As many of you know, it has been a very long road to get our Bacon Marmalade back into production. Last March we were informed by the USDA that this product needed to be manufactured in a USDA approved facility and our commercial kitchen would not be approved for that. So I set out to find a USDA approved co-packer. For those of you who do not know what a co-packer is, it’s essentially a manufacturer that will take your recipe and make it exactly as you would except on a larger scale.
After extensive research, I decided on River Run Foods located in Northumberland, PA. That was the easy part! Getting our label approved by the USDA was a bureaucratic nightmare. It became obvious very early on that this department is in need of some updating and perhaps a refresher course in new and innovative food products. I will spare you the details of this process but it took almost 6 months and numerous revisions to get the label approved.
We have finally arrived in the final stretches of manufacturing. we spent the past week pureeing 2200 lbs of orange segments, and peeling 750 lbs of onions to make our caramelized onions. The reason for us doing this is to keep the production cost down at the co-packer end,so we can pass on that savings to our customer. Tomorrow I will pick up my refrigerator van I rented and bring all this to the co-packer. Then next week I get to go back an pick up 500 cases of Bacon Marmalade, and hopefully make some long waiting customers very happy!