Category Archives: Food Industry

Food manufacturing, processing, and cold storage. Seafood, produce, poultry, beef/poultry, meals/meal kits, and food ingredients intended for grocery stores, restaurants, institutions, and consumers. Facilities with freezers, coolers, USDA processing areas, bakeries, floor drains, food safety testing labs, and wastewater interceptors.

Vernon Livestock Rendering Plant

Animal Fat Recycling Plant, Food Processing, Vernon, CaliforniaLos Angeles Magazine has written a lengthy article about Baker Commodities, a livestock rendering plant based in the City of Vernon, California, near Downtown Los Angeles.  It is the oldest rendering business in L.A. and the largest on the West Coast.  In 2008, some 250 U.S. rendering plants like Baker took in 54 billion pounds of killed livestock—blood, bone, guts, legs, hide, muscle, and head, the detritus of slaughter—warmed the raw material in cookers, and squeezed out a clear liquid called tallow.

Baker seizes on fat wherever it can: dairy cows that have died in the heat of the Central Valley, the trimmings left over from the purchase of a Niman Ranch roast at Whole Foods, steaks and chickens whose shelf life at Pavilions has expired. The company retrieves grease from deep fryers at McDonald’s and the drippings of ribs in the Vons hot section. Rendering is the most elemental form of recycling, the regeneration of the dead into soap and scented creams. It has existed for millennia in societies, and its reach in modern America is staggering. We live in a vast cycle of fat reclamation, one that stretches from the killing floors of the Midwest to our medicine cabinets, making a stop along the way at the local Burger King.

Every restaurant and fast-food stand in L.A. has a fat reservoir called a grease trap, usually secreted under the parking lot. A trap may strain as much as 15,000 gallons of liquid fat from a kitchen’s drains, though the speed at which it fills depends on what’s cooking upstairs. A Burger King trap can take three months to fill, while an El Pollo Loco trap might need to be emptied in weeks. There are tens of thousands of grease traps citywide, each a promising revenue source for rendering companies. Baker taps around 8,000 of them.

Biodiesel!  About 40 pounds of good ground beef heated to 250 degrees will produce enough tallow to make a gallon of biodiesel. The process is insanely wasteful if cattle are raised for it alone; you’d need to boil an entire cow to fill your Chevy Volt. Yet there’s no shortage of cow remnants in slaughterhouses, and U.S. production of biodiesel from renderers has grown from 78,000 metric tons in 2007 to 400,000 metric tons in 2008.

Full article.

Real Mex Food Expands Food Processing Plant

Real Mex Foods expanded food processing plant in Vernon, CaliforniaReal Mex Foods supplies more than 200 restaurants as the distribution branch of Real Mex Restaurants, Cypress, Calif., including Chevy’s, El Torito and Acapulco restaurant concepts located in Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.  In addition, Real Mex Foods has branched into broader frozen foods processing for foodservice, co-pack and retail channels serving clients such as Sysco Distributors, El Pollo Loco, Carl’s Jr.-Green Burrito, Albertson’s and U.S. Foods.

In February, Real Mex closed its 32,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Santa Fe Springs, Calif., and moved into a 100,000-square-foot space in Vernon, California. The city of Vernon and a developer came to us and proposed a deal where we got a 100,000-square-foot building retrofitted to a state-of-the-art USDA manufacturing plant, Angulo explains.  It was an opportunistic deal.   They got us into 100,000 square feet at the cost that we would have gotten a build-to-suit 65,000-square-foot building.

Food safety also was a major priority for Real Mex in building out the new plant. The company built an in-house lab and hired a complete quality assurance team. Other food safety precautions include a triple boiler system, floor foamers, centralized sanitation system, in-house chlorination system for vegetables and a full quality assurance staff.

The developer invested $10 million in the build out, while Real Mex spent about $4 million on equipment. The completely refurbished plant quadrupled the company’s previous capacity and allowed it to more than double the number of kettles, tumble chillers and blast freezers. www.realmexfoods.com

Major Bakery Closing Locations – Reducing Food Processing Footprint

Interstate Bakeries Hostess Bakery

Interstate Bakeries Corp., the maker of the iconic Wonder Bread and other baked goods, said Tuesday it will no longer make or sell bread in Southern Califonia, closing its bakeries in San Diego, Los Angeles, Pomona and Glendale.

The San Diego bakery employs about 80 workers and makes buns and rolls under the Millwood brand. Interstate also said it will close 17 distribution centers and 19 outlet stores, including five locations in San Diego County. In total, some 1,300 workers will be affected throughout Southern California. The company plans to deliver bread products until Oct. 20. Other brands affected include Home Pride Bread, Baker’s Inn and Roman Meal.

IBC, which also makes Ding Dongs and Twinkies, said it plans to continue selling its line of Hostess and Dolly Madison snack cakes in the area.

The closing of the company’s bread operations in Southern California comes as IBC continues to struggle to improve its business, which has been hurt by declining sales and higher costs. The Kansas City company filed for bankruptcy in 2004. For the fiscal year ended June 2, IBC reported a net loss of $128.5 million on sales of $2.92 billion.

Craig Jung, chief executive of IBC, said the decision was difficult but necessary as the Southern California bread business continued to be a drag on the company. Among the competitive pressures, he said, were the growth of low-cost, non-union rivals as well as changing consumers demands. Compounding the problem, Jung added, was the high cost of doing business in California including what he called the “excessive” workers’ compensation insurance costs and a confrontational relationship with one of the company’s main unions.

New Meat Processing Facility at Cal Poly

The J and G Lau Family Meat Processing Center is a state-of-the-art facility located on the Cal Poly campus in the heart of one of the most beautiful cities in California – San Luis Obispo. From harvesting to packaging, this over 13,500 sq. foot center will enable all stages of meat processing in the safest possible environment. Beyond the ordinary classroom, students will experience their education in this state-of-the-art Meat Processing Center that is as technologically advanced as the professional world they will enter. Intended as a space where the lines are blurred between industry and education, the Meat Processing Center will allow companies to utilize test kitchens for product development alongside Cal Poly students and faculty. With this kind of vision, Cal Poly graduates will enter their professions as leaders, innovators and experienced problem solvers.

With the meat industry constantly emerging, such an advanced facility is vital to preparing our future leaders. This is your opportunity to contribute to one of the finest meat processing centers and help guarantee a place where past principles and modern ideas will join forces to improve education and raise the bar of meat industry standards.

Los Angeles Downtown Industrial District

The Los Angeles Downtown Industrial District (LADID) covers 44 blocks, a district with boundaries roughly between Third (on the north) and Eighth and Olympic (on the south), San Pedro (on the west) and Alameda (on the east) Streets. Established as a Business Improvement District (BID), this manufacturing and wholesale District is comprised of mostly seafood, fresh and frozen produce, cold storage and other food related services.  Over 600 properties lie within the LADID boundaries. It encompasses a 36 block district between Fourth (on the north) and Eighth (on the south) Streets, San Pedro (on the west) and Alameda (on the east) Streets.

The District is the hub of the food chain in Southern California and hosts the Los Angeles Wholesale Produce Market, which has 550,000 sq. ft. on 30 acres. It is the second largest produce market in the United States generating annual revenues of $2 billion.  The historic Fisherman’s Outlet is just one of several great restaurants that attract thousands of customers daily.  Dozens of garment and printing businesses also thrive in the district.

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