Running a family food business with razor-thin margins and a deeply seasonal sales cycle is not for the faint of heart. In a recent episode of Spilled Salt, host Maureen Ballatori sat down with Julie Camardo, fifth-generation owner and CEO of Zweigle’s, Inc., a meat company founded in the late 1800s. The conversation covers succession, company culture, product development, and what it really takes to lead a generational food brand forward.
From Psychology Major to CEO: An Unconventional Path Into the Family Business
Julie did not grow up planning to run Zweigle’s. She studied psychology at Providence College and spent years in Maryland working for a staffing firm before returning to Rochester in 2002. As she put it, “There was no job promised for me… It was, ‘if there’s a position available’.” She cycled through HR, sales, the production floor, and the lab before finding her footing in a leadership role following the unexpected passing of her mother in 2009.
Leaning on Boards and Peer Groups to Fill Leadership Gaps
Stepping into the CEO role at a young age, Julie leaned on a board of directors, the company’s longtime COO, and a 15-year membership with Vistage to build her leadership skills. She later formed a separate advisory board that meets monthly and provides hands-on strategic counsel across sales, operations, and finance.
Managing Thin Margins and Seasonal Demand in the Meat Industry
Julie is candid about the financial reality of food manufacturing: “In the meat industry, we work on pennies.” Zweigle’s uses co-packing and private label work to smooth out seasonal revenue gaps and keep its workforce stable year-round.
Culture as a Competitive Advantage in Food Manufacturing
At Zweigle’s, culture is an operational strategy. Julie skips formal quarterly meetings when production demands it, but she does not skip the shop floor. She checks in with employees directly, asks about their weekends, and follows up on praise she hears from managers. With 52 full-time employees and a workforce that includes long-tenured staff she describes as family, the approach appears to hold. For food and agriculture founders navigating the same pressures of thin margins, seasonal volatility, and high turnover risk, that may be the most transferable lesson Zweigle’s 140-year run has to offer.
Transcript
This transcript has been edited from its original form to support readability.
Maureen Ballatori: I’m Maureen Ballatori and this is Spilled Salt, a podcast on the thrills and spills from the food, beverage and agriculture industries.
Today’s guest is Julie Camardo. She is the fifth generation owner and CEO of Zweigle’s, Inc. Born and raised in Rochester, New York, she attended Mercy High School, went on to Providence College and received a BA in psychology.
For more than 140 years, Zweigle’s has been making great tasting sausages, hot dogs and specialty meat products based on their exclusive old world family recipes. Today, as a fifth generation family owned business, they carry forward the legacy of quality and excellence that has made them the hometown favorite since the late 1800s.
Zweigle’s products are backed by their commitment to delivering great tasting, premium quality products. Julie today talks about leadership for the organization, what it looked like to step into the CEO role and how she’s gotten support in the growth of the business over the years. Enjoy the conversation.
Maureen: Hey Julie, nice to see you.
Julie Camardo: Good to see you too, Maureen. Thank you for having me.
Maureen: Yes, my pleasure. Thanks so much for taking the time. I’m so excited to talk with you. I always love to be able to get a generational business owner on the podcast. I think they’ve got such rich stories and especially because we like to take it all the way back to the beginning. So tell me about the very early days when you were growing up. Did you always want to be involved in the family business?
Julie: Okay, so not back to 1880, which is good. I wasn’t born then. I didn’t always want to be in the family business. Early, very early on, I thought I actually wanted to be a nurse. I was a huge fan of Clara Barton, Red Cross founder, but it was not my calling in the end.
Maureen: And you went to school for psychology, right?
Julie: I did go for psychology, Providence College. Yes, I’m a friar.
Maureen: So tell me a little bit about your evolution. How did you go from, “I don’t want to be in the family business, maybe I want to be a nurse, I’m going to school for psychology…” When did you decide? Tell me about that trajectory.
Julie: Yes, that is a good question. So it did take me a little bit to get there. In college, I was going to school for psychology to further my career in that area. And sometimes I’m like, gosh, what if I did do that? What would my life be like right now?
Maureen: Was it with a goal of seeing patients? Was that the angle there?
