Meat+Poultry - October 2017 - 64

NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

In addition to the Nature's
Rancher Snack Bacon,
Pederson's has added a
line of pressed-and-formed
bacon snack products
under its own banner.

"To my
knowledge,
we're the only
company with
a bacon snack
solution that
fits this niche."
- NEIL DUDLEY

64

ADDING VALUE
Like the company's raw bacon line, the new
Nature's Rancher fully cooked snack product
is made from pork bellies produced from
humanely raised, vegetarian-fed, antibiotic-free
pigs and is hickory-smoked, uncured and has
no sugar added. Each 0.6-oz. package of the
belly-based snack product contains two strips
of bacon and is priced at about $2 per package.
Unlike the raw product, the snack bacon
has a shelf life of 180 days. During the
development phase, shelf stability wasn't as
much a priority as creating an item that could
go into the microwave for a few seconds and
have the taste of a bacon strip that had just
come out of the frying pan or oven. "And then
one day somebody said, 'we ought to just make
this a snack,'" Dudley recalls, "and at that point
it had to be shelf stable and have a shelf life of
at least four months."
Once the Pederson's team reimagined the
product as a snack item, the target consumer
evolved to include on-the-go, physically active
protein seekers. Fans of beef jerky or meat
bars would ideally be lured to Pederson's new
product, including thrill seekers like mountain
climbers, distance runners, hikers or even
horseback-riding cowboys like Dudley. "It's
something you can put in a backpack or in
your back pocket and take it with you knowing
you'll have a quality protein and a quality fat
energy source at your fingertips."
While tire-kicking processing equipment,

MEAT+ POULTRY | 10.17 | www.meatpoultry.com

needed to deliver the quality and conveniencebased product, Dudley points out there was
not, in fact, a team of product formulation
specialists developing what would become
a shelf-stable, snack bacon. He says the
company's raw bacon is the same formulation
and exact same product used for the snack
bacon strips.

EQUIPMENT MATTERS
Instead, the successful development of
the snack bacon was directly linked to the
investment in a spiral oven and chiller,
manufactured by Unitherm, based in Bristow,
Oklahoma. At that time, "we didn't believe the
fully cooked bacon on the market tasted like
bacon out of the oven or any variety of bacon
you would cook from raw at home," Dudley
says. "We wanted to develop something that
could be considered the same quality as raw,
with the convenience of precooked. There
wasn't a lot of R&D into the product, there
was more R&D in figuring out how to run the
equipment," including incorporating a new
Repak vacuum packaging machine into the
process. Perfecting the process required about
six months, he says.
To create the new product, the company
was willing to take measured risks. Finding
the best quality spiral oven that could produce
the quality needed without a huge investment
in a large machine was somewhat challenging.
Unitherm offered a smaller machine that
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