2
Business View Magazine
HLS Linen Services
An industry leader in laundry quality and service
HLS Linen Services was formed in 1974 in Ottawa, Ontar-
io, by six area hospitals looking to reorganize their laundry
operations. Rocco Romeo, the company’s current CEO,
give an account of the company’s origins: “Back in that
era, every individual hospital had its own on-premise laun-
dry. An on-premise laundry is both capital-intensive and
extremely labor-intensive. There’s also a lot of real estate
that’s being taken up at each hospital. So the hospitals
said, in a cooperative venture, ‘Why don’t we set up a co-
op organization that handles all of the linen and laundry
requirements for us, collectively?’” In this way, the hospi-
tals reasoned that they could reap savings in labor, capi-
tal, and equipment costs, as well as in utility expenses, by
using more efficient, centralized equipment.
The cooperative venture achieved all of those goals, and
more. Today, HLS is an industry-leading, laundry service
company that operates from a state-of-the-art, 185,000
square-foot facility. No longer organized as a co-op, the
mature company now employs 220 full-time workers and
another 180, part-time. Its ten-truck fleet services over
100 customers – 20 of which are hospitals - across many
regions of Ontario and Western Quebec. Romeo recounts
significant changes in HLS’s business model: “Back in