Julie: Maybe or also, maybe working in the mental health industry in some way. Anyways, moving forward. I guess my first job out of college was a volunteer through the Digital Volunteer Corps. I was in charge of creating a program for young parents and really involved in that community aspect of it.
And then I moved to Maryland for a number of years and definitely did not work in the nursing industry by any means. I actually worked for a staffing firm for three, four years there. And there’s a lot of selling that is involved when you work in that type of firm. You’re selling to people, people selling people to jobs. It’s a constant HR involvement. So psychology was really great for that type of work.
I should really clarify my first job. That was my first job out of college, but way back when I spent numerous summers working at Zweigle’s. I worked at Zweigle’s durin high school. I worked at the front desk. I worked in finance and my whole job was data entry way back when they had one or two computers.
I worked when I was in college, I worked on the shop floor. So I was in packaging. We are actually talking about that today. And I have little hands, so it’s hard grabbing those hot dogs can be a challenge, right?
So I worked in packaging. And then I also worked one summer in sales at Zweigle’s. So I was given a little route to visit a bunch of the Wegmans stores.
So that was not at the same time. I did the two jobs separately. Separately, I should say. So I did have a lot of years where I was working at Zweigle’s while also doing and pursuing other things.
But in a family business, that’s just what you do. So I didn’t necessarily, I didn’t think anything of it. I just remember my mom coming home, oh, so and so is out, they’re on vacation or something. Whenever there was a leave of absence, hey, can you fill in? Sure, I’ll be at the front desk for whatever, or I’ll do that. So that’s just what you do.
We could not be on the shop floor until you’re 18 and that’s pretty strict. But in reality, the first job is like mail and staking. That’s like the first job that you give any kids when they come in or shredding. My kids are really big and have done the shredding.
Fast forward, we’re talking high school, college. And then post college did the Maryland thing, worked at that job. And then there was a point where I said, I think I want to come home and see what the family business is like.
I decided to put a pause on that whole nursing career. Some of it was that it seemed like an amazing, extremely rewarding job.
And I didn’t actually come out of Providence with a nursing degree. They didn’t have nursing then. They have it now. I was going to go further and go on to look. I was looking into getting that degree. And then I totally changed what I was looking at. So then I came home.
Maureen: So funny. Same thing actually. I went to Nazareth College, now Nazareth University in Rochester, and I thought I wanted to be an art teacher. And so I went to that school because they had a very robust art education program. But then I decided I didn’t want to do that. And so I changed my major to graphic design and illustration because I love advertising and art with a purpose, a business purpose kind of angle.
If I wasn’t at a school that had both curriculums, who knows what I would be doing now to your point of if you had pursued nursing, who knows where you would be now.
Julie: Right, yes. I did end up back in Rochester. There was no job promised for me. I want to be clear. It was, if there’s a position available. And at the time when I came back in 2002 to the Rochester area, I was blessed to have my grandfather and my mother working at Zweigle’s.
And so there was an opportunity for me to come in and actually it made sense on the HR side of things because working in that staffing industry, to pretty much do it all on some level.
There were parts of the job that my mom was doing that she should not have been doing as a president of the company, but we were small, we all wore many hats. You’re also familiar with that, too. And so I was able to take some of that away from her, make some changes internally.
And I took myself on a little Zweigle tour while I was here. I spent some time in HR, I spent some time back out in sales. Honestly, this many years later, I’d have to really track the specifics of what was, what I did when, but I spent some time back on the shop floor and the kitchen side of things. I hadn’t done that when I was in college.
So I spent some time on the kitchen floor. I spent time in the lab. So learning about the lab, learning about what tests we perform. I’m doing the tests myself. So I did that as well. And I tried to do a number of the jobs at Zweigle’s in the kitchen. When I say kitchen, I mean where we manufacture the hot dog.
That’s where I was just over the years doing numerous various different positions. I would say definitely sales is probably where I migrated back to. I would say I enjoyed being out with the customers, being out in the community, being responsible for setting up new routes, understanding the difference between what it is to sell to retail and how you sell the food service, more branded items.
