Logan’s Sausage founder built his tasty business on a Giant idea
WHEN it comes to business, or any pursuit for that matter, what you don’t do can be just as important as what you do.
Take Cliff Logan, owner and founder of Logan’s Sausage in Alexandria, Virginia, and a 50-year veteran of the food business.
“I am a food nut,” said the sausage king (and not the kind that’s made on Capitol Hill).
Logan, a Pittsburgh- area native, was an ambitious 20something when was approached in 1977 by visionary supermarket pioneer Israel “Izzy” Cohen, head of the Giant Food chain, the Washington- area grocery business founded by his family.
Cohen was dead- set on building a massive, state- of-theart meat- cutting plant outside Washington. It was designed to save time - and money - for his in- store butchers by taking 600-pound sides of beef from suppliers and chopping them into ready-to-buy packages of steaks, shanks, roasts, ribs, burgers, briskets, soup bones and what have you.
Cohen asked Logan, his US$ 25,000 ( RM113,000)- a-year troubleshooter, for his opinion.
Armed with an MBA and a head for complex operations, Logan travelled the country, snooping around similar plants and other supermarket chains.
He reported back months later with a simple message: Don’t build it.
Logan’s advice was to ask the suppliers to do the chopping before the meat got to the stores.
“I saved him four cents a pound on the meat buying,” said Logan, 77, sitting in his cluttered office in a low-industrial area in Alexandria with his sons, Cliff III and Kevin. “That’s a lot when you are talking about the volume of meat Giant sold.”
Logan became Giant’s vice president of corporate planning, ran 40-plus grocery stores for Cohen and made enough money to retire in 1986 before he turned 50.
He said the key to running stores was making it easy on the customer. Keep the register lines short, and the meat and produce fresh.
Cohen, a legend in the food industry, died in 1995 at 83. He was a big influence on Logan.
“Izzy was a very good executive, a very unique executive,” Logan said. “He spent a lot of time working with people, a hands- on type of manager. He knew the company. Knew the people. He listened and knew what he didn’t know.”
One thing Logan knows is that he loves the food business, dating back to weekends and summers spent on relatives’ farms in Pennsylvania and New York. “It’s in my blood,” he said. It’s in his head, too. He studied agronomy at Penn State. He picked up his MBA at the University of Pennsylvania. He was planning to move to the country and open his own small supermarket after retirement.
He took up sausage instead. Logan Sausage Company is a US$ 10 million-to-US$ 15 million enterprise with 28 employees, six refrigerated delivery trucks and a small manufacturing plant whose US$ 500,000 worth of “cutters” and “stuffers” turn pork, beef and chicken into three million pounds of sausage a year.
The company is profitable, although the Logans won’t say how profitable. Each of the three Logans takes a salary, and they all live comfortably in Arlington, Virginia. Most of the profits are reinvested in trucks and equipment.
And they are preparing to move into a much larger factory down the street from Logan’s current location.
The biggest cost is the meat, which comes from around the country but mostly Virginia and the Carolinas. The secondbiggest cost is the payroll. Then there are trucks, insurance, sales and lease costs.
On a recent visit, I watched as 120 pounds of pork was dumped into a US$ 175,000 Germanmade chopper that grinds it in seconds.
Salvador Ferrufino, a 30-yearemployee who is the head of production, sprinkles in the spice recipe that turns the ground meat into the tasty sausage. In this case it is chorizo, which also happens to be the company’s most popular item - at 15 per cent of sales.
From 6am to 2pm every weekday, Logan’s 12-man crew creates Italian, breakfast, chorizo, polish and andouille sausages, among many others. In the summer, when demand increases, the sausage-making can take longer and is more intense.
The product is then distributed to grocery stores on Logan trucks, and the rest is picked up by restaurants throughout the day. Some sausage is frozen for last-minute orders for restaurants. Everything else leaves the plant within 24 hours and is made to order for each customer.
The spread of business is 70 per cent to groceries, 30 per cent to restaurants.
Logan’s is everywhere: Matchbox Pizza, Ted’s Bulletin, Safeway, Giant (of course), Wegman’s and sandwich shop Taylor Gourmet.
“We have established ourselves with distributors as a local family business,” Cliff said.
Cliff handles overall strategy, creates the recipes and is constantly studying meat prices to find the best buy. Oldest son Cliff III is an attorney who handles the company’s contracts and operations.
As director of sales, Kevin is in charge of Logan’s “ground game,” targeting new expansion with food distributors, restaurants and grocery stores. — WP-Bloomberg