Wayne Caplan claims that he has been working in the food service industry since he was 10, when he would keep himself busy while his father worked in his Baltimore City-based shops during the summer. Sixty years later, he’s finally retiring from his lifelong career after working at several different food brokerage and distribution companies throughout his life, as well as founding his own.

Caplan, 70, was a Baltimore resident until two years ago, when he moved to York, Pennsylvania, with his wife. He returned to Timonium to celebrate his retirement party on May 31 with friends, family and former colleagues.

While he was born in Baltimore City, Caplan’s family moved into the county in 1961. There, they were some of the founding members of the former Winands Road Synagogue Center, which was the last remaining synagogue in Randallstown until it closed its doors in 2017.

While he jokes that he first got involved with food brokerage as a child, he actually broke into the industry running a fast food franchise while he was living in Florida. From there, he got involved with Sysco, one of the largest food distribution businesses in the world that helps provide ingredients in bulk and culinary supplies to restaurants. He officially became a food broker in 1992.

“I love to eat, and I love that you can take one item and make 30 different dishes with it,” Caplan said of why he’s been in the food distribution business for so long. “I enjoy being in the kitchen, working with chefs and cooks and coming up with new ideas. I like working with sales reps because they have a variety of different types of customers. So it’s not the same thing every day, I’m not doing the same routine every day. I really enjoy that part of it.”

A food broker typically acts as the sales and marketing arm of food manufacturers. They are responsible for selling food products, making them appealing to consumers and arranging to have different stores stock those products for sale. Food brokers add a more personal, human element to the process of marketing a product and can often help the product appeal to specific audiences.

After the company he was working for at the time was acquired by another, larger company, Caplan founded his own food distribution business: Atlantic Food Brokers, which largely focuses on brokerage in the Mid-Atlantic region. Food service brokers that specialize in specific, local areas are becoming increasingly uncommon as larger brokerage companies with wider reaches continue to grow.

Much of Atlantic Food Brokers’ work is conducted through the Maryland-based Saval Foodservice.

“Everything I do goes through Saval. They’re the largest independent food distributor in the Mid-Atlantic [region],” Caplan explained. “I’m on the road a lot, working with different sales reps in different locations.”

Because he’s been working in food brokerage for so long, Caplan has a lot of stories from his time in the business. One particularly memorable instance was when he worked with food managers at local prisons. In the past, he has also worked with government agencies in Washington, D.C. in order to stock certain products in their cafeterias.

Eventually, though, it came time for him to retire. Caplan noted that food brokerage can be a surprisingly demanding job on the body. He would often drive up to 20,000 miles a year to do business with different restaurants and companies, and the job also required a lot of lifting heavy items like bulk cases of food.

Caplan isn’t sure yet what he wants to do now that he’s retired, but he will be leaving behind a monumental legacy of 60 years in the food service industry. And he doesn’t plan to fully stop working, either.

“I want to do something part-time [when I’m retired], I’m just not sure what yet. Some of the manufacturers I’ve worked with want me to do things with them, so I’ll probably work on that,” he said. “And then I just want to relax for a while, and maybe do a little traveling with my wife. We haven’t been able to do much of that over the years.”