I would say I want to clarify a lot of what I’m talking about might be Michael Brand related, but there is more to the meat industry in particular. It is different from selling in some of the other types of industries. It was as very much a face-to-face– and still in many ways is–type of position. I still go and talk to meat managers to say hello. So some of that is still how we get our orders.
Maureen: Interesting. So let me clarify that because we’ve talked about that before a little bit with other guests in terms of how do you get something into a retail store? And it used to be years ago that you would drive from one store to another and you would talk to the store buyer who was there on the floor at the store in some cases, depending on the department, right?
Whereas now it’s typically more centralized where there is a category buyer for all of the meat for all of the retail stores. But are you saying that it’s different in the meat department that it’s still more store by store?
Julie: No, I should clarify that’s once you get the product into the stores. It’s store by store for us if we deliver direct to the store door and we’re order-taking inventory and doing our own little inventory analysis at different stores on the smaller stores, independence, the Topps and the Wegmans of the world.
Ordering, just like a Topps, just like Walmart’s, it is through the category manager. It’s through a merchant. They all have different names for their categories. But for Wegmans, it goes right through their warehouse. So that’s how the store itself gets replenished.
But that doesn’t mean that I’m not in the stores at Wegmans checking on my product, making sure it all looks good, going to the back, making sure they have inventory, if they have inventory.
So I still do those things, because it’s just as important to be here at Zweigle’s checking on things as it is to be out in the community. So we were talking about sales. So I really loved that part of sales. I loved being out in the community, people making new friendships. For a while there were some people I would visit every week, chat about the family and their friends and yes, sometimes it was a lot of driving and then sometimes it was a lot of phone calls. So it varies.
Maureen: Yes, but I think that it’s important for startups to understand that Zweigle’s is a 140 year old business and you’re still going store to store to make sure that the brand is represented in the way that reflects what is important to you.
Julie: Yes, so I don’t go everywhere all over the place, but if I do travel somewhere and there’s a Wegmans, my kids or my husband are probably like, ugh, whatever. But I’m like, let’s go to Wegmans. I want to see. Let me check the store. So they’re used to it now. It would be no difference if I was a kid or my parents might do something similar.
We are mostly there, definitely in the hot dog grilling season, just maybe not visually, depending on the shelf, certain places, but we are there. We’re so grateful for that relationship. But yes, I will go if I’m out of town and search out a Wegmans store and I will absolutely look at Zweigle’s and see where they are. I’ll take pictures. So I’m right there. I do it.
Maureen: That’s such a great message. You touched on one of the things I was going to ask you about too. So Zweigle’s is in retail food service and also doing private label, which you were just referencing just now as well. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about your traction and your excitement in those various verticals.
Julie: Yes, we’ll just start with branded versus private label, co-packing. So for us, branded goes into retail and food service for us. When I say retail, it is Wegmans, it’s Topps, it’s your Independents, food services, your Hots Places, your Tom Walls, your Bill Gray’s. Pretty much anywhere that we like to think that you can buy is Zweigle’s Hot Dog.
There’s some food service and that is through distributors. That product is sold. So our branded product is very important to us and it’s a very seasonal item. So we aren’t as busy November, December, January, February.
And if March is not an ideal weather month, as this has pretty much been winter number three here in Rochester, it doesn’t help with the true grilling season.
So how we look at co-pack and private labels are two different things. So we do both of those to help us offset the busy season when or our non-busy season. So we can continue to keep people hired and to keep us moving along steadily.
So that way instead of these crazy erratic spikes that we have and we do have them in the summer, we still have business that we’re manufacturing throughout the year that is slightly more steady. So it is definitely helpful. The margins are much thinner on a co-pack or private label item because you’re selling it to someone else and we’re now not adding in, we’ll call it SG&A on top of that, we are pricing that marginally thin.
And I’m sure that you know in the meat industry, we have low margins to begin with. You’re working on the margins, right? Agriculture is not the service industry, it’s not other industries. We’re small margins. In the meat industry, for people who don’t know, we work on pennies. I’m not saying that for the sake of whatever. I know the penny seems to no longer exist, but it does exist. It exists in the meat industry. I can assure you. And I’m not the only one that would share that with you. Pennies, yes, it matters.
