Fit for Royalty
Since Royalty Foods bought their AEW THURNE SmartSlice 3D and Sortaweigh Grading System, they've had consistently accurate portion weights. This Orlando, Fl, based processor is equipped with state-of-the-art facilities to ensure that, when it comes to providing service to their top food service customers, they're up with the best.
Prime and choice Certified Angus Beef, pork, lamb, veal and poultry (including exotic game and fowl), cheeses, frozen vegetables, desserts, caviar, pat, hors d'oeuvres, custom pasta and sauces, truffles, mushrooms and even berries, are just some of the products for which Royalty Foods are famous throughout the USA.
The company has experienced consistent and managed growth since it was founded in 1983, not taking on new accounts unless they could continue to provide their customers with optimum service. As volumes expanded the need to overcome the skilled labour shortages that are so common in our industry became urgent. Increasing production efficiency, raising yields and achieving those all important accurate portion weights on fresh beef, pork, veal and lamb steaks could not be done unless a solution to the labour problem could be found.
With weekly orders for 55,000lbs of cut steaks fast becoming the norm, Bob Meeks, Royalty's President and CEO, charged his Operations Manager, Kit Applegarth, with the task of finding a solution. Kit looked at a number of slicers, most of which could do the job satisfactorily, but he wanted the best, so he turned to a company he'd known about and worked with for many years, AEW THURNE.
"We needed a slicer that could cut a superb steak with accuracy and in high volumes," said Applegarth. "I wanted a machine that employed the latest technology to offset obsolescence, be well engineered for reliability, ease of maintenance and cleaning. And, of course, it had to be easy to use."
Good service was also a major factor in choosing SmartSlice 3D and Kit is impressed by the support he receives - usually over the phone - from our service engineers in Chicago.
Accuracy is a major feature of SmartSlice 3D no doubting that, but when one restaurant chain customer began ordering 250,000 steaks every 10 weeks and insisting on uniform portion weights, manual checkweighing became a prohibitively expensive chore and high yields became crucial.
SmartSlice 3D can produce a combination of fixed weight and fixed thickness portions from one product, further enhancing efficiency. By adding a Sortaweigh GS 910 Grading system, portions are automatically weighed as they come off the slicer, and then graded into the appropriate weight bin. An additional feature was added to Royalty's system to enable high and low profile portions to be cut and graded, adding even more efficiency and greatly reducing labour.
Bob Meeks is delighted with his latest investment and loves showing it off to visitors. "By sourcing SmartSlice 3D and the Sortaweigh GS 910 Grading system, Kit has found the perfect solution to our problem, a solution that's certainly fit for Royalty."
