FSI already ships the larger pizzas to retailers in the Southwest and has future orders to ship elsewhere.
"We see ourselves as a great venue for retailers in terms of private label one-stop shopping," Mr. Welka says. "We now have two segments of the pizza category as well as the hand-held snack area. We have some other ideas coming up as well."
FSI most likely will explore other pizza offerings based on trends in the category to round out its private label line. These could include products targeting the premium and super-premium pizza segments, Mr. Welka says.
just as important to supermarkets are a private label processor's operation and service levels. Mr. Welka notes that FSI has been equally busy establishing and maintaining its plant performance. Operations accreditor the American Institute of Baking, Manhattan, Kan., awarded FSI a 985 rating (on a 1000-point scale) for operations and sanitation. The "superior" rating places FSI in the top 19 percent of all U.S. plants inspected.
FSI indeed maintains strict attention to detail and quality throughout its operation.
Each day, FSI's in-house lab performs microbiological testing for standard plate counts, mold and yeast in addition to staphylococci, salmonella and coliforms. Additionally, bacteria levels are continuously monitored at critical contact areas and finished goods from all lines are sampled hourly.
"FSI's micro and sanitation programs scored 100 percent per AIB," says Stephen Dominique, vice president of operations. "FSI has had superior ratings over the past several years. Operations is continually tweaking improvements in Good Manufacturing Practices, especially in food safety and cleaning practices."
These and other practices are certainly clear to visitors observing pepperoni pizza production. Actually the process involves a series of ingredient
preparation steps before FS1 assembles the product on its main 35,000sq.-ft. production floor.
FSI's 5,000-sq.-ft. dry warehouse stores various ingredients including spices, stick pepperoni sausage and even the makings for analog cheese topping, which is produced on-site. Trailer trucks deliver bulk flour to two outside silos. Incoming oil is pumped directly into inside holding tanks.
FSI workers prepare a pizza sauce in a set-aside area just off the production floor. Here they pump tomato paste from large, bag-in-box totes into a batch mixer. Additionally, water, oil and other dry ingredients are metered in and/or manually added. The resulting mixture is then pumped to a holding tank for later transfer to the production line.
Analog cheese is prepared in an adjoining room off the plant floor. Workers here combine casein, water, oil and other ingredients in a steam mixer, which blends and then cooks the mixture in about 30 minutes. The process produces a soft, stringy white cheese, which is pumped into a holding tank. Later it will be extruded into 40-1b. cases.
Here, workers will periodically inspect the cheese for moisture as well as melting and shredding attributes. Filled boxes are passed through a metal detector and then placed into a 34'F cooler for a minimum of 10 days. Later, they'll be wheeled onto the production floor.
Workers prepare pepperoni topping by running 3-foot sticks of pepperoni sausage through a slicer and dicer that produce 1/4" pepperoni cubes. Diced pepperoni then drops onto a conveyor, which travels through a metal detector. Product is weighed for consistency and boxed for later use.
The sheet then is conveyed through a reducer, which helps the 3/4"-thick dough recover and rolls it out to an even thinner 1/4" width. To ensure proper height and width, the dough is conveyed through a gauging roller and a cross roller, which bi-directionally works the dough and helps it recover glutens, destroyed when it moved through the extruder. Upon exiting the rollers, brushes remove excess flour and a docker perforates the dough with small holes so that the crust won't puff up during baking. This low stress sheeting system produces a crust with an open cell structure, Mr. Dominique says.
The sheets then are conveyed through a cutter, which cuts three 5-inch round pizza crusts across the width of the sheet. Excess dough is conveyed back to the sheeting line and recycled. Overall, the plant loses less than 90 pounds of dough per day.
A mechanical hoist later will lift the tub and drop the block of dough into a chuncker, which segments the product into smaller portions. These portions drop onto conveyor belts feeding a central extruder. The extruder shapes dough into a consistent and continuous 800 mm by 3/4" sheet, which is floured on top and bottom as it exits.
The cut dough is conveyed into a six-zone air impingement oven, which directs high-velocity, low mass air through nozzles at the pizza crusts. The oven's air streams sweep away the boundary layers of stagnant air and surface moisture, which otherwise insulate the crust and slow down the baking process. Upon exiting the oven just under two minutes later, the crusts are conveyed through a cooling tunnel.
The topping process begins as pizza crusts travel under a waterfall sauce applicator, which evenly coats each crust. Crusts then pass below a waterfall cheese applicator. After shredded cheese is applied, a meal applicator deposits pepperoni across the circumference of the pizza. Employees check meat topping quantities every half hour to ensure that topping levels meet USA requirements.
Pizza spirals downward and exits the freezer 20 minutes later on a waist-level conveyor.
Pizzas travel onward to an automatic cartoner, which positions each product into a quickly formed carton. Open cartons then are closed and glued shut before traveling through a checkweigher, metal detector and an imaging scanner. Cartons also are coded for tracking purposes.
Pizza cartons then are conveyed into an adjacent room where they'll be automatically case packed and palletized. Forklift operators transfer wrapped, finished pallets into FSI's 33,000-sq.-ft. frozen warehouse. Here, they're stored at - YF until shipping.
From analog cheese production to final storage, it's imperative that FSI employees reduce waste and maintain quality. After all, FSI's private label and branded businesses depend on the company's ability to pass on operational savings to customers. It's that kind of performance that speaks well of the company in its strategy to get new accounts across the United States.
Meanwhile, FSI remains well positioned for the category's continued growth.
"FSI products outperform the total frozen pizza category versus all but two brands on units and dollars per million dollars ACV per SKU." Mr. Delzell says. "This is because our consumers buy almost four packages of our pizza when it is purchased giving the retailer a great penny profit and a high direct product profit."
REFRIGERATED&FROZEN FOODS July 1997