Maureen: Yes. So, how do you do that? You’ve been in the business for 23 years, right? And altogether now you’re CEO. So how do you navigate exactly what you just explained? You’re running a business with incredibly thin margins that’s highly seasonal. I mean, the challenges, the headwinds of those things are monumental.
Julie: Yes, since 20, yes.
Maureen: What are your, what’s the word, upwinds? What’s the way that you navigate those things in a positive way to keep everybody coming to the plant every day and not only just showing up, but like showing up with joy, right? About the excitement to continue to build that business.
Julie: Yes, that is a really great question. Our culture, our values are really critical to Zweigle’s. It’s about how we look to grow and keep and find ways to keep our employees happy and wanting to make sure that there’s a balance between these tight margins that we have to run and our values of quality, caring, accountability, continuous improvement.
Our values matter for how we are able to be sustainable into the future years. But it’s a very big question that you ask because there’s a lot more to what you’re saying because yes, we do look for all those, we have to look for all these wins throughout the week and how, what’s good news.
Maureen: Yes. I’m a big advocate for strong culture as well. I think that a strong culture can power through a lot of things.
For example, over here, we had some turnover with staff and so we’ve been down a designer for the last probably six weeks and we’ve got somebody starting in roughly two weeks. So that’s eight weeks that my two designers have been giving 120%, right? Because they know that we’re understaffed and that it’s going to take time for that seat to be filled.
And I strongly believe that appreciative culture, strong culture are what help you get through those moments, right? That somebody doesn’t see that happening and throws their arms up and gets frustrated and walks out and now you’re down multiple people, right?
But a strong culture and supportive environment are critical to that. And so for us, we do quarterly team building exercises. We do quarterly meetings with the team to kind of share what’s going on. It’s mostly quarterly for us.
But how do you manage that? What are some of the ways that you drive culture at Zweigle’s?
Julie: Yes, so that’s a really great question. And it has evolved over the years. So all the things that you’re saying, I understand.
So in terms of how we do it, how we communicate and work on culture on the shop floor is a little bit more challenging than necessarily when you’re not on the shop floor because people who are down working, running the lines every day. We need them to be on the shop floor running in scenes, to work hard, because they’re the people that help to make sure that we’re out there.
So how we communicate to them and taking time to speak with them has become a challenge over the years. We tried to do one really big company meeting at the end of year, at the beginning of the year.
When we found that that was really hard to accomplish, if we got busier, what we did was we broke them down into smaller meetings. And then we tried to shorten our message to try to make the most important topics that would be of interest to our end audience. That is really important.
I live in a lot of it every day. I’m constantly hearing the sales, the marketing, what’s going on with packaging, what’s going on in the world outside and could be affecting our pricing. I’m constantly personally getting updates, but that’s not necessarily happening on the shop floor. So when we do meet with our employees we really have to shorten that timeframe.
So we’re talking about what we used to do. At one point we were doing four hour meetings. Well, that was too much. We’ve gotten to an hour, but even now, we’ve got to get to like 20 minutes or less because one, we want them to be able to continue to do their jobs because obviously we look at metrics on a weekly basis, but we do need to be sharing with them what’s going on with sales. Sometimes it’s really always fun to talk about sales and what’s happening that is affecting what they’re doing.
Maureen: Totally.
Julie: Internally, we look for opportunities to meet when people do something really great. Sometimes we call it ‘good catches’. We make sure to recognize them. We give them something a little extra, a little gift card. We’ll put it up. have our screens. Our two lunchrooms have screens where we share company information from something simple as the weather today.
Maureen: Yes, it’s about communication and recognition, right?
Julie: Yes, it’s both because it’s top down, bottom up. We want to know things that are happening on the shop floor and they want to know, hey, what’s happening in sales? So it is important that we do that.
Sometimes I’ll be honest, we’re a small company. We wear many hats. The truth of the matter is it doesn’t always go as seamless as I’m saying.
We’ll have a meeting, we’ll have something that’s planned. And then, no, a machine or piece of equipment broke down. And now that time that I was going to spend talking to the employees has to be pushed back because I need to get that product out the door because our end customer, whether it be for our branded business or somebody else, we’ve promised that to them and we need to fill that order.
