Land O’Frost: Breaking Ground in Sanitary Facility Design
When Land O’Frost, Inc. poured the concrete for the foundation of its new processing facility this May in Kentucky, one might say it was a ground-breaking groundbreaking. The new ready-to-eat (RTE) meat processing plant will be the nation’s first building designed and constructed to wholly incorporate the 11 Principles of Sanitary Facility Design recently defined by the American Meat Institute (AMI) Sanitary Facility Design Task Force. For this nationally recognized family business, which boasts the fourth largest selling brand of RTE luncheon meats in the nation, the role of forerunner is one that suits the company.
Since its establishment more than 40 years ago in Chicago’s Roseland district, Land O’Frost is no stranger to innovation of the groundbreaking kind. After emigrating from Holland to the U.S. following World War I, company founder Antoon Van Eekeren wasted no time in laying a foundation of his own in the refrigeration repair business. When Van Eekeren saw a significant rise in consumer demand for freezer space during World War II, he purchased a vacant meat distribution center on Chicago’s south side, growing his new venture into the largest frozen food locker in the U.S. When the market slowed, the industrious founder converted a part of the facility to the manufacture and sale of frozen roast beef and gravy for local restaurants. When fire destroyed part of the facility, he rebuilt, expanding to include frozen meat pies and TV dinners for area retail stores—a product line that marked the birth of the brand name “Land O’Frost.”
In the 1950s, Land O’Frost adopted new packaging and processing technology that enabled the company to refocus the business and expand its product offerings to include smoked sliced beef, ham and turkey. After relocating its headquarters and manufacturing facilities to Lansing, IL, in 1969, new products were added to the product line. With the 1976 purchase of a vegetable processing plant in Searcy, AR and its subsequent conversion to a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspected meat plant, Land O’Frost had even more reason to innovate.
In the 1980s, Land O’Frost’s pioneered the use of retort technology, once the domain of the canning industry, applying the room-temperature, shelf-life extending process to flexible pouches and plastic trays. This allowed the company to seize the opportunity to provide meals to the U.S. military’s Meals Ready to Eat (MRTE) program, as well as individual meals for the dietary market, catalog and retail sales.
Land O’Frost continued to break new ground in the ’80s and ’90s in the area of food safety and sanitation, introducing a pasteurization kill step and one-way product flow during production, developing the Seek & Destroy program as a proactive way to find and eliminate foodborne pathogens from the plant environment, and implementing one of the meat industry’s first Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) programs. “Our commitment to food safety is an integral part of Land O’Frost’s history and corporate culture,” says John Butts, Ph.D., vice president research with Land O’Frost, whose 31 years of leadership in the company’s development and application of proactive food safety systems has recently been recognized by NSF International with the 2005 Food Safety Leadership Award (p. 82). “Designing and building our new plant from the ground up using the principles of sanitary equipment and facility design are just additional examples of that commitment—and of our commitment to our customers to continually find better ways to produce high-quality, safe products.”
Today, Land O’Frost produces sliced lunchmeats in the Illinois and Arkansas plants. The new state-of-the-art facillity in Kentucky will add another 190,000 sq. ft. of manufacturing space, increasing the production capacity of the RTE meat processor’s popular Premium brand one-pound Deli Pouch, Deli Shaved and Deli Style Thin Sliced meats, and Dagwood and Taste Escapes brand products distributed to grocery stores, and its complete line of prepackaged diced, sliced, stripped and ground meats used as industrial ingredients by restaurant, prepared food manufacturing and institutional customers.
The new plant, says Butts, is expected to be up and running within a year. “We’re continuing to work closely with our colleagues on the AMI Sanitary Facility Design Task Force, and our architects, engineers and contractors as construction of the facility gets underway. And credit should go to AMI, its members and partners for developing sanitary design guidelines that industry can use as real-world building blocks to improve product safety efforts in actual food production environments.”
Food Safety is Not a Competitive Sport
Following on the heels of the task force that brought the meat processing industry the AMI 10 Principles for Sanitary Equipment Design—a model that has been gaining more than passing interest by other food processing categories—industry leaders joined forces again, setting aside competitive issues to establish clear sanitary design principles for the planning, construction and renovation of RTE meat processing facilities. The AMI Sanitary Facility Design Task Force—comprised of representatives from AMI, Land O’Frost, Hormel Foods, Sara Lee, The Stellar Group, Hendon Redmond, Middough Consulting, Tyson, McClier, Carter & Burgess, The Haskell Company, Tyson, Bar S, Kraft Foods, Middough Consulting Inc., Hixson, Ram Market Solutions, and Smithfield—is a unique coalition of experts from processing, construction, consulting, engineering and architecture, perhaps opening lines of communication between these fields for the first time in the area of food safety, says Butts. “I don’t know any prior time when people from all of these groups sat together to address problems from a sanitary design standpoint,” he states. “No one person or company had all the expertise. We’ve all learned a lot from each other.”
“We all agreed that food safety would not be used in our industry for competitive advantage,” adds Dr. Skip Seward, AMI vice president of regulatory affairs and facilitator of the sanitary facility design task force. “Everyone brought their best practices for sanitary design and their knowledge of where things can and have gone wrong in the past to create a set of principles that will ensure the safety of the production process. It was a remarkable experience.”
The task force spent months defining the basic principles, and designing comprehensive checklists that could be used by processors, designers and architects to communicate about critical food safety issues and where these need to be addressed in the design or retrofit of a facility for enhanced sanitation and food safety. In September 2004, the AMI 11 Principles of Sanitary Facility Design were unveiled at an AMI Foundation-sponsored workshop, signalling the success of the task force’s mission to define principles for facility design that will result in improved sanitation and food safety in the food processing environment. The list has the potential to radically reduce the most common food safety hazards currently faced by sanitation personnel.
“Key to the principles,” Seward says, “is that they establish a point of discussion between the company in need of the facility and the design/architect firms in charge of the design and construction of the facility. It gives them a forum for their decision-making processes and provides a rationale for certain design decisions.”
The task force also created a 107-point questionnaire that designers, contractors and processors can use during their planning stages as an auditing tool to assess a blueprint for food safety design standards—before they begin construction. “Whether you are building a new plant or retrofitting an existing one, the questionnaire helps you assess potential hazards,” Seward says, “and it helps corporate management understand what areas of the plant need attention.”