To drill down to the secret of Tony Caputo’s success as a food purveyor extraordinaire, go back more than 30 years to a time when he was working for his old high school friend Sam Granato at Granato’s importing business. Tony was in his early 30s, raising two young sons, Matt and Peter, with his wife, Mary, while slicing salami and working the deli counter at Granato’s.

One day he had an epiphany. “I was about two years into the job, and it just dawned on me that I loved what I was doing,” he recalls. “I thought I had higher aspirations, that I needed to do something else, be somebody else, but I realized that wasn’t true. From then on, I wasn’t looking to be CEO of Xerox anymore. I was thrilled to death to be a deli guy.”