So in a perfect world we would be doing it quarterly, if we can, but in reality we meet about twice a year. Sometimes we struggle to do the true once a year bigger meeting and now it’s just, hey, we’ve got 10 minutes, I’m going to be on the shop floor and here’s what’s been going on.
Maureen: Yes, culture is something that you feel every day, right? It’s not how many times you were actually able to get together and somebody’s with their notebook and they’re checking the box or not, right? It’s about what people feel every day. And if they feel your intention to keep them informed, then you’ve achieved a positive culture.
Julie: Yes, just as much as being out in the community and checking on things and taking pictures and doing my due diligence there as much as trying to get on the shop floor and interacting with the employees.
And if I’m asking you, how was your weekend or what are your plans for this weekend? I’m really interested. I want to know. I won’t just say it for the sake of saying it. I also want to say, hey, thanks for doing a good job. If they’ve done a good job, if I heard it from a manager, I want to make sure that I specifically could interact with them.
Maureen: Yes, that’s great. Talk to me a little bit about the transition to CEO, because especially with family businesses, the succession, right, from one generation to another is always a big thing, right?
It’s big because it’s the next generation stepping in to take over. I don’t mean that it’s a big upheaval in that the next one comes in and everything changes, but it’s a moment, right? And you mentioned that when you came back, your mom and your grandfather were in the business. So you had two generations to go through before you landed at the helm where you are today. So talk about that a little bit.
Julie: Yes. Well, when my grandfather worked atZweigle’s, he lived and breathed Zweigle’s. He was so proud of the business and he did a lot to help grow the business over the years. And he moved the business from where it was to where we are today.
When I came in to work for Zweigle’s, it really was sort of working under his regime as he was still at the head of things, even though he did a lot, I’ll say before there was like this virtual thing. He wasn’t as active. He rarely came into the business, but he picked up a phone and he called people and he wanted to know what was going on. And not only would he do that, he’d also call our smokehouse operators at night and talk to them and ask, okay, what’s going on and how’s the product. He really was involved.
Maureen: He was involved virtually, you said.
Julie: In a sense, yes, at home, he would pick up the phone and he would call a lot of people. I would be honest, sometimes he would be like, Mr. Rowe’s on the line.
But I love my grandfather. I feel super blessed. My grandfather did pass away. I had a really good year while he was passively/actively at Zweigle’s. In reality, that time that I was there, my mother was starting to take over the president job at Zweigle’s.
And really it was more of her legacy that I was a part of when I was working at Zweigle’s.
You know, she worked as a child at Zweigle’s very differently than I did.
There were times when we would have conversations about all kinds of things, sales, people. We didn’t always see eye to eye. It was definitely different for me interacting with my mom in that aspect versus she’s just my mom.
The conversations ran the gamut. I did learn a lot from her and my grandfather. They both have a very, I’ll call it a servant leadership role that they led with. And the employees who worked for us have always been very important to our family and community, but you still had to run a business.
So in some ways, when I was taking more of an active role, I’ll be honest, there was a time between, so my grandfather, shortly after I came, my grandfather passed away. And then it was in 2009 that my mom passed away unexpectedly.
It was sort of at a crossroads. There was a lot, both business-wise and personal, that one goes through when he was a parent at a young age. I like to think I was young, I was still in my 30s, but it was a lot.
I did not feel like I was alone in this next stage of my life. I had a very supportive board of directors. And then I had a very strong COO who worked with me and had been working with me for a number of years with my mom. And there was very strong support.
But I realized I don’t know enough to quite be truly ready to feel comfortable taking on that role. So along with the support of the board and the support of the COO, I actually also joined Vistage.
Maureen: Yes, I saw you’ve been a member of Vistage for 13 years.
Julie: Yes, I’m not with Vistage right now, but yes, I was a member of Vistage for, I think it was more than 13, think it might have been like 15 years. And my coach, Linda, was wonderfully supportive and helpful to me and learning and to my team at Zweigle’s.
We did offsite things we had never done before. I had a true offsite board, true offsite team meetings where we got time together outside the office, things that are important, that are just challenging to do when you’re in a manufacturing environment.
