RECESSION? BALONEY LOCAL FIRM FEEDS INMATES.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

LANCASTER - Nine million times a year, state prison inmates bite into lunches assembled by workers at a downtown Lancaster company, Harvest Farms.

In a building that once housed a meat company run by the company president's father and uncles, white-coated workers put bread, lunch meat, a cookie or two, a powdered-drink packet, chips and an apple in a cardboard tray and seal it in plastic. The meals - 32,000 a day - are then trucked to prisons throughout California.

``We set ourselves up in a niche market with the correctional industry,'' said Harvest Farms President George Callas, whose company works out of the downtown building where his father and uncles ran Callas Meats from the 1940s into the early 1980s.

The prison focus was Callas' response to California's long and deep 1990s recession, which hit hard at restaurants and other traditional customers of Harvest Farms, from Los Angeles to Fresno.

Callas looked around and decided prisons were an untapped market. Prison officials nationally were already starting to ``outsource'' their kitchens - get meals prepared by private companies under contract.

Callas convinced prison officials that his USDA-inspected food-processing plant could produce lunches under conditions more sanitary than those in prison, with less waste or pilfering of food than likely when hardened inmates prepare the meals.

``They had a yield problem,'' said Callas, who was a certified public accountant practicing in Los Angeles before returning to Lancaster to run the business. ``They had major health concerns.''

Now with nearly 100 employees, Harvest Farms supplies packaged, ready-to-serve lunches to seven state prisons, from Lancaster to Butte County, as well as to the Terminal Island federal prison and the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department jails.

Oregon officials are evaluating the company's products for their state prison system.

The company also sells packaged lunch meat and acts as a distributor for other companies' wares to nonprison customers, including restaurants, food wholesalers and Long Beach public schools.

``We've even supplied extras in the motion picture industry,'' Callas said.

Harvest Farms lunches are working out fine at California State Prison- Los Angeles County in Lancaster, one prison official said.

``I know when I pick up a case of lunches I've got 30 lunches in it,'' said Mark Howard, assistant correctional food manager at the prison.

When inmates assembled lunches, too much food disappeared, Howard said.

``It's easy to put a handful in your pocket,'' Howard said.

Prison officials select meals from a 70-item menu of lunch meats, cheese, cookies, chips, breads, fruits and drink mixes, usually varying the choices weekly.

Harvest Farms has also produced a special meal for Ramadan, the Islamic holy month in which Muslims must fast from sunrise to sunset. Because Muslims eat only one meal a day during Ramadan, the package is filled with hard-boiled eggs, dates, a special pastry, bread and fruit.

The lunch meats for the prisons are all chicken and turkey, prepared by Foster Farms with Harvest Farms recipes. Poultry doesn't conflict with some religious prohibitions against pork and beef, Callas said. The poultry is processed into ham, bologna and salami that taste like those made with beef and pork.

``If you didn't' see it on a label that it was a poultry-based meat, you wouldn't know,'' Callas said.

A Washington state cooperative supplies golden delicious apples, and Harvest Farms has some other large-scale suppliers.

Callas' goals for the company are to expand into more schools, prisons outside California, other institutions and private industry that serves meals on a large scale.

``We could even create an airline meal,'' Callas said. ``It could lend itself to that.''

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Photo:

(1 -- 2 -- color) Workers package 32,000 lunches daily at the Harvest Farms plant in Lancaster. At right, the company president, George Callas, sees tons of slices at his family's former meat business that he converted into a food-packaging company.

Gene Blevins/Special to the Daily News