A brand new plant opens the door for Eli's to enhance its cheesecake market, multiply its dessert offerings ... and build the dream.
BY LAURIE GORTON
It's a great time to be building brands," saidMarc S. Schulman, president of The Eli's Cheesecake Company, Chicago, the market leader in premium specialty cheesecakes. He has good reason for optimism. His company just moved into a new, state-of-the-art bakery, complete with high-volume baking and freezing capacity - a facility that will enhance Eli's brand position through advances in output, quality, variety and manufacturing productivity. It's a facility that fulfills a dream.
LONG AWAITED. Eli's pioneered the commercial cheesecake business. Noted Chicago restaurateur Eli Schulman turned a cookie-crust cheesecake into the signature dessert at his popular restaurant, Eli's the Place for Steak. In 1980, he decided to use the first Taste of Chicago food festival as a giant test market to see if customers outside the restaurant would like - and buy - his cheesecakes. They did. The business outgrew the restaurant kitchen, and Mr. Schulman set up a separate cheesecake operation in a small plant at Dakin Street on Chicago's northwest side. In 1984, his son, Marc, stepped in to run the cheesecake company.

Eli's built its customer base among food service, bakery/deli and retail supermarket accounts. Production quickly grew from 200 cakes a day in the mid- 1980s to 1,600 per hour by the early 1990s. That's when the company maxed out capacity at its existing facility.
The company's desire for a larger site
has been well-known for several years. Although strongly courted by other communities, company executives rejected choices that would take the business out of Chicago. They looked at existing food plants that were available, but finding the best infrastructure was difficult, and renovation costs exceeded new construction expense.

Management waited. Eight years passed. Then, in fall 1995, the city opened for development a large piece of property just a few blocks from Eli's existing plant.
The time was right, and the move was quick.
On Nov. 1, 1995, Eli's broke ground. On Oct. 16,1996, the plant celebrated its grand opening, attended by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and Illinois Governor Jim Edgar. In less than 10 months, the company turned the signature on the closing papers into a $9-million, 62,000-sq-ft plant capable of making 4,000 cheesecakes an hour. The new facility includes a state-of-the-art bakery, visitor's center, retail store, cafe and corporate headquarters, all housed in an attractive new building worthy of its name: "Eli's Cheesecake World." Besides shifting manufacturing into high gear, the move prompted other changes. For one thing, the company adopted a new corporate name: The Eli's Cheesecake Company instead of Eli's Chicago's Finest Cheesecake. More importantly, the move prompted elevation of the company's business skills.
"We increased our management capabilities, adding top creative people to handle sales, marketing and operations," Marc Schulman said. "We're positioning ourselves for steady growth. "Now, Eli's is backed up by the facility and staff that will allow us to realize our dreams," he continued. "As a privately-held company, we have the ability to continue to invest here. And we could very easily double in size by this time next year."
"It's a big year," concurred Deborah J. Littmann, director of marketing, who joined Eli's from Keebler last year as one of the first of company's new crop of managers.

INFINITE VARIETY. When founder Eli Schulman started baking cheesecakes at his restaurant, he made 20 a day. The new plant processes 5,000 lb an hour. While production volume changed drastically, what stayed the same were the high quality ingredients, hand work and attention to detail. Over a year, the bakery uses more than 4 million lb of cream cheese, 50,000 lb of eggs, 250,000 lb of butter and 13,000 lb of bourbon vanilla.
"The bakery replaced its old mobile cooling racks methods with an I.J. White Ambient Spiral Cooling System because the new method conserves floor space, avoids unnecessary handling, saves labor and moves each cake smoothly in uninterrupted first-in-first-out order."
Eli's has added substantially to its product line in recent years. The business that started with just two styles - "original plain" and chocolate chip cheesecake - now boasts more than 50 varieties. Sizes, too, have multiplied from initial choices of 6 or 9-in. diameter. Eli's cheesecakes now come in 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10-in. diameters. "And we added more upscale lines," Ms. Worthington said. "Cheesecake provides an infinite variety. It's like ice cream. It lends itself to so much creativity in ingredients, flavor and texture."

SPREAD SHEET APPROACH. Production is the responsibility of Ms. Worthington, along with operations manager Bryan Price who reports to her. He recently joined Eli's from operations positions at Sara Lee Bakery and Ralston Purina.

"It took us literally 12 years to build this line," Ms. Worthington explained about technology decisions. "Once we decided how many units we wanted to make, we knew we could semi-automate or automate most of our long-run cheesecake operations."
Management assembled its new plant team, drawing participation from Eli's supervisors, foremen and lead workers. Eli's also tapped a process engineer to help spec and layout the new bakery.
"It was a team endeavor," Ms. Worthington said. "We put things on a spread sheet to see what we would need and how we could set up the installation details. We knew where the weakest links would be before moving to this plant."
The move was timed for July 1996. This gave the bakery a two-month window to schedule changeover. New equipment - the Gemini Werner & Pfleiderer 70-ft tunnel oven and the IJ. White 20ft-tall Spiral Cooler - handles several key functions. But some existing equipment had to come from the old site. Once the new systems came in, the rest of the move took just two weeks of down time. Eli's put its supervisors and engineers to work on the installation effort.
From the start, Eli's managers viewed the new bakery as a multi-phase project. Phase One covered startup of the new equipment and the first few months of operation. It involves some redundancy in production as operators run automated and semi-automated systems "in parallel" with older methods to maintain output rates and maximize use of the high-capacity tunnel oven. During Phase Two, the bakery will install conveyor links between key operations, completing the change to automated depositing and oven loading. Future phases will automate freezing and improve productivity in packaging.