Maureen: How many people do you have?
Julie: So right now we’re at 52, 53. And that does not include all the temporary associates that we have that work for us as well. And everybody in, that’s our full time number.
Maureen: So, yes, your mom passed in 2009 and you said that the support of the board of directors, your Vistage group and your COO really helped you get through.
Julie: Yes. And then, I can’t remember the exact year, but the timeframe when I was elevated to the COO role and the CEO level and the COO then elevated to the president level. He was extremely supportive and really helped his strength. He wasn’t only operations, but it definitely was on the operations side of things. So Kevin was his name and he just retired at the end of the year. So we had 20 years together. Yes, it was fun times that we had together. Learning, growing.
Maureen: Wow. What a gift to be able to have such a strong relationship with someone in that role. Talk to me a little bit more about the board of directors is always intriguing to me. Are you an ESOP or a fully private company?
Julie: We’re private, so nope.
Maureen: Okay. You also serve on the board for a couple of private organizations. I also created an advisory board for my agency as well, just this year. So we’ve had one meeting. So I might pick your brain on that a little bit more about how you utilize your board.
Talk to me about that a little bit. When did that get set up? You know, what was the initial intention and how have they added value to the organization?
Julie: Yes. So over the years, we’ll start with the board of directors. Over the years, the board of directors has evolved.
So under my grandfather and then my mother, there was always outside counsel. So we always had a secretary to take the notes and keep the books. That’s with probably any business.
And then in reality, a lot of the board under them was really an extension of just Zweigle’s that was financial people as Zweigle’s. It was a salesperson as Zweigle’s and that was maybe okay for that time with the knowledge that was had.
Moving forward, taking over the board worked to make sure that that wasn’t necessarily the case. And we had outside people, still legal counsel, still someone who’s treasurer at the time, come.
So I tried to pick what I thought was the best matrix for me and my business. So someone who had some meat experience, someone who was involved in the community, someone who had some operations experience and maybe experience working with retail with Wegmans or Walmart or Topps at the time. I’m trying to think of all that. If we had someone who had really strong experience with working with people with family business, who also in their own family business and finance.
So I tried to look at this new board in a different way than maybe my predecessors. Thinking, how could they be helpful to me? What they could do. We don’t. So, how should I say this on top of that? So I have this board of directors and our board of directors. Everybody’s different. We do an annual one.
I should also say anybody who’s a shareholder. So it’s just two people, just my sister and I right now, but both of us sit on this. We’re the shareholders. We sit on the board of directors. I also have an advisory board that has been over a year plus now. No, no. I have a board of directors and then I have an advisory board of directors. Well, they’re not a board, they’re just an advisory board and they do it for different purposes. So I’ve talked with them about that.
Maureen: Personal advisory board?
Julie: So the board of directors has a function where they do our annual meeting minutes and maybe less touch points.
My advisory board, I work with sometimes on a daily basis. There are times that they are more of my weekly or daily contacts in various different ways for different conversations. And then I work with them harder, I’d say on a monthly basis. We go over a variety of different topics from sales to operations to finance.
That’s a much smaller group. There’s just a couple of people on the advisory board and then I’ll bring in some people from my team to present briefly. But we have monthly meetings together as a group. And then on top of that separately, I work with them. I leverage their knowledge. I leverage their experience so I can learn from them.
It was super helpful over the years, but this is my own and I know it’s my company, but it’s like my personal mission. I can get really deep down into the weeds and deep down to the weeds. And then the strategy specifically focused on Zweigle’s. That’s what I need right now.
Maureen: Yes, I have tried so many groups over the years. I have never tried Vistage, but there are so many groups and they’re just not for me. I really love that I am a person who, when I have a challenge and I need support on something, I am constantly leveraging my network to call somebody to be like, I’m going through this. What do you think I should do? Which was the form. The reason why I wanted to start my advisory board as well was I need people who are more bought in.
Not bought in, more understanding of the layers of my questions. So I want them to understand the nuances of our revenue and its impact on my question to you about compensation for employees. We just started profit sharing, for example. And so I’ve called a couple of folks in my network to ask their thoughts on it and they can provide their perspective, right?
