At the processing grounds of Red Bird Farms in Englewood, countless birds in total in containers wait to be pruned. A massive device typifies breasts according to their weight. Another contraption encloses them in vacuum-sealed plastic trays, a shelf packaging approach that allows Red Bird to maintain the freshness of its poultry cuts without freezing them. It turns out that all the birds on Earth are in this building, until 75-year-old owner and Tokyo local Mareo Torito puts things in perspective: while his team processes up to 20,000 pounds of a given product at a time, competition like Perdue and Tyson make two million.
Big Chicken’s strategies would possibly be faster and cheaper, but they entail a sacrifice of quality. For example, freezing (a practice not unusual in giant farms) causes ice crystals to form in the meat, breaking down the fiber so that some of the meat herbal flavors escape once thawed. Fresh birds processed in small batches like Red Bird are juicier and tastier. In addition to not freezing its product, Red Bird waits 10 to 12 hours after slaughter to bone its birds, a step that, according to Torito, is essential. “Most corporations oppose engineering right away because everything gets so much cheaper,” Torito says. “But the product bites too dry and [loses] its flavor. “
Restaurants in 14 states are fans of their business model. Here in Colorado, for example, Brad Manske, vice president of Lotus Concepts Management, says of his properties: “ViewHouse has been exclusively supplied by Red Bird Farms for 10 years and My Neighbor Felix for two years, from the day we opened either brand. The menus even refer to the supplier through a pride call: “Red Bird is local and their birds are raised without antibiotics and fed without by-products or hormones. . . Simply put, you can taste the difference,” manske says.
Torito would possibly be destined for this career from the day his parents named him: Mareo translates from Japanese as “born with expectations”, while Torito means “eye-catching bird”. In other words, he feels that he has been put on this earth. to succeed in the poultry industry on its intransigent terms. Whether it’s fate or his no-strings attached main criteria, he’s done exactly that, with the song around $90 million in sales a year.
In fact, in the year ending August 2022 alone, overall sales increased 55% and sales at particular places to eat increased by 84%, according to Red Bird Farms’ vice president of food service sales, Alexis Ross, who notes that due to the chain of origin issues that many corporations have had to face: “The value gap between a commodity and [ours], we’re the Chicken Cadillac, is smaller than in the past, so why not spend a few times more on a bigger chicken?”
Mark Landes, chief operating officer of takeaway and delivery concept Scratch Kitchen, based in Denver and Boulder, agrees. says. ” We are committed to Red Bird as a spouse because not only do they manufacture a premium product locally, but they are also a constant source, so we never have to let our consumers down. “
In 1975, Torito, then 25 and enjoying life in the city of Tokyo, sent Denver through the Informal Japanese Chain Yoshinoya Beef Bowl to help oversee the progress of six locations in Colorado. The shift from a city of 26 million to a metropolitan domain of one million caused a dose of culture shock. “When I came to this country, I didn’t like it, that’s right, as you say, the people of the cows,” says Torito. “No nightlife. That’s my first impression, I still thought, “Well, I’ll stay for at least two years. “
Five years later, Yoshinoya went bankrupt, but during that time, Torito had discovered an explanation for why to stay in Mile High City: his wife, Maylis, whom he met while working as a waitress at Yoshinoya on East Colfax Avenue. he had a young son; a woman would follow. So, with the distiller skills he had acquired by cutting meat for Yoshinoya and saving $2,500, he started a meat distribution company called International Food Processors (IFP) in 1981.
Inspired during his time in Yoshinoya, he opened Kokoro, a fast-paced, casual Japanese restaurant on South Colorado Boulevard serving bowls of rice and noodles, as well as sushi, with a former Yoshinoya colleague in 1986. A current location in Arvada followed in 1998. ” I had the youth, the energy, the madness,” Torito says, to take on the dangers related to the beginning of IFP and the early days of kokoro at a time when “most people didn’t know how to use chopsticks. “
Even though Kokoro was a success, the savvy entrepreneur was following trends in the food industry. “I did some studies and learned that the next niche detail was the skinless bird breast portion,” Torito says. As a result, he bought Englewood-Red Bird Farms, which was founded in 1949 and had built a positive reputation in the global poultry world, in 1991 from its owners, who lived in Arkansas, and closed IFP some time later. Since then, his strategy has been simple: keep Red Bird’s fan base among chefs and grocery store shoppers through qualityArray, which Torito still personally oversees every day at the factory.
If you decide to bring a pack of boneless, skinless breasts or thighs with bone and skin from Red Bird Farms at your next King Soopers or Safeway, or Tony’s Meats
Like other high-end poultry brands, Red Bird’s definition of “good” includes promoting cage-free chickens on grain-only diets (no animal by-products) and avoiding the use of antibiotics and steroids. But it also encompasses the way the company treats its workers: Most Red Bird workers have worked there for more than 8 years, a fact that Torito’s son Masaru attributes to a generally Japanese ethic of “teamwork and interdependence. “One facet of how Red Bird has coped with COVID perhaps more than others is the cultural technique that Mareo brings to its business. As you may have seen, COVID numbers in Japan have been low compared to other countries, basically due to cultural norms and not necessarily government protocols. . . Long-term workers and supervisors [have] created a global culture where workers see themselves as part of something bigger than themselves.
And that’s how Torito has seen it. ” It’s so vital to tell the story of how Mareo has done an incredible job with the Red Bird brand,” says Ross. “He is not a young man, and [still] he is still at full steam; he has such a fondness for it. It stuck to the features that identify Red Bird as a product, and doesn’t deviate from them. With this in mind, it is worth noting that he named Kokoro after the celebrated Japanese novel of the same name, whose name translates to “heart. “”My business philosophy was related to my workers and my customers, from my heart,” says Torito. “That’s still the case. “
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