O'Steen Meat Specialties

Have you ever been to a restaurant, ordered some beef fajitas or fried pickles, and wondered to yourself, "How do they make these so tasty?" Restaurants have several ways to go about creating their product. The ones that are more upscale, the ones with the knowhow, or just the ones that have the means probably get everything from scratch. For others, they receive their products already fashioned in some way to make their process of getting the final product out to the customer a bit easier. You could say that they outsource the food preparation for some of their menu items. One such company that is involved in this outsourcing is O'Steen Meat Specialties. They also happen to be my former employer. And just like other outsourced companies, their ideal position is that of a labor saving entity for the restaurant industry

O'Steen Meat Specialties was started in 1989 by Jim and June O'Steen, as well as their son, Rick. They decided to take their knowledge of food and bestow it to the world in the form of wholesale food products that are not made available to the direct public. Many of their customers are local restaurants and businesses such as Shorty Smalls, Henry Hudson's Bar and Grille, and Ted's Café Escondido. O'Steen's purchases materials in just about their most raw forms, save for a few marinades, and through various formulaic combinations, that are either acquired or thought up, the ingredients are mixed and matched to create hundreds of inventory items that are then sold to restaurants to make their job cooking that much easier. Final products come in the form of chicken fried steaks, fajita meats, breaded alligator bites, and fried pickles.

These final products, however, are worth much more than just their raw materials. There is a process that every inventory item goes through before it can be sold off to businesses that involves more than just the actual labor that goes into marinating meats and breading vegetables. So while the best things in life may be free, in the world of business everything has a cost, and for every step along the way in the creation of a product value is being added to it. To simply base a price off of raw materials, could end up causing some failures on the profits one would hope to achieve. Costs outside of the typical raw materials include research and development, marketing, distribution, and customer service. All of these steps that a product goes through, production included, is called the value chain. So I am going to walk you through the steps that a piece of food goes through to become the final product starting with how the actual recipes are created and tested, the steps that goes into the actual making of the product, how O'Steen's goes about marketing their product and finding new customers, the shipping and distribution to customers, and the way that the company handles any problems that the customers may have.

At O'Steen Meat Specialties, one of their most valuable assets is their recipes and formulas. Without them the company loses a bit of its appeal to customers, because if anyone could make the things they do it could hurt business. So for that reason they are predominantly concocted in-house, except for a Polynesian marinade and one or two other sauces. But just because they are made in-house that is not necessarily where the idea originates. The company originally started with just several products that were found at just about every restaurant in the area, simple things such as chicken fried steak. Along the way, however, some of the larger companies began making requests for certain food items that were either offered by other vendors or just sounded like a money maker. Or sometimes the ideas just funneled into company president Rick O'Steen from others on the management staff. As soon as an idea that sounds good enough to research comes to Rick he passes it along to the plant manager Mark Tener. He is the expert on details of what it would take to get made. Just about all recipes have a base formula. Mark is the one who determines the correct ratio of what is needed to give the customer what they want based on their specifications. With hundreds of spices and sauces to mix and match and over 20 years of experience, he usually finds something that works. And for all experiments that they try there is the test kitchen. This is the location where these concoctions come to fruition and the team of pretty much anyone who is close enough to smell the food determines the quality of the product based on taste, color, and texture. While this is a very important step in the creation process it is, however, fairly low cost. Most materials are purchased in bulk, anywhere from 50 to thousands of pounds at a time. So the wasted materials that goes into the sample products has little outcome on the overall numbers. And with materials they