Meat + Poultry - April 2006 - 58

Bacon

for flavor in the fast-food industry has
certainly helped us."
Daily's opened its Utah bacon facility in the 1990s. This past May,
Shawnee Mission, Kan.-based Sea-

strange, but E. coli was probably the
best thing ever to happen to bacon," he
says. "What I mean is, all of a sudden
bacon became the best way to make a
hamburger taste good again. The need

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Bacon.
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board Foods acquired Daily's for $45
million.
Bacon production is perhaps the
only remaining category in the meat
business where an existing or new
processor can build a high-speed,
dedicated plant and still expect to
make a reasonable profit. Brand equity isn't even necessarily required,
as co-packing arrangements like BarS's demonstrate. "There are still opportunities like that. Again, a lot of
it depends on your access to competitively priced raw materials," says
Mason. "But if you can buy bellies
at the same prices your competitors
can buy them, you can still engineer a
plant and invest in the technology to
maximize the return on your investment. There's still enough profitability in bacon, because the category's
still growing. I don't know if that's
true for other meat products."
No one believes bacon processing has
reached maximum efficiency. Bacon
packaging is an area to watch for nearterm technology improvements with
improved vision-guided developments
holding promise in the future. Mason
points out that for many years, bacon
technology in the United States was
dominated by a few suppliers, but over
the past three to five years the market
has opened to European suppliers, who
are already experienced with the remarkable bacon-production efficiencies
in Danish, German and British plants.
"While the basic steps in bacon production haven't changed, the technology
involved in those steps has changed rapidly," he says. "I don't think that's going
to slow down. As long as bacon processors are interested in spending money
on new technology, the suppliers will be
happy to develop it."
Steve Bjerklie is M&P's West Coast
correspondent, based in San Francisco.
He has worked as a journalist covering
the meat and poultry processing
industry for more than 25 years.

1148 Ensell Road, Lake Zurich, IL 60047, USA. Tel: 847 726 8000 E-mail: chicago@aewdelford.com

For more information, see Page 73
60

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April 2006

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We would like to hear from you- your comments
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E-mail the author at: meat&poultry@sosland.com

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Meat + Poultry - April 2006

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