by Bryan Salvage, editor
Clougherty Packing Co. is a privately held, family trust owned by the second generation (three brothers and one sister) of the Clougherty family.
The company is California's leading packer of fresh pork and pork products under the Farmer John brand, with annual sales of $350 million. Products processed at its Vernon, Calif.-based processing complex include fully cooked, bone-in and boneless smoked hams; bacon and smoked meats; pork sausage; wieners and smoked sausage; and luncheon meat, chubs and cooked ham. The company also owns a small beef cutting plant in Arizona.
Farmer John products are distributed primarily throughout Southern California. About 1,500 supermarkets make up its major customer base. But some customers are located as far away as San Francisco, Oregon and Hawaii. The company employs 1,300 people.
"We are structured like a little butcher shop in Europe," says Peter Auer, manager of Clougherty Packing's processing complex. "We do everything."
The company began operation in the 1930s in the rented basement of a 100-year-old building, the current site of its three-story pork products plant, which continues to be remodeled and upgraded. "Now we own more than 20 acres," Auer adds.
Produces own hogs
Clougherty raises about 400,000 hogs annually at two hog farms in California and Arizona. In addition, 90 rail cars transport hogs bought at market to satisfy the company's growing processing needs.
The company is presently slaughtering around 13.5 hogs a minute, and slaughtered 5,500 hogs the morning of this tour.
Clougherty is designing a bigger kill floor on the second floor of its processing building, which is scheduled to open in May. The new kill operation will electrically stun and slaughter 5,000 hogs in an eight-hour shift, but kill only 12 hogs a minute. This process is being slowed to promote consistent quality of product.
"It will almost be the same, but it will have bigger rooms," Auer says of the new kill floor. "The new hallways will be bigger than our current kill floor. This technology doesn't change too much."
The new kill floor will utilize a new leaf-lard puller and hog splitters, both French built.
"There are a lot of splitters in the world, but this one works," Auer says. "With some splitters, you free a man from splitting. But it requires two engineers [to keep it running]."
Offals and more
Clougherty's offal department is currently on the first floor of the building. Offals are crust-frozen while passing through chilled salt water for 45 minutes via plastic conveyor.
"We're shipping our offal within one hour after the kill," Auer says. "We distribute ears, stomachs, snouts, tongues, kidneys-you name it. This is one example of just-in-time shipping."
Clougherty is also building a new offal room that will open on the second floor in May.
"My dream is that when we have more demand, we will go to two shifts, seven days a week. Right now, we're at one shift, five days a week [with an occasional shift ] on Saturday," Auer says.
Clougherty's lard department produces about 80,000 pounds daily.
The company's Polish sausage department makes smoked pork sausage, bologna and other sausage products amounting to about 350,000 pounds a week. Items like Polish and pork sausage begin production at 6 a.m. daily.
"We start packing by 10 a.m., and it's done by noon," Auer says. "All specialty products are made to order. Order sizes vary; but we can do it because we are a just-in-time [operation]."
Auer wants to save money without compromising quality. One way to do this is through further automation. For example, a single-cut machine (which he first saw in Switzerland and had built by a Japanese supplier) cuts sausage links in natural casings.
"It saves me five people, and the flow-through is much better," Auer says of the machine. "It's very simple. And all products here are either vacuum-packaged or gas-flushed."
Some of the cardboard packaging serves as both a shipping and selling container. Such products are shrink wrapped on a pallet and shipped, which saves packaging material, Auer says.
Bread and butter
Clougherty's fresh pork sausage department is on the third floor of its processing complex.
"This is a major department; this is our bread and butter," Auer claims. "We make from 100,000 to 150,000 pounds of fresh pork sausage a day."
All product is made automatically and consists of 25 percent-, 35 percent- and 40 percent-fat fresh pork sausage.
"We take an order at 8 a.m., and by 10 a.m. that day we're shipping custom-made products," Auer says. "The shelf life for our fresh pork sausage is 21 days."
Clougherty's liver sausage department produces 8,000 pounds of product (in half-pound and 1-pound chubs) in eight hours. Only four people work in the computerized department-one person scales product, one operates the machinery, and two work in the pack outs for shipping.