An advisory board member has a whole other layer of understanding of what the day to day is and can provide some more robust counsel. And so it’s been, even though I’m only one meeting and I’ve leveraged a couple of additional conversations with those members as well, that it has been so valuable.
Julie: Right. I also sit on a bunch of community boards that are out there. Traditionally, I don’t pay my board of directors. My advisory board, I know for being like, they do get compensation for their work, but I leverage them really hard.
Not only are they necessarily available for me, but if there’s someone else in my organization that they need to help guide support, then they work with them as well. It’s not solely just me. A lot of it all comes back to me and we talk, but there is that aspect of it. I have found an advisory board to be very helpful.
So some people, it’s just their board and advisory board is one in the same. I’ve decided for now to keep them separate. And that’s also how they want it. They want to keep the separation of church and state in a sense.
Maureen: Yes, it makes perfect sense. I also compensate my advisory board.
Okay, I’m going to switch gears on you a little bit here to talk a little bit about some of the big picture changes of what’s happening in the industry at large.
There are a lot of things that are changing. So customer preferences and customer demand, GLP ones, clean labels, et cetera, et cetera, all of those things.
You have an expanded product portfolio. Correct me on this if I’m wrong. I believe you used to be best known for sausages and hot dogs. And you have expanded that to also include things like chicken sausages, to expand the product portfolio that fit well into some of those changing consumer preferences. Is that right?
I’m curious if you can just talk a little bit about how you look at product development, especially on something within margins to react to changing customer preferences.
Julie: Sure. So that’s a really big question. And important because we have evolved over the years and changed our thinking and methodology. I know there was a time when my grandpa would never make any chicken. There’d be no chicken. I think that’s why it’s ever been. The customer preference for the different types of proteins has changed over the years. Chicken is number one.
Chicken’s number one, beef is still, although crazy expensive, people still will pay for it, and then there’s pork. So it follows the suit. But over the rest about how we go about with R &D, how we manage new ideas, new thought processes, how we keep up with things. Two things, one, we don’t manufacture chicken sausage under our brand anymore.
Again, with the blessed relationship that we have that we work really hard for with Wegmans. We do manufacture their chicken sausage and there’s a lot of collaboration between us. But it is very hard in our market for us when we manufacture. We can’t manufacture these small little bats. Right. And then package them.
Maureen: Like small batches, yes.
Julie: It may sound small, like thousand pound batches, but we need to be able to manufacture that and then sell that in the timeframe of our shelf life in order to fulfill customer orders. Reality was we were not selling as much on the chicken sausage side under our brand as we were making. So we have to make some tough decisions. And maybe it wasn’t the most difficult decision, but we were still able to keep that going with Wegmans as one of the products that we had made under our brand. We introduced them and we manufactured them.
So when we don’t necessarily have the product locally at Wegmans, it is a little bit more of a challenge for us to maintain the product with the type of constraints that we have. Our machines are larger. We have very large binding machines. We have these big stuffing machines. So we just like any business, and you’re especially in manufacturing and operations, have to pay your cost of goods, you’re going to figure out how that product is 100 percent.
So again, you’re right when we work on pennies. So anyways, when we’re looking at R&D now, it’s all of the things that you are mentioning. It’s consumer preference. What’s their choice? And then how are we going to be able to do that under our brand? And can we leverage the partners we’re currently selling to?
Maureen: Totally. It’s a volume play for sure.
Julie: Then, do we do it retail or do we do food service? Like which comes first? And then our price point. So is it a price point that we can get to the end consumer that they’re going to accept? So there’s a lot to it.
We haven’t done so because we picked up on some of our co-packing business and some of that private label business, I’m not saying we don’t have R&D because we talk about R&D and new products, but a lot of it is usually with working with other partners, working with other potential customers.
And we learn a lot that way and we provide our knowledge and our experience to help them make a better product. It is very challenging, especially on the marketing side and the expense that it takes to put a product on that is our brand, like your own brand into place and to have it be successful.
So you need to know you need to spend even if it’s geo-fencing and targeted marketing, it still has a cost to it. Right?
