A lot at steak.

Susan Spencer built a creaking concern into Allied Steaks, a producer of innovative foodservice items.

Being a female chief executive officer of a meat company makes you kind of conspicuous. But then, high visibility is nothing new to Susan T. Spencer.

After all, if you think

That was one of Spencer's former employment venues, thanks to being the daughter of Leonard Tose, who owned the Philadelphia Eagles for 16 years. As her father's vice president of operations, Spencer strove to cut front-office costs. That, plus her gender, didn't exactly ingratiate her with the average National Football League male; she recalls getting "a 20-minute standing boo" at a local athletic association function.

But playing in the boys' club taught Spencer some valuable lessons. Two years after her father sold the Eagles in 1985, she purchased Allied Steaks Inc., a supplier of frozen steaks and other specialty meats for foodservice. Allied now produces about 150,000 pounds a week of Philadelphia cheese steaks, hamburgers, chicken wings, fajitas and other restaurant items in a 25,000-square-foot production facility (plus a small, separated office) in Vineland, N.J. Sales total about $18 million a year, with major customers including Bennigan's, Chili's, Jack in the Box, and K-Mart cafeterias.

Spencer's formal education includes a master's and a law degree, but nothing about meat processing. That proved to be an advantage, she says: "One of the biggest benefits I had was knowing nothing about the meat business. I had no preconceived notions about what it had to be."

Ignorance was bliss when it came time to buy Allied in the first place. When her father sold the Eagles, she started a food distribution business, getting the idea "by reading the paper and saying, Hey, maybe this is something I want to do."

She found a niche supplying the casinos in Atlantic City, but quickly became disenchanted. This was partly because most of the major Atlantic City casinos were having financial difficulties, and she feared that one or more would fold and leave her with uncollectable receivables. But she also felt dissatisfied with distribution as a vocation.

"The reason I didn't like the distribution business is because it's a service business," Spencer says. "If you have old trucks and old facilities and lousy organization, how can you compete with the big guys?"

The Alliance ally

Along came Al Rosenberg, a former boxer and all-around Atlantic City character who had a small distribution and production business in Philadelphia called Allied. Spencer contacted him because he had a beach house in Atlantic City for sale.

"I called Al, he took me out, and at the end of the day he had sold me his company," Spencer recalls with a laugh. "Al obviously was a great salesman. He sold me a broken-down business on a street with no dock, and I thought I had a great buy. If I had known anything, I would have kept walking."

When Spencer bought Allied in 1987, it was mostly another distribution business, with a small production division that sold Philly cheese steaks and a few other items. Over the next couple of years, she phased out both her own business and the distribution aspects of Allied in favor of production, which she calls "more creative."

Her initial ignorance about the meat business fueled that creativity. "Within three years of owning the business, I was doing marinated Philly steaks," she says. "No one else was doing it. Why not? Because no one else asked the questions. But I'm a lawyer, and I ask a lot of questions."

Gradually, Allied's niche evolved: high-quality specialty meat items for foodservice. Philly steaks, strips of pressed meat usually served with onions, cheese and peppers, remained the company's flagship product. "I really found out who should buy--what chain restaurants would buy Philly steaks," she says.

For a small processor to cater to foodservice requires a lot of flexibility. Allied often finds itself called on to formulate and scale up a product, armed only with a customer's description of the desired result. "I don't know of any company that will take on the tough jobs we tackle," Spencer says.

As the business grew, more of Allied's output went into cooked products, which now total about half of all production. This is what fast-food chains want, for reasons including safety and ease of use. "Most of the fast-food guys are into cooked product," Spencer says. "They won't touch raw anymore."

It's not quite accurate to say that the growing business put a strain on Allied's facilities; they had been stretched to the breaking point before Spencer bought the business. "We had no computer, no copier, not even a typewriter," Spencer recalls. "The third day I was running the plant, everything fell apart." She moved to a rented space in Williamstown, N.J., in 1994, but found that renting didn't allow her to grow the business at the rate she wanted. This discovery overcame her reluctance to own bricks and mortar. A friendly USDA inspector told her about the Vineland facility, and with help from the Vineland Economic Development Authority, Allied moved to Vineland in 1996.

Allied now employs about 60 workers in one daily production shift. (Spencer has run second shifts when needed to meet demand, but doesn't like them: "That's the shift where all your best people are at home.") About a dozen of them have been with her from the beginning in Philadelphia, which means a long commute to southern New Jersey.

Once a quarter, she gathers all Allied's workers for a day of free food and instruction in GMPs, sanitation and general cleanliness. "They are my eyes and ears about quality," she says. "If they don't care about quality, we're not going to have a quality product."

In somewhat of a break with current industry trends, Allied does its own engineering, including line configurations and modifications to equipment--some of which are extensive.

A stake in steaks

Although cooked products have grown to about 50 percent of Allied's total output, the primary raw product is still the company's signature Philly steaks. A good example is the raw Philly steaks produced for the Cincinnati-based Great Steak & Potato chain.

Production for these steaks begins when the "lifter meat"--beef from the animal's rib area--is received in boxes of about 60 pounds each. Workers pull the blocks of meat into their component pieces, which then pass through a tenderizer from Ross Industries, Midland, Va. This machine tenderizes the meat by pricking it throughout with tiny holes, then drops it into a stainless steel bin.

