Chicken Salad

Same Quality Product Under Different Processes

Date: February 28, 2012 | Author: Willow Tree Farm | Leave a Comment
Category: Chicken Pie, Chicken Salad, Press Coverage, Uncategorized, Willow Tree

As seen in the New England Business Bulletin
By Pamela Berard
Bulletin correspondent
February 24, 2012

 

In a down economy, businesses need to identify cost-savings measures. But there’s one thing Willow Tree Poultry Farm President Wally Cekala won’t sacrifice: quality.

The Attleboro-based producer of chicken products — perhaps best-known for its deli chicken salad and chicken pot pies — has undergone some major changes in the past few years — including a facility upgrade, the creation of a management team, the addition of new products, a number of green initiatives, and recent expansion into new markets. But there’s one thing that hasn’t changed.

“I do believe that if you go back and try our chicken salad 20 years ago and tried it today side-by-side, you wouldn’t notice a difference,” Cekala said. “That’s really been our goal. We don’t ever want the quality of the product to feel less-than.”

The family-owned business began as an egg and poultry farm in the late 1800s, and Cekala’s father bought the farm in 1954 after working there. In the 1960s, the company stopped raising poultry and entered the end-processing side of the business, growing into a full-production and retail operation.

“We’ve had a lot of opportunities where we could have produced a cheaper product and gone for the quick dollar,” Cekala said. “But my dad taught me well. (In a bad economy), you ride the wave. You have to take a little bit of a hit in sales. We didn’t want to join the wave of less-expensive products. We just know the (down economic) cycle will end.

“We don’t mind if (consumers) only buy half as much in a down economy,” he said. “We won’t put out anything that isn’t quality.”

Willow Tree workers still debone chicken by hand, because the company hasn’t found another method that provides the same quality, and the company avoids preservatives. During a facility upgrade in 2010, the one mandate Cekala had was that “we make sure the chicken coming out of the cooker was as good or better” than before, he said.

The 2010 facility upgrade is allowing the company to expand its product line, and go into new markets.

Among changes — the company replaced 14 gas-fired kettle cookers with an inline cooker that cooks about 26,000 pounds of chicken per day. The inline cooker takes up less space and cooks chicken continuously through a conveyor system.

“We tried to streamline our production process, without changing the process,” Cekala said, noting that the change was from what he called “old-world ways” to a more efficient process.

“The chicken still takes an hour to cook, but being an inline system, we can continually load the cooker and the other end is continually unloaded,” he said.

The company has seen a 40 percent increase in production, Cekala said, but that success is not only attributed to the new cooker. “The cooker gave us the ability to build some efficiency in the system, but really, the changes we made were really top-to-bottom,” he said.

Cekala said the company has maintained its employee base of about 100 through the economic downturn, but he put a new production team in place, adding several management positions. “It was pretty much a one-man show before 2010,” Cekala said. “Rather than me trying to be everywhere — it was becoming an exercise in futility. It was hitting a point where I couldn’t keep all the balls in the air.”

So Cekala added several key positions, including an operations manager, regional sales manager, plant manager, and a logistics department. And two of Cekala’s sons are involved in the business — Christopher Cekala is sales director, while Alex Cekala is controller.

Now that the company has expanded its production capacity, “it’s just a matter of bringing in additional business,” Cekala said, noting that sales are expanding further into New York, and into Pennsylvania.

“Our core market is still New England,” Cekala said, noting that the company’s increased production capacity is helping it solidify the outer fringes of the New England market.

Breaking into markets outside of New England can be difficult. “The challenge we always have is trying to get the consumer to try our product,” Cekala said. “It’s really tough in an area where your name isn’t well-known.”

Now that the company can produce more product, Cekala is trying to introduce “new” products, as well. During the holidays, the company offered turkey and chicken gravy, fresh to market, in pint containers, at major supermarkets in the area. Also, last summer the company introduced two new versions of its chicken pie — one with vegetables, and one with potatoes. And it is currently selling a line of chicken dips for crackers, chips, or to use as a spread. A buffalo chicken dip, and a chicken Caesar, dip are available, primarily in the Boston area right now. DeMoula’s Market Basket also pretty much carries the full Willow Tree line, Cekala said. The new products should be cycling into stores throughout New England in the coming year.

“It’s our hope that when the economy does turn that we’ll be poised and ready with the new products,” Cekala said.

Willow Tree products are available in most major supermarket chains in New England, New York and New Jersey, at smaller independent retailers and delis, as well as at the company’s retail store in Attleboro.

