Any Italian cook worth her salt knows how to feed a lot of people with her Sunday sauce.

But even the most devoted grandma couldn't handle the 10 million people a day who crack open a jar or bottle that is filled and distributed by LiDestri Food & Beverage.

From its own brands — Francesco Rinaldi pasta sauces and LiDestri bloody mary mixes — to the store brands of dozens of retailers, LiDestri has made a name as the biggest food processor in New York and the largest processor of tomatoes in the United States. It packs 1,000 jars of spaghetti sauce a minute at its plant on Lee Road in Rochester.

With plants on both the east and west sides of Rochester, as well as in California, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, LiDestri packs the food and drink that lie behind some 1,500 labels.

Some manufacturers aren't willing to let it be known who makes their stuff. But you can be sure that the spaghetti sauces at Wegmans, Tops, Kroger, Aldi and Target are made at LiDestri — each with a unique recipe, swears Dave Stoklosa, vice president of corporate business development mergers and acquisitions.

"We don't run the line all day and just change the label," Stoklosa said.

Newman's Own has 12 spaghetti sauces and 12 salsas made by LiDestri in a handshake relationship that began a quarter-century ago. One of the late Paul Newman's race cars is enshrined near an employee entrance to the Lee Road plant. And Stefani LiDestri, the company's marketing director, co-chaired a major fundraiser in New York City in October for Newman's Connecticut camp for seriously ill children.

What helps drive all this sauce making — as well as liquor mixing and bottling, and creation of flavored oils, jams and condiments — is an innovation center where clients can fine-tune existing recipes or try out new ones. The center includes an industrial kitchen adjoining a space more akin to a laboratory where a visitor might stumble upon an experimental habanero pineapple drink mixer. There's also a pilot plant where small batches of products are processed, meeting rooms, and a glitzy tasting bar that would make most wineries jealous.

Stoklosa said customers with a deep relationship with LiDestri can use the center at no charge. Those who are new or have a limited history with the company pay a small fee to cover costs.

The impetus for the center, said CEO Giovanni LiDestri, was to differentiate the company from its competitors. "This is what some of our customers were looking for. We think it will open more opportunities."

Indeed, it already has. Mike DeCory, vice president of grocery, dairy and frozen foods at Wegmans, said LiDestri's willingness to allow customers to experiment is unusual in the food processing business.

"Many suppliers do specific categories. They will limit customization or flexibility. LiDestri is like, 'If we're not in it today, let us look at it and we might be'," DeCory said.

Some years ago, Wegmans was developing its Jammin' line of organic fruit spreads and was unable to find a suitable jam maker to produce the spreads on a large scale.

"The product developer said (to LiDestri), 'You have all the equipment to make jam, would you consider it? We're having trouble getting the product we want.' They did and the product is spectacular," DeCory said. That was LiDestri's first jam product and now it makes jams and jellies for a number of labels.

"LiDestri always has a willingness to try something new that might not be in their comfort zone or wheelhouse," DeCory said.

Wegmans developed several lines of spaghetti sauces with LiDestri's help, including its signature "Food You Feel Good About" and "Italian Classics" lines. The grocery chain has its own development kitchens but being able to use LiDestri's facilities gives Wegmans a better idea of what the product will taste like in mass production, he said.

"We've tasted things (and said), 'I'd like to try that with more salt,' and two hours later you're tasting it with more salt," DeCory said. So it's no wonder LiDestri makes more than 30 Wegmans products, from tomato sauce to basting oil to salsas.

"When it's developed here, it's piloted here, you know what you're going to get," Stoklosa said.

Tomato-based products have brought LiDestri to national prominence. But there's only so far you can go with products that sell for $1.50 a jar. So in 2009, when land became available in what had been known as Kodak Park South, LiDestri grabbed up properties there to launch new products with larger profit margins.

After four separate purchases, LiDestri now owns 40 acres of manufacturing space at Eastman Business Park and another 200 acres of open land, creating a buffer zone around its food production.

Besides sauce lines and the innovation center, the complex also houses LiDestri's beverage division, where it bottles and blends liquor. The company does not run a distillery, choosing to avoid the higher taxes that come with grain alcohol production. It does make some alcohol, however, relying on citrus-based beverages instead of grain-based drinks.

