Claremont
“My grandfather was what we called a country butcher,” Satzow said. “He would sell meat off a wagon.”
Abraham went on to build a slaughterhouse on Sullivan Street in 1939 that his son, Satzow’s father, took over in the early 1940s. The slaughterhouse closed around 1980 and, a few years after that, Satzow moved Butcher Block to Sullivan Street.
This week, the business Satzow started in a 4,000-square-foot building two years after college that eventually became North Country Smokehouse will begin operating in a new 65,000-square-foot state-of-the-art facility in the Syd Clarke Industrial Park off Grissom Lane.
“We will be creating a lot of efficiencies in this facility,” Satzow said at the new plant.
“In our other facility, it was smaller and we had to keep moving stuff around. In this facility, we have much larger coolers. We have tripled the production capacity at least. Some of this equipment is the only equipment like this in the country.”
Additional expansion at the Sullivan Street plant, which grew to 15,000 square feet, was not possible without an expensive investment to meet city codes, Satzow, 69, said. That led to the decision to sell North Country Smokehouse in 2015 to the Canadian meat processor, Les Specialites Prodal, with an agreement for a new plant.
“I have been doing business with them for about 15 years,” Satzow said in the offices of the new plant last week. “They are wonderful people. We put a project together where I would sell them the company and they would build this facility in Claremont.”
The land in the park had been on the market for years. Satzow had been part of the Claremont Development Authority’s attempts to sell lots in the park for years. “I finally found a buyer,” he said with a laugh.
Les Specialites Prodal’s president, Serge Breton, said the Claremont building represents an investment of about $25 million, which Satzow said he believes is the largest, single private investment in the city’s history.
“This will allow the company to meet a growing demand in the U.S. for the company’s smoked meats,” Breton said in a phone interview from his office in Quebec. “We expects to double our sales (in Claremont) to about $50 million in the next three or four years.”
Prior to the move, Satzow, who began his smoked meat products business in the late 1970s, said he hired about 20 new employees, bringing the total to 55. He expects that number to grow to 70 or 80 in the next few years.
“Our retail distribution is strengthening and they (Les Specialites Prodal) want to take it more to the retail arena,” Satzow said. “Right now 80 percent of the business is hotels and restaurants. We have a very upscale clientele.”
Construction on the nearly 14-acre parcel began in the summer of 2016. The exterior of the plant’s production area is a simple off-white while a post-and-beam structure of large timbers is built at the front of the main entrance where the company’s offices are.
Last week, the installation of large specialized stainless steel machines used to prepare, smoke and pack the company’s bacon, ham, turkey, sausages and cheeses was being completed and readied for operation. The new plant is spacious and well-lit with as much attention paid to sanitation and cleanliness as to producing smoked meats and cheeses.
There is large washer the size of an outdoor tool shed for cleaning the equipment by a crew of five or six every night; a lab room for continual testing of products to guard against bacteria, including listeria and salmonella, and a modern hand washing and “boot cleaning” machine for employees entering the production area that Satzow said is the “latest in sanitation.”
“We have equipment on the roof that completely cleanses the air, heats the air and cools the air,” he said. “We are continually cleaning the (high) ceilings in this place to keep condensation from having an effect.”
Production equipment includes a half-million dollar bacon slicer that uses an electronic eye to cut the product with the optimal ratio of lean to fat. The sliced bacon, including North Country’s signature product, applewood smoked bacon, is moved along to a second machine where it is packaged in an air-tight film made by Winpak of Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Winpak officials “go into plants all over the country and said they have never seen a plant like this,” Satzow said.
Other equipment includes two computer-controlled tumblers that can hold 10,000 pounds of meat during a four-hour marinating process for the making of boneless hams and turkeys; injector machines that infuse the meats with maple syrup, salts, sugars and natural curing agents; a sausage stuffing machine; and chillers with 100 tons of refrigeration to cool the product down quickly.
“Years ago, we weren’t concerned about cooling, we were concerned about cooking and getting up to temperature,” Satzow said. “Now everyone is concerned about getting it cooled as rapidly as possible.”
The “smokehouses” are large stainless steel rooms that can hold 8,000 pounds of meat during the 12-hour process.
“When I was starting out 30 or 40 years ago, I used to go to the (American Meat Institute) and see all this great equipment, all this big expensive equipment and I thought, boy, it is like being a kid in a candy store. Then I walk through our own plant and see something like this. It is really something,” he said, marveling at the bacon slicer.
North Country’s meats are delivered in refrigerated trucks from the parent company in Canada and placed on racks at the building’s south end. Satzow said the plant was designed to separate the fully cooked products, such as turkeys and hams, from the bacon, which is partially cooked.
When the production is complete, the products are stored in a refrigerated area at the other end of the building before being shipped to distributors throughout the country.
“We probably have 50,000 square feet under refrigeration that is guaranteed to be within one degree of what we set,” Satzow said.
Satzow, who is the company’s executive vice president of sales and marketing, said that while the business is much bigger than when he started 45 years ago, quality won’t be sacrificed with greater production.
“We have been successful and we had done everything possible to make sure the flavor of the product doesn’t change. We want to make this the showplace of the meat industry,” Satzow said.
Patrick O’Grady can be reached at pogclmt@gmail.com.
