What if we told you one Cambro product could help scale your business more than three times without having to add any additional space? For Bill-E’s Small Batch Bacon, that is exactly what happened.
Billy Stitt, owner of Bill-E’s Small Batch Bacon in Fairhope, Ala., makes bacon for local distribution and national shipping. Previously, everything was manually carried from the kitchen to the cooler and then to the smokehouse. His staff had started complaining how heavy the pans were and Stitt knew there had to be a better way.
“Not only did I want something cool to transport my bacon, but when [my Cambro sales rep] Russ said ‘trolley’ it was a game changer for me,” said Stitt.
Billy Stitt, owner of Bill-E’s Small Batch Bacon in Fairhope, Ala.
Stitt’s Cambro Sales Rep, Russ Griffis, recommended taking out all of the metal shelving and aluminum dunnage racks from their storage spaces and replacing them with Camshelving® GN Food Pan Trolleys and Camshelving Premium Series.
“Since we partnered with Cambro, we have been able to safely make lots more bacon and easily cure our products and transport them from one room to the next room,” said Stitt.
The process of making Bill-E’s Small Batch Bacon starts when fresh pork bellies arrive and combined with brown sugar, real molasses and heavy kosher salt. Next, ballies are rolled in a curing room for 8 days before being moved into a smokehouse. Lastly, they’re chilled, sliced, packaged and shipped all over the country.
With the ability to load food pans of pork bellies onto Food Pan Trolleys and easily roll them through the process, Stitt has seen a significant increase in production.
“Before, we were struggling scaling up. We knew we needed to make more product, and we had to make it fast within our time frame; it just wasn’t happening with what we had,” said Stitt. “Now that we have the new shelving, the new trolleys and the new pans, it is so much easier. We were literally able to scale up production three times our capacity and not only are we able to do more product, we're able to do it more efficiently.”
Not only does Stitt and his team love their new trolleys and shelving, his USDA inspector gave it his seal of approval too!
“Now that we have the Cambro plastic shelving and trolleys, it's been a game changer for us; our USDA inspector loves it, our team loves it. Not only is it more heavy duty and doesn’t rust or corrode, it’s lighter,” said Stitt.