E.W. Grobbel Sons Inc. is planning an expansion in Detroit's Eastern Market area.
The 137-year old corned beef meat processor is nearing a deal to secure roughly 100,000 square feet of real estate to open a "culinary development center" where it will work to develop prepackaged or partially prepared meat products for restaurants and grocers.
Jason Grobbel, president of the company, declined to reveal the location of the center as the real estate deal is yet to be signed. He did not provide a projected investment total.
Leading the new development will be Will Branch, founder and co-CEO of Corridor Sausage LLC. The Eastern Market sausage maker inked a distribution deal with E.W. Grobbel to expand its customer reach to the entire United States.
Corridor Sausage will remain a separate entity from E.W. Grobbel, and day-to-day operations will be led by Branch's partner Zachary Klein.
Branch will serve as Grobbel's director of culinary development, working with Grobbel's son Justin, a food scientist, to develop the partially-packaged solutions for the company, Grobbel said.
"We would work with typically chain of restaurants and supermarkets to help develop custom value-added products," Grobbel said. "An example is custom ingredients a restaurant would typically make from scratch. Restaurants, right now, are challenged with employees in the kitchen and are looking for ways to streamline. So we can make some of the things they used to and they can finish them off. Saving them a few steps and operate more efficiently."
Grobbel said the company is already doing this to some extent. For instance, it is grinding corned beef trimmings for a client to use in corned beef egg rolls, where formerly the restaurant would buy a more expensive cut of corned beef and grind it at the restaurant.
E.W. Grobbel has been in growth mode for several years, acquiring Sy Ginsberg's famed Detroit corned beef company United Meat and Deli Inc. in 2017 and Topor's Pickle Co. in 2018. The moves have allowed Grobbel to expand its offerings.
Even before a dollar goes into the culinary development center, E.W. Grobbel is growing its workforce ahead of the corned beef demand before St. Patrick's Day next March. The company is seeking 150 workers to round out its processing operations and is struggling to do so, Grobbel said.
Grobbel blames the $600 pandemic unemployment assistance payments and federal stimulus payments for keeping people out of the labor force. The $600 payments ended at the end of July.
"Those that employ general labor and entry-level workers are struggling," Grobbel said. "For lower-wage positions, the amount the government was giving them was more than they were making in some cases. It really displaced the priorities of some workers."
The company currently employs 250, down about 50 from its usual workforce over the summer. But it ramps up hiring in the fall as it prepares for the St. Patrick's holiday.
E.W. Grobbel also may be tarnished by outbreaks that occurred at large meatpacking plants across the U.S. early in the pandemic. In early July, about 9 percent of workers at meat and poultry processing facilities across 14 states had been diagnosed with COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But Grobbel stresses that his company hasn't been plagued by the coronavirus and it's a processor, not a packer.
"Our facilities are much smaller and nothing like those large meat packers," Grobbel said. The packers are major with as many as 6,000 employees. We have 250. With that large of a population, you're going to challenged far more than we are. Meat processors never had breakouts at that level."
The jobs range in pay from $14 an hour to $20 an hour and include benefits and a 401(k) plan, Grobbel said.
"Less than 15 percent of the food produced in Michigan is further processed in Michigan," Grobbel said. "We're missing a huge opportunity. That business is so stable. We can have wild growth, and we're here to promote that."
September 04, 2020 at 05:00PM
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Corned-beef titan EW Grobbel to expand in Eastern Market, makes deal with Corridor Sausage - Crain's Detroit Business
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