The company is also experimenting with new kinds of packaging that can handle different types of food, such as aseptic wraps for cold cuts and hot dogs, and Tetra Pak, a European-style liquid container that looks something like a juice box with a plastic spout on it. LiDestri makes and fills the packages in New Jersey and is the only U.S. user of a certain kind of Tetra Pak that can handle high-acid products, such as juices.

Despite these developments, though, tomatoes are still king in this plant. Ten boxcar loads arrive each day, packed with wooden crates that each hold 2,000 pounds of tomato paste, prepared at field processing plants in California. California has the tomatoes; the Northeast has the majority of pasta eaters.

The crates are fed into giant vats where the paste is reconstituted and with other ingredients (spices, onions, meat, for instance) called for by proprietary recipes. Though the sauce is hot when it leaves the vats, it's not cooked yet. It runs through a series of pipes that look like giant paper clips and is par-cooked inside the pipes' double-lined walls.

Once the sauce is poured into bottles, it still goes through a pasteurization process that puts the final cooking touches on the contents. In all, each bottle travels perhaps a third of a mile inside the plant as it's washed, prepped, filled, capped and processed.

And then it travels around the corner or across the country to be ladled onto your spaghetti.

In heaping helpings, if grandma has anything to say about it.

The aroma of tomato sauce greets visitors at LiDestri's Lee Road plant, but it's a very different kind of "sauce" the company is concocting on the north side of the building.

When LiDestri expanded into the former Eastman Kodak industrial park in 2009, it opened up a new spirits line. There have been three acquisitions since then, and now the company maintains 1.6 million square feet of manufacturing and warehouse space in three Eastman Business Park buildings.

About one third of the manufacturing building is devoted to blending and bottling spirits.

On a recent day, workers were bottling a citrus-based vodka. Each triangular bottle was steadied in custom-cut holders that held the vessels in the right position so the label would go on correctly. One person's job was devoted to orienting the bottles correctly.

After the bottles were labeled, a machine filled them with bright, green vodka. Two other workers screwed on caps. Two more had the job of putting on metallic bottom caps that contained lights in them. Two added hang tags around the necks of the bottles and two more packed them into cartons.

While workers moved quickly, they weren't doing anything like the 1,000 jars a minute on the automated tomato sauce line. And here's why: The tomato sauce sells for about $1.50 a jar in the supermarket. These specialty bottles that actually turn the liquid into a lamp will sell for at least 10 times more.

LiDestri certainly has the experience to handle high-speed and high-volume filling and bottling. But with a higher price product like the bottle of vodka that's both a drink decanter and a lamp, slower, custom handling is required, Stoklosa said. And the payoff is worth it.

LiDestri is hoping that payoff grows in time.

"Pasta sauce is a much larger category," said CEO Giovanni LiDestri. But, he added, "It's not a growing category."

The company has developed a number of spirits products in its own innovation center, such as a pink lemoncello and a bloody mary mix that it packages in a pouch. Just like it does with tomato sauce, though, LiDestri also makes drinks for other company's labels. Among them: Blue Chair Bay rum, founded by country music star Kenny Chesney.

In the case of the green vodka, the customer supplies the bottles. But in other cases LiDestri sources the appropriate bottles from glass manufacturers. The company uses so much glass that when a bottle-making plant in Auburn, Cayuga County, faced closure because it lost a beer bottle contract, LiDestri stepped in and took up the slack.

What: LiDestri Food & Beverage, the largest food processor in the state and largest tomato processor in the country.

Location: Lee Road in Rochester and Whitney Road in Perinton, as well as in California, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Employees: 700 in Monroe County, and about 300 more out of state.

Key Players: CEO Giovanni LiDestri; President John Vetere.

How it measures success: In millions of mouths fed every day.

LiDestri in a word: Far-reaching.

This is the 15th installment in the Passport to Innovation series. This business is innovative because:

•It built and runs a test kitchen and pilot line so customers can experiment.

•It has expanded into new lines, such as spirits, to stay profitable.

•It explores new products to win new customers or deepen relationships with old ones.