The company has taken on a number of green initiatives, including donating its used cooking oil to a nonprofit that converts it into biofuel. “Our oil used to just go to waste, and now it gets sent to a company that produces a biodiesel type of product,” he said.

The chicken skin goes to pig farms.

“We also went through great pains to change all of our lighting,” he said. “We reduced energy consumption by about 20 percent, which is huge.”

The company also moved to a single-stream recycling company, and heats the facility with secondary use of heat.

Willow Tree also supports dozens of local charities.

“The company has been a part of the community forever,” Cekala said. “It’s our home. We want to make sure future generations enjoy being here as much as we do.”

Building a Brand on Chicken Salad: from Providence Business News

Date: December 28, 2011 | Author: Willow Tree Farm | Leave a Comment
Category: Chicken Pie, Chicken Salad, Willow Tree

By Kelly L. Anderson

PBN Staff Writer

December 26th, 2011

It started out as chicken scratch, literally. Now, more than 57 years later, Attleboro-based Willow Tree Poultry Farm has expanded its operation area, thus allowing it to grow its customer base – moving for the first time through the New England states and into metro New York.

“Our facility can handle about 40 percent more capacity now, so we couldn’t really seek out any new customers until we were able to find that capacity,” said Walter Cekala, president of Willow Tree. “So that’s really what we’ve gone through these last three years, getting to this place where now we can pitch bigger markets like Costco and Sam’s Club and go after some more club stores for business.”

 The farm put a new warehouse facility on the site that was completed three years ago and just last year finished corporate-office renovations as well, Cekala said.

Those changes mean the one-time mom-and-pop egg provider can distribute its products further south. They also mean more products can be produced with longer shelf life, Cekala said.

The farm started as a poultry-raising farm, selling eggs and chicken to neighbors. Then Cekala’s father bought the farm in 1954 after working there.

The farm raised poultry until the early 1960s when getting feed into the area became an issue, Cekala said. So the company decided to enter into the end-processing side of the business, where they brought the chickens in already slaughtered and Willow Tree did things such as deboning and cooking the chickens and eventually making them into chicken pies, chicken salad and other poultry-line items.

Then came frozen chicken cacciatore and chicken croquettes.

“We started wholesaling the chicken pies, and [they] were really our only product we produced until about 1986,” Cekala said. “We always had a retail store attached to the plant, and we sold chicken salad.”

But it wasn’t until RoJacks Supermarkets requested the chicken salad be sold in their stores that the company decided to make it a wholesale product, he said.

“We started selling at RoJacks, then other markets picked it up and within about eight years, we were in about 300 different markets,” Cekala said.

And now, with the chicken salad sold throughout New England, Willow Tree will have their frozen chicken and turkey pies in the New York area in 2012, he said.

To date, Willow Tree Poultry Farm products are distributed in close to 2,000 markets, Cekala said.

New product lines include buffalo-chicken dip, which was distributed this past summer, he said. The dip is the buffalo-wing concept turned into a dip for tortilla chips, crackers and sometimes even as a sandwich spread, Cekala said. It can be eaten hot or cold, although Cekala recommends eating it hot.

And just last month, Willow Tree distributed a new turkey and chicken gravy line.

“We’ve always made gravy on the premises, but we just invested in a packaging line that hot packs the gravy to give us a longer shelf life,” Cekala said, “again, without adding preservatives or things like that. That’s always our main thrust, to create a clean product with a very simple ingredient legend.”

The chicken salad has a 14-day shelf life, which makes it a little difficult to get too far outside of the Northeast region. But that’s an ongoing process, figuring out how to get the chicken salad out to a broader customer base.

“We’ve actually, through just really good manufacturing practices over the years, been able to put out a no-preservative salad that has a 14-day shelf life. So we’re pretty proud of that, but still 14 days isn’t 28 days, which is what supermarkets would love to have on salad items, Cekala said.

But the company refuses to hurt the taste or the quality of the product just to give it a longer shelf life, he said.

“We want the product to always taste as good as it does today,” Cekala said.

The gravy became available in the major markets Willow Tree supplies in early November in time for the holiday season.

“We’re not certain if they’re going to hang onto it all year or they’re just going to carry it as a seasonal, Thanksgiving Day-type item,” Cekala said. “We moved thousands of gallons of gravy and we just literally launched it in November. … It’s good when the plan works.”

Cekala said the company is constantly looking at new markets and new products. He tastes poultry samples three times a day and never tires of it.

“We sample the first run off the machinery, and then middle run and then last run, so I’m eating chicken every day,” he said.

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