Turn Chicken Into a Profit Point in Your Grocery or Retail Operation

You could easily make the argument that chicken is America’s favorite protein. Americans consume roughly eight billion chickens annually, amounting to more than 80 pounds per person, per year. And for grocery stores and retail operations, this level of consumption comes with profit potential.

A report from Technomic Ignite detailing the top prepared foods menu items in grocery stores lists chicken as a top-five offering, with 82 percent of respondents listing it as an option for customers. Couple the popularity of prepared foods with increased demand for poultry, and chicken might become even more prevalent on grocery store menus.

Consider the recent fried chicken and fried chicken sandwich wars. There’s been an enormous amount of press underscoring this popularity, so the question becomes, how can grocery store and retail operations capitalize? What are the objections to starting a fried chicken program in these types of operations? And how can operators overcome them? Let’s review these questions through the lens of the Pitco ROV Rack Fryer.

THE CHALLENGE OF VOLUME

When it comes to producing large quantities of fried chicken, operators of any type are most limited by the volume of their fryers. Pitco developed the ROV Rack Fryer to mitigate this issue, making it possible to cook up to 64 pieces of fried chicken at once.

THE CHALLENGE OF FRYING OIL

One of the biggest challenges in a fried food program is oil consumption and handling. ROV actually stands for “Reduced Oil Volume,” meaning these units can process more chicken with less oil than the previous Pitco generation of rack fryers. ROV models reduce the amount of oil required from 100 pounds to 73 pounds while simultaneously increasing the processing capacity of the unit.

Handling used frying oil can also be a challenge for grocery stores, with prepared foods service areas often being far from loading docks where oil is typically disposed of. The ROV Rack Fryer can be hooked up to a waste oil management system eliminating the need to ever touch the oil making maintenance easier.

THE CHALLENGE OF LABOR

Right now, labor is the top challenge in foodservice. When it comes to fried foods, both the cooking and oil filtration processes need to be monitored. Pitco’s ROV Rack Fryers use capacitance sensors to help automate the cooking process and SOS sensors to monitor the quality of cooking oil. When it’s time to filter oil, the fryer can run a filtration cycle automatically.

Are you ready to provide more comfort foods to your customers?  Pitco fryers can help!