So on top of that, you need to have a price point for a period of time that’s going to get the consumer to want to purchase it. And so you’re decreasing your margin at that point. It’s under our brand. We include things like SG&A in the product. And then we also look at shelf life. So when you talk about all natural or healthy or clean labels, thank you.
Absolutely that can play into how long of a shelf life you get on your product before adding something like high pressure pasteurization or heat pasteurization, which we don’t have the capacity for either one here. And so then if we’re sending it out for somewhere else to do that, then you’re adding more costs on top of that. And then, like, at what point is when you pass it off to the consumer is for them to buy.
So it is a lot to think about. And it’s important that we continue. It is important that we continue to think about the end user, the customer, and what are the growing trends. So absolutely, chicken’s huge. Beef is big. Beef is expensive.
NAE, no antibiotics ever. And the terminology can also be confusing, but there’s no antibiotics ever. There’s, I can’t think of all of them off the top of my head.
Of course, organic. We are not organic anymore. We put a pause on that. We had found we were making one or two items that were organic. We found with what we were manufacturing, the amount we were manufacturing… So I say sometimes like a small batch is too small for us. In this case, if we don’t have enough of something like organic meat, if you don’t have enough business to make a truckload of it, then I’m not going to be able to continue to manufacture that product, right? So there’s two sides to that, Maureen.
Maureen: I think it’s great to hear you talk about the nuance of all of that, right? So that the consumer can also understand that you’re not just charging extra for funsies, you know? It’s all of those factors.
Julie: No, we are very slim margins here over in the meat industry. Yes, we wish we could. We wish we could in the meat industry simply change our packaging size like they do in cereal and people will keep buying us. But I feel when we change our packaging size, they seem to notice it more.
Maureen: Yes, shrinkflation, they call it, right? Where like the package shrunk a little bit, but the price stayed the same.
Well, because I think typically in the meat department, you’re used to shopping by pound, right? You’re used to shopping by weight. I’m looking for versus I would guess like hot dogs and sausages might be a little bit different because you’re, I’m looking for five hot dogs or six hot dogs or whatever the case may be, but still.
Julie: Yes, so there’s that too.
Maureen: I understand the nuance of what you’re talking about there. Last question for you. Tell me a little bit about what fills your cup. What’s the most exciting thing about your work?
Julie: I guess it’s twofold. Externally, it’s the people who share with me their Zweigle stories about shipping Zweigle’s to their uncle and a different stage and there was nothing else they wanted or let me tell you my Zweigle story and how much like I, we had him in this picnic and these people who had never had his Zweigle’s white hot before and they had it.
That’s my external joy, knowing that there’s this unique brand that has iconic stories that go along with it that are surrounded by Rochester. Like, right, so cool, amazing.
Internally, it’s the people that work with me every day. So they are, and it’s more than them, it’s them and their families. I’m connecting with them, talking with them. Getting out of my square office. And when I want a moment of just getting away from the computer, I’m like, my God, I need to be on the shop floor.
And sometimes you go to the shop floor and this will sound really weird. But if you’ve ever been in manufacturing, there’s part of something in manufacturing that just kind of runs. And sometimes I just zone in on that. And this is like my zen where I watch something happening and I’m zenning and it sounds good.
And maybe it’s the smell. We got a lot of people that come from the outside and be like, my God, it smells so good in here. Most of us that work here don’t notice the smell anymore, but sometimes we do. But there’s some sort of the Zen in this manufacturing where you go in and you listen, you feel, you hear, well, hearing and listening, same thing, maybe smell. And then you’re watching the people and carefully manufacturing the product because manufacturing with a natural casing, that’s, it’s an art.
It’s very different from some other things, just filling a bottle or a jar. There’s an art to it. It’s a natural thing. And then and then obviously, like I said, it’s the people. So they have had some people that have worked here for so many years. They’re like family. We know more about each other than maybe we should.
Maureen: Yes. Again, going back to that strong culture.
Well, for somebody who wasn’t sure that they were going to work in the family business to speak about being on the manufacturing floor as Zen certainly says you’re in the right place.
So thanks so much for taking the time to be here with me today, Julie. I appreciate it.