"This is my favorite department," Auer says. "We ship final product only three hours after the hogs are slaughtered."
Clougherty's carcass chilling room can hold up to 6,300 split hogs. The carcasses are then further processed in the break-up room located in the next building.
"About 142 people process from 800 to 1,100 carcasses an hour in the cut room," Auer claims. "There are four lines: leg, shoulder, loin and belly. These items go right into pack-out or to further processing."
Clougherty processes and ships its own bacon within 72 hours. It manufactures about 100,000 pounds of bacon a day, Auer claims.
Six lines automatically feed into the slicers into the bacon room, which has around 40 people.
"We have new technology here in automatic slicing and scaling," Auer adds. "The computer and scale instructs the slicing. One line does 20,000 pounds a day, and we have six lines. This is our most sophisticated department."
Auer claims Clougherty's boning line for boneless hams is the most advanced in the United States.
"We do about 4,500 [boneless hams] a day," Auer claims. "We can go up to 8,000 when we put more people on the line. There are about 40 [people] here now.
"We had 19 skinners here at one time," he adds. "Now we only have 13 because we installed a new automatic skinning machine."
Clougherty achieved $11 million in sales on its fresh muscle meat in 1994.
"We use much of this product for our own brand, but we also ship it to other ham manufacturers located in New York, Milwaukee, Houston and Denver," Auer adds.
In the slicing room for special projects, ham products are processed for customers such as Burger King.
Clougherty's new smokehouse has five chambers.
"You can cook, smoke and do everything with it," Auer says. "You can do bone-in hams and boneless hams. Everything is computer controlled. The smoke system is also hooked up to its manufacturer in Germany by modem. They see everything we're doing."
The company is smoking some of its meats in a non-traditional way.
"Here's the old-fashioned way: We have sawdust and we make our smoke with steam," Auer says. "But we have to be careful not to contribute to air pollution. We were also using about one million gallons of water a day."
Clougherty is now using pre-smoked casings and nettings on some of its products.
Clougherty's ham packaging room produces 13,000 bone-in hams a day during the bone-in ham season, Auer adds. He calls the German-made injection machine for his bone-in hams the best in the world.
"You inject the hams, put them into a pre-smoked net, and then they go into the smokehouse and then into chilling," Auer says.
Auer feels it would be best for the meat industry to be more open instead of secretive.
"Meat companies are the same everywhere. They're secretive," he says."The industry in the U.S. has a bad image, and we have to improve it. We have to change. We must be open," he adds.
Farmer John Meat Products
Clougherty Packing processes a number of fresh pork and processed pork products:
Fully-Cooked Smoked Hams
Bone-in Hams, Case-Ready Hams (including a low-salt case-ready ham), Center Cut Ham Steaks and Spiral Cut Ham.
Fully-Cooked Boneless Smoked Hams
Boned and Rolled Hams, Tavern Hams (regular, flat, special and pee-wee), Golden Tradition Hams, and Low-Salt Boneless Ham.
Bacon and Smoked Meats
Includes a variety of bacon products, Smoked Picnics, Smoked Hocks, Smoked Neck Bones, Smoked Loins, Dry Salt Belly and Retail Dry Salt Belly.
Pork Sausage
Sheep Casing Links, Skinless Links, Skinless Pork Links, Roll Sausage, Premium Roll Sausage, Italian Sausage, Sausage Gravy & Biscuit, Sausage & Biscuit, Pork Sausage Patties, Sausage Patties and P.C. Links.
Wieners and Smoked Sausage
Meat Wieners, Dinner Franks, Lite Wieners, Beef Wieners, Corn Dogs (meat & beef), Polish Sausage, Louisiana Hot, Red Hots, Pork Rope Sausage, Beef Rope Sausage, Jalapeno Rope Sausage and Polska Kielbasa.
Luncheon Meat, Chubs & Cooked Ham
Sliced Meat and Beef, Bologna, Sliced Cotto Salami, Sliced Ham Roll, Braunschweiger, Sliced Ham, Sliced Ham Steak, Chopped Ham, Thin Sliced Ham, Thin Sliced Roast Pork, Thin Sliced Beef Salami.