A hoist then carries the bin up and tips it into a chopper from Hobart Corp., Troy, Ohio. The chopper cuts the meat into irregular 1.5-inch pieces, depositing them into another bin. This is hoisted and dumped into a vacuum tumbler that compresses the product and marinates it with a mixture of water and dry seasoning. Different products spend from five to 30 minutes at this step; the raw Philly steak takes about seven minutes. The tumbling exudes the meat's protein to its surface for optimal binding.

The product goes into another bin and is hoisted and emptied into a vacuum stuffer from Handtmann Inc., Buffalo Grove, III., which compresses the product further. Workers fit a poly sleeve over a short pipe in the machine; product flows into the bag, which workers then tie off, remove and place into a long corrugated case. This case shapes the product into a long rectangular block. (Workers also pat the bagged meat into shape.) The cases are hand-palletized, and the pallets are taken to a frozen area at -20 F.

After being blast-frozen for 48 hours, the pallets are tempered until the meat's temperature reaches 28 F, then returned to the processing area. A worker uncases the tempered blocks of meat by hand and places them, one by one, into the chamber of a Dyna-Form from Bettchern Industries, Vermillion, Ohio. In this chamber, hydraulically powered poly walls press the meat into a more perfect rectangular block.

Workers then feed these columns of frozen meat vertically into one of two slicers from Great Lakes Corp., Chicago. Six small chains on either side of the column grab the meat and force it downward into a rotating circular blade. Four-ounce portions come out onto a plastic-cord conveyor. An interleaver machine from Packaging Progressions, Collegeville, Pa., stacks the slices while cutting waxed paper from a web and depositing it between the slices. Workers hand-weigh and pack the slices into cases, which then go through a metal detector from Loma International, Elk Grove Village, III. The cases are stored in the same frozen area that blast-froze the meat. It can hold only about two days' production at a time; by then, the product is off to one of the public cold-storage warehouses Allied uses.

Fast freeze

Cooked product goes through Multi-Purpose Ovens (MPOs) from Heat and Control, Hayward, Calif. For Philly steak, the meat slices go through a standard MPO, in which a combination of rising steam and descending hot air cooks the steak in about one minute. After passing over a short, declining stretch of white poly belt for visual inspection, the product enters a spiral freezer from the Liquid Carbonics division of Praxair, Oak Brook, Ill.

Spencer decided a couple of years ago to go with nitrogen-based cryogenic freezing for cooked product. The object, she says, is to get the product frozen as quickly as possible: "The faster you freeze, the fresher the product." Fast freezing preserves product quality by minimizing the size of ice crystals that disrupt cell walls, cutting down microbiological growth and minimizing moisture loss.

She settled on liquid nitrogen as her cryogen of choice because its low temperature means extra-fast freezing. That meant spending $50,000 to retrofit the tubing and nozzles of the Liquid Carbonic freezer, which was designed for carbon dioxide. The steak slices spend 30 minutes in the freezer, with total freezing accomplished in about the first three minutes.

The frozen slices emerge from the top of the freezer and pass through rows of mechanical teeth, designed in-house, that break them into strips--the shape of cooked Philly steak. They drop through a bagger that seals them, three pounds at a time, into gusseted pouches. They pass through a metal detector and are hand-cased and sent to storage.

Allied's cooked chicken products, including seasoned strips, presented several production challenges. Cooking was the first one. Spencer determined that the combination steam/convection oven from Heat and Control didn't offer enough steam penetration for the throughput she wanted. She had Allied's engineer, Ken Smith, re-engineer it to add more entry holes for the steam so that it surrounds the meat completely.

After going through a breader from Stein Inc., San-dusky, Ohio, and cooking in the modified Heat and Control oven, the product is ready for freezing. Spencer decided that the thick chicken slices don't freeze quickly enough in the cryogenic spiral. Instead, they go through a Cryo-Quick from Air Products and Chemicals, Allentown, Pa. A steel mesh belt carries the product through a three-inch dip while overhead nozzles spray liquid nitrogen, immersing the product in the cryogen for a quick crust freeze. The chicken then goes through a conventional tunnel, where residual cryogen from the bath area, sometimes supplemented by additional nitrogen, completes the freezing. The product is then automatically bagged and shipped, much as for the cooked Philly steak.

The staff conducts organoleptic tests on each batch of cooked product. An off-site microbiological lab tests for salmonella, staph, E. coli, Listeria, coliforms and aerobic plate count.

Future projects at Allied include a gradual move into retail with the introduction of Gourmet Touche, a frozen home meal replacement product of cooked chicken, pasta, vegetables and sauce. Spencer is looking to market Gourmet Touche as a private label competitor to such products as Agrilink's Chicken Voila! She also is considering a nutraceutical version with organically raised chicken and vitamin-enriched sauce.

"If I can't give something back to the industry, I don't want to do it," Spencer says. "It's not just about making money, it's about doing something that makes a difference in consumers' lives."

STATISTICS

Allied Steaks Inc. at-a-glance

25,000 square feet, producing 150,000 pounds per week. Sixty full-time, workers on one daily shift. About $18 million yearly in sales.

TRAINING

Workers brought in quarterly for instruction in sanitation and good manufacturing practices.

OUTSOURCING

Sanitation done by outside company, with Allied supervisor in charge.

ENGINEERING

In-house engineer oversees line configuration and assembly, and does equipment modifications.

QUALITY CONTROL

Organoleptic tests done in-house on each day's production. Outside lab conducts microbiological tests, on test-and-release basis.