Artisan Industrial Foods (and other near impossibilities)
This article is scheduled to run in the Capital Press in Summer 2006At the risk of stating the obvious, it is very difficult to industrialize artisan foods. I had this realization at one in the morning after spending the better part of the day on the phone trying to untangle a labyrinthine web of problems for one of my clients, a grass-fed beef producer.
My client is a green company and their agricultural operation requires little in the way of inputs other than sunlight and a little water. Last year, one of the heaviest hitters in the industrial food complex began buying my client’s grass-fed hamburger patties as part their greening initiative. The volumes related to the deal are excellent and the profit margins are sustainable. Despite the fact that the executives at the food service company are bought into the idea of featuring an artisan hamburger patty, the patty itself has encountered a fair amount of resistance from the both the line level cooks and the management of the individual food service sites within that company.
At a very basic level, food artisans have an intimate knowledge of both their product’s relationship with nature and nature’s innate variability. What makes an artisan is the ability to move with this variability to create products that are of a consistent quality. Although artisan foods are frequently consistent, they are never uniform. In fact uniformity is the antithesis of artisanal. Unfortunately, this same uniformity is the hallmark of the industrial food complex.
My client is a relatively small company and they have to rely on other vendors to process their cows into middle meats and ground beef. Since they are small, and because grass-fed beef is very different from corn-fed beef in terms of its musculature and fat content, it is exceedingly difficult for them to create hamburger patties with a uniform fat content. For the home user or for the independent restaurant, this is not much of a problem. However, in the world of industrial food service these slight variations can create enormous problems. For example, the food service company dictates that the patties must be cooked to 160 degrees Fahrenheit and the ebb and flow of business at many of the sites where the patties are used necessitates that the burgers must be par-cooked and held until there is a rush, whereupon they will be cooked the rest of the way. These are truly the worst-case conditions for a grass-fed beef hamburger.
Herein lies the moral of the story: although it is very difficult to industrialize artisan foods, it is not impossible. If you are going to work with other vendors to produce your artisan foods, you will need to either pay them a premium, or do an enormous volume of business with those vendors to ensure that your needs are met.
However, you may end up ahead if you invest in your own processing facility. The more of your processing and production you control, the more control you have over your destiny. This sort of control can enable you to do things that would otherwise be impossible; like creating a consistent, nearly uniform grass-fed beef patty.
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posted by Brian J. Kenny @ 6:28 AM
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