Spectro Oils Hides In Plain Sight

BROOKFIELD, CT – The nondescript tan building  is set back from the road on Route 202, just south of the Route 7 intersection (where Route 7 becomes a divided highway). It might be a low-key factory or a warehouse, but with only a few cars parked outside, the suggestion is that very little happens within. The sign out front bears a rather generic name – Intercontinental Lubricants Corporation – that likewise gives an insufficient clue as to what goes on inside.

John P. Dunne, who works there, says visitors are sometimes surprised upon being given a tour of the 70,000-square-foot building. The reaction is often “‘It’s amazing you’re here.’ They expect you to be down in New Jersey or Texas,” he said earlier this week after giving RIDE-CT / RIDE-New England a tour of what is both factory and warehouse as well as office complex. It’s the plant where Spectro Oils‘ products have been blended, packaged and shipped since 1975.

“If it has two wheels, we make a fluid for it,” said Dunne, specialty sales manager for the company. The raw material arrives on tanker trucks or in drums, gets stored in holding tanks, blended, checked for quality, packaged and then shipped across the country and worldwide. “About a million gallons goes through here a year – give or take,” he said.

It’s an efficient, high-automated operation. ILC only has 20 employees and only seven of them are hands-on in the actual production process. “It’s not labor intensive. It’s machine intensive to be cost effective,” Dunne said.

Besides producing Spectro Oils, the company also produces branded oil for others, including for S&S and Mercury Marine. For 28 years, and up until two years ago, it produced BMW branded oil. Dunne said that relationship ended when BMW, which had used ILC in the U.S. and another company for the rest of the world, decided to consolidate production with one company. BMW first went with Castrol and then, earlier this month, switched to Shell.

Walking through the plant, beginning at the bay where tankers unload oil to the shipping area where pallets stacked with cartons containing the finished product are found, it was hard not to be impressed by the cleanliness and organization of the operation.

Back in August, the company’s longtime president Dave Miller retired and was succeeded by 26-year-old Alex Josefson, grandson of company founder Robert H. Wehman.

Josefson’s parents, Thomas Josefson and Barbara Wehman Josefson and brothers Chris and Mike are part of the management team, making ILC a truly family-run business.

John Dunne and Alex Josefson

As Dunne mentioned, Spectro Oils makes all sorts of oils – oils for two-stroke and four-stroke engines, fork oils and chain lubes, and oils for snowmobiles and ATVs. That it’s produced under the radar in Connecticut is what made writing about the company appealing, so that riders who might happen to go by the plant will know that the lubricants that keep their bikes operating smoothly came from just a few yards away.