Torani, the beverage and syrup company, has not laid off a single employee since the Great Depression—not in 2008, not amid globalization or the automation wave that hollowed out American manufacturing towns, and not during the pandemic that closed the cafes that buy most of its flavored syrups. That streak places it in rare company in an era when even famously employee-friendly tech firms have conducted repeated waves of layoffs.

Now, as generative and agentic AI reshape entry-level work across corporate America, Melanie Dulbecco—who has led the 101-year-old, San Leandro, California-based syrup maker for 35 years—faces the same question confronting executives everywhere: how to adopt technology that could theoretically replace employees' work. For Dulbecco, there is an added consideration—navigating the AI age without breaking Torani's no-layoffs streak.

"It is going to dramatically change things, and we're all going to live through this together, but our approach is going to be the same as it has been," Dulbecco told Fortune. "How do we create great jobs through this for everyone?"

After a friend connected her with the family that owns Torani, Dulbecco joined the company in 1991, when she said it was a nine-employee operation generating about $700,000 a year. Founded in 1925 in San Francisco by Italian immigrants who sold hand-crafted syrups to flavor drinks, the company pivoted to producing liqueurs after Prohibition ended in 1933. Its coffee-flavoring business—the syrups it is best known for today—did not arrive until decades later, in 1982. Over that time, Torani grew from five syrups to more than 150 that can be added to coffee, cocktails, and sodas, and Dulbecco even claimed the company "invented the flavored latte" with its vanilla syrup.

This year, the company is expected to bring in more than $800 million with just 500 employees, averaging 20% annual revenue growth over 35 years, the CEO said.

"Most companies focus on their financials, and then people are the tools," said Dulbecco. "We look at it the other way around, and it works really well for us."

Keeping the company local

A year into Dulbecco's tenure, the then-small Seattle chain Starbucks approached Torani to become its private-label syrup manufacturer. Torani already supplied syrups to Starbucks, but the decision split Dulbecco's team so sharply that they brought in students from Stanford Business School, her alma mater, to sort it out.

The students concluded that Torani could succeed either way, but that private labeling meant becoming a low-cost producer and skimping on what made Torani special—like swapping cane sugar for high-fructose corn syrup.

"It made the decision easy because then all of us who were here could say, what's the business we want to build?" Dulbecco recalled.

Decades later, in 2020, that same instinct to preserve the company's legacy kept it in the Bay Area. As Torani outgrew its San Francisco facility, Dulbecco's team approached every employee and mapped out their zip codes to find a commutable site: the current San Leandro campus. Two and a half years went into planning the move, but in March, California's Covid-19 order landed, and it became a "moment of truth" as cafes and restaurants began shutting down.

Dulbecco said the company ran financial scenarios on how to keep the business afloat without letting anyone go, and "the only way" was to move as soon as possible and get the new equipment running.

"We made it—everyone, safely—and then when things picked up again—because business did go down in April—it picked up because e-commerce took off, retail took off, some other things filled the gaps. We could help our cafe customers reopen their doors and our team was here," she said. "Being committed to our team, whom we care so much about, ends up really being to our benefit to continue to create the momentum and to be resilient in the hard times."

The Torani antidote to AI layoffs

Dulbecco explained that her team also takes precedence in major financial decisions when incorporating any new technology, especially AI.

"What are those 500 people, or 200 people, or 20 people doing to add more value?" she said. Treating AI purely as a way to slash costs, she argued, misses the bigger picture. Because Torani has not laid off people as new technology has come in, there is more trust between Dulbecco and her team when it comes to AI.

"What we find is our team is more likely to embrace new technologies also because there's confidence and an openness to learning new things because they know we've got their backs and they've got ours," she added.

Dulbecco said that trust also shows up in employees' benefits. Torani has a unique wealth-sharing plan on top of 401(k) matching and salaries, including bonuses for every employee tied to the company's top-line revenue and bottom-line profits, and an employee stock ownership plan that kicks in after a year. She called this "sharing the wealth we create together." Employee ownership of this kind remains uncommon among U.S. private companies, though thousands of firms operate ESOPs as a retention and alignment tool.

"Every year people get a new tranche of shares, and every year we do a new valuation, so there's nothing that makes me happier than when we, in a town hall meeting, share, 'Hey, we just did our valuation, here's been the increase,' and then afterwards, I see a forklift driver ask our CFO questions," Dulbecco said.

Dulbecco said she has talked to people at law and accounting firms who describe entry-level work changing rapidly around them, but Torani's entry-level hiring has not changed because she expects people to move around once they join.

She called it "career mixology," where an employee may start in an entry-level inventory role and later move into something completely different. She pointed to a procurement staffer named Carlos, who started at the company in an entry-level supply-chain job before working through several other positions to reach his current post.

"He's mixing up his career," said Dulbecco, "building a broader perspective of the business, which makes him a more valuable team member as well." Torani also runs a summer internship program for employees' college-age children, plus "first job programs" for newcomers.

"In a market where people say it's hard to hire, we have not had the same challenge, and I think it's because we look at roles differently," Dulbecco said. "We appreciate people in every role."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.