers, commercial refrigerators, giant mixers and a range of pots and pans and china in stock. They opened a second store in Seaside to be nearer to their many hospitality clients. The company distributes to thousands of regular customers – everything from restaurants to hotels to schools – in the tri-county area.

The big changes, Molinari says, are not in the products, although there are more options these days. “We may have seven products that do the exact same thing, but they all smell different,” he says. Another example: “In the beginning, there were single-fold towels, and multi-fold towels. The industry has become more complicated. It doesn’t have to be as complicated as it is.” (Those different smells we associate with cleanness? It’s an illusion.)

Greg’s father, David, is still the company president; they, along with Greg’s brother, Perry, now own the business. They get letters almost every week inquiring about whether the business is for sale; they never even answer, Molinari says, because they’re not interested.

They’re already preparing a fourth generation of college-age kids to take it over.

“If any of them want to give this a shot, it will be here for them,” Molinari says.