Independent meat processors have an opportunity to set yourselves apart from big meatpackers by making high-quality, craft products, building relationships with your customers, and wrapping up your niche products and direct-to-consumer connection in a compelling brand story.

If you’re not competing on large plant volumes, how will you differentiate your small meat processing business? Vertically integrating your operation—becoming a one-stop shop—allows you to meet customer demand, reach new markets, and stay ahead of your competitors. While boring big brands churn out unremarkable products, gaining the capability to create craft meat products like smoked hams or beef snack sticks enables you to establish a specialty market—and earn higher margins for your craft products.

Friesla’s Ready-to-Eat Production Module is tailored for your operation’s needs in our Project Development Phase, integrated with your site plan, and built for operation under USDA inspection. Whether it is added onto or integrated with your existing brick-and-mortar plant, or included in your new Friesla Meat Processing System, the RTE Module allows you to take control of all elements of your meat processing business—without a piecemeal, hodge-podge building expansion.

After you’ve harvested, dry aged, cut, and packaged your raw products, the RTE Module provides the autonomy to expand your retail product variety and offer new services and capabilities to your customers. This may be a flexible space to create a wide variety of lower-volume, craft beef and pork products, or a dialed-in space for crafting higher volumes of a focused product line (e.g., smoked sausage or jerky).

The RTE Module is outfitted with a specialty equipment package—ranging from large commercial smokehouses and fermentation chambers to chill rooms and vacuum sealers—which are selected based on the products you plan to make. This equipment is accompanied by all of the tools you need to produce cooked, RTE, and value-added products and ensure full traceability—from trays, smoke trucks, and hoses to tables, scales, and labeling machines.

If so many independent meat processors want to add this capability, what stops them? The complexity, risk, and requirements of creating these products under USDA inspection can be daunting. Friesla helps you shoulder this burden by cutting through the red tape: we handle the intensive HACCP Plan writing, training, certification and support you with getting—and staying—USDA compliant.

Cooked, RTE, and value-added meat products don’t have to be made on a large scale to be profitable. There is a sweet spot for small-scale processors who craft these products, develop a market, and maximize their margins.

Interested in adding the capability to create specialty meat products to your existing meat processing business, retail shop, or Meat Processing System?