ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Busch's here has sharpened its edge in the meals market with an increasing variety of hand-crafted prepared foods and is making money doing it, officials said.
While the terms "hand-crafted" and "streamlined production" could be mutually exclusive, the retailer has made both happen at an updated central kitchen.
Slow-baked baby back ribs, pan-seared chicken breasts and hand-crimped stromboli may pull customers to the prepared-foods case in Busch's stores, but it's the newly remodeled facility staffed by a cost-conscious production team that is cooking up more profits, they said.
"We've always done central production for the economy of scale, but as our product line expanded, we were bursting at the seams. We needed more room, but we didn't add a whole lot of automated equipment because we want to keep the products' home-made appearance," said Dan Courser, vice president for perishables at the 10-unit chain here. "For example, for our Parmesan chicken, we hand-tenderize the chicken, sear it by pan-frying and then bake it in the oven. As a result, it looks like you've cooked it at home. And our baby back ribs are baked for three and a half hours. That's what makes them so tender," Courser added.
Courser explained that some of the chain's recipes were created in the late 1980s when the company had just three stores. Others have been developed more recently by the chain's corporate chef, Peter Julian. From the beginning, Busch's made prepared foods in the 500-foot kitchen of one store and shipped them out to the other two. Then, three years ago, the company built an 8,500-square-foot extension onto that store to house a kitchen and bakery.
Now the central kitchen makes a variety of 60 items daily and deliveries are made to stores each morning. The total volume produced -- 6 tons a week -- includes products delivered in bulk to be "plattered" in the deli case and offered on the self-service food bar. Also included are entrees and side dishes in heat-sealed containers with Busch's own "Josephine's Kitchen" label.
The latter is the biggest growth category in the deli, Courser said.
The challenge is to keep a "home-made" look to its prepared foods and still institute efficiencies that grow the bottom line. And Courser said production control supervisor Candice Shavalia has found ways to do it with selective automation and well-monitored systems.
Earlier this year, when the kitchen was remodeled, the company added layout features and equipment that have trimmed at least 50 manhours per week as well as creating new manufacturing capabilities, according to Shavalia.
The company, which will open a new prototype store next month that will showcase its prepared foods, also intends to expand at the rate of one new store a year, Courser said. The company's expansion plans and the home-meal replacement trend have both driven kitchen upgrades, he added. "We've been somewhat ahead of the rest of industry in HMR, but two years ago at FMI MealSolutions [The Food Marketing Institute's first, held in Phoenix], I realized our competitors are catching up," Courser said.
"Now we have the infrastructure in place and plenty of capacity. So there's lots of potential. Now we need to market our products better," Courser said.
The biggest challenge at the production facility itself is two-fold, Shavalia said.
"Training and keeping costs down," she said.
The latter was addressed when the kitchen took 700 square feet away from the adjacent bakery for a second cold room, which helped Shavalia organize her production team better, she said. The company also added a vegetable washer with a centrifuge, an industrial food processor, and a cake-decorating machine that's used to fill twice-baked potatoes. A freezer was also converted to a quick-chill unit.
Shavalia explained how the new vegetable washer does "double duty."
"One of our signature items is spinach dip, which we make with frozen spinach, but we had to smash the moisture out of it somehow. We tried wringing it by hand, putting it in a colander and pressing on it with another pot, everything. "We needed some way to automate that. We looked at apple presses, wine presses, laundromat extractors. Then, one of our suppliers told us about a piece of equipment that washes vegetables and also has a centrifuge in the bottom of it. We bought that and it works perfectly. We use the washer and spin the water out of the frozen spinach in the centrifuge," she said.
That piece of equipment, which cost about $6,000 installed, was well worth it, Shavalia said. The facility turns out 1,500 pounds of spinach dip in a normal week and that figure will climb as the holiday season begins, Shavalia said.
"Just imagine trying to wring 200 pounds of spinach dry by hand. It took 10 times as long, and it was hard on our associates. I was thinking of that even more than the costs," she said. It was Shavalia's thinking about people, or more precisely about a person, that spurred her to seek a filling machine for the company's top-selling twice-baked potatoes.
"We had one cook who was making twice-baked potatoes eight hours a day, three times a week and refilling them by hand. We kidded him about getting Popeye-muscled arms, but really it could have become a Workers' Comp issue. He looked tired."
Since the remodel, Shavalia has purchased a machine that refills the twice-baked potatoes. It was designed for use by cake decorators but "it works great for the potatoes," and frees the cook for other tasks, she said.
A $2,000 industrial food processor has also been a boon, Shavalia said.
"We were dicing vegetables on a butcher block with a French knife before we got it. It used to take us an hour to process a 40-pound box of tomatoes. Now it takes 15 minutes," she said.
But some experiments don't work, the production manager was quick to point out. Sometimes, it's just the visual effect that's not pleasing, she said.
"For example, we bought equipment to finish our calzones and stromboli. Our bakery makes the dough for us and we fill them and had been hand-crimping them. We thought we'd save some time with a machine and we did, but our chef said the products didn't look as good as our previous ones," she said. So hand-crimping was resumed and the bakery is now using the equipment for turnovers, she said.
When the kitchen was remodeled, a lot of thought went into organizing activities in order to save foot travel from one area of the floor to another, Shavalia said.
"That's why we converted a freezer that was at the end of the cooking lineup into a quick chiller instead of one that was located nearer the grocery area. It was located in the right place," she said. A new heat-sealed packaging system that uses just two sizes of package has saved time and inventory space as well, Shavalia said. Ingredient shrink, too, which can be a problem, is controlled with tight supervision and a team effort, Shavalia said.
"Just visual checks help. For instance, we use a lot of canned products as ingredients. If I go into a cooler and see that someone has opened another can when another of the same product is already open, I'll call the associates together and tell them this shouldn't happen," she said.
Busch's central kitchen produces 50% of the prepared foods that are sold at store level. The remainder, including rotisserie chickens, some salads and roast turkeys for holiday dinners is made in-store.
