Sausage success: Vernon plant expansion allows Papa Cantella's to meet new demands even as supermarket strike posed threat to orders; 'quality counts'.

FOUR months after Tom Cantella expanded to a larger sausage plant last year, two of his largest customers halved their orders. The supermarket strike that has kept shoppers out of Vons and Albertsons Inc. stores since October has hurt suppliers across Southern California, Cantella included.

But as it turns out, the new plant may have saved the sausage maker's bacon.

With greater capacity, Vernon-based Papa Cantella's was able to add new accounts. The supermarket sales lost during the strike will never be replaced, but overall sales have been running higher than year-earlier figures.

For the 57-year-old Cantella, who founded the company in 1980, Vernon is sausage country. Every day, he dons a hard hat and butcher's coat (per USDA regulations) to tour his new 40,000-square-foot facility.

"Sausage is just meat--beef, pork, or poultry--stuffed into a casing," Cantella explained. "We make fresh, perishable sausage from fresh meat and spices, chopped up, stuffed into a casing, packaged, and delivered each day. We also make fully cooked sausage."

The plant's steam-generated smokehouses and computerized processing equipment involve around the clock operations. A high-pressure cleaning system scrubs everything down each night. Vast refrigeration rooms cool cooked meat to 35 degrees Fahrenheit from 162 degrees.

"Our most popular product is the mild Italian sausage we started with in 1980," Cantella said. "It's pork with a salt and pepper base and fennel seed. We add a cardamom-type spice, just like the old-time Italian sausage-makers."

Family link

Cantella's start was far removed from the meat business. His father and uncle owned a bar in Inglewood with a "telephonic jukebox" system in which customers would put money and a live phone operator would take the request, playing it back over the phone lines. Eventually, free-standing jukeboxes got better, and the telephonic system could not compete.

When his mother, who had worked as a jukebox operator, got him a toy jukebox as a wedding present, Cantella was inspired to find the real thing. He found someone with 14, refurbished one and sold it, and started Antique Jukebox Co.

For 12 years, he rode an ever-hotter market for old jukeboxes, until parts became scarce and manufacturers began making new replicas. He got out, funneling about $50,000 to $75,000 of his profits into the sausage company.

"The plan was to sell my grandfather's (sausage) recipe from an antique street cart," he said. "But I never got that far. One of my antiques customers was a store manager for Vons and he suggested I approach his meat buyers."

He started supplying the chain with a few hundred pounds a week. "We'd stand outside the market offering free samples," he said. "When we added our turkey and German sausage lines in 1984, the retail accounts climbed into the hundreds."

Cantella learned a key lesson from selling antiques: quality products always sold first, regardless of price. He credits attention to detail to Papa Cantella's growth to a 90-employee operation selling 120,000 pounds of sausage a week to more than 1,000 West Coast retailers and restaurants. Vons, a unit of Safeway Inc., and Trader Joe's Co. are his biggest buyers.

The new plant, built on land purchased three years ago, is four times the size as the previous one. Cantella has separated the fresh and fully cooked operations to avoid cross-contamination. "Since everything is made fresh, we don't maintain an inventory," Cantella said.

A package of fully cooked sausage will cost $1.50 per pound to produce, he said, including everything from meat to feta cheese to maple syrup. It will wholesale for between $2 and $2.25, and retail for $3 to $4 a pound. "We also supply all the Gelson's and Bristol Farms. We make their formula and recipe, which they private-label," he said.

Since only a small fraction of Papa Cantella's sales are in beef, the recent mad cow scare hasn't affected sales. A USDA inspector maintains an office inside the plant, but the company also inspects all incoming raw meats, checking for bits of bone and rejecting shipments with substandard temperature controls. Papa Cantella's even initiated its own recall on 6,500 pounds of beef sausage that was mislabeled.

"The vendor that prints our labels failed to change over from our chicken and turkey line," Cantella said. "We caught the mistake, notified the industry immediately, and started the recall."

Beyond quality issues, there are other challenges. Prices fluctuate daily, and a retailer such as Costco Wholesale Corp. can drop a best-selling item like a chicken breakfast sausage, without explanation, only to reintroduce it a few months later.

The three-person management staff is made up of Cantella, his son Tony, who is vice president of sales and marketing; and his cousin, Chris Stafford, who is the main administrator. They focus on developing eye-catching labels and new product introductions.

"Not only do they dream up innovative flavor profiles like pesto chicken-turkey, and chicken with roasted peppers and onions," said Annette Davidson, product manager for Trader Joe's West Coast stores, "but they hand-blend all their spice additives in-house."

Confidence is a key concern when buying meat products, Davidson said, noting that Papa Cantella's is certified to track each ingredient down to its raw supplier. "Gourmet foodies absolutely love their products," she said.

PROFILE

Papa Cantella's

Year Founded: 1980

Core Business: Maker of fresh and fully cooked premium sausage

Revenue in 2002: $10.5 million

Revenue in 2003: $12 million

Employees in 2002:65

Employees in 2003:90

Goal: Grow business by five times current output; $15 million in sales by end of 2004

Driving Force: Maintaining high quality standards