Cambro 30CWGL135 Camwear 1/3 Size Clear Polycarbonate GripLid

Organic mixed greens. So one of the things is that they're not sprayed, there's no preservatives, so the minute they get taken out of the airtight bag, they start losing shelf life. So it wasn't that the greens weren't flavorful, but they didn't look pretty. Again, we're producing a product that still you eat with your eyes. So we would revive our lettuce by taking... the beginning of the shift before we've even opened our doors, we would assess the greens that were stored from the night before. If they didn't really look fresh and green, we would take our three compartment sink... we would create an ice bath and then submerge all of the lettuce into this ice bath to shock it, put it in a salad spinner, spin it, dry it, and put it back into the containers for use. Well, you've just added an hour of labor that really didn't result in anything new that wasn't already there. We already had the greens ready to go; they should've been fine from the night before. Now, now that we've incorporated the Cambro seal lids we've been able to... we get our mixed greens -- organic mixed greens in a bag that have been triple washed -- we open them up. We put them in the containers. We seal them up, and put them on the line ready to go. It's a five minute process. We've been able to utilize more employees now from doing the same task repeatedly to producing more products of things that we need. We've incorporated catering jobs that now we can and use the same employee that was busy doing stuff that really didn't generate income, to putting them on our catering assembly line, or adding more preppings on our schedule that we weren't able to do before.

The challenges that I think we've faced from the beginning for choosing to be an all organic restaurant has been (1) the expense of purchasing a product that has sometimes double the cost, and (2) once you've purchased it and made that commitment, you've purchased that product, now how do you not lose it? The biggest changes that we had to make in our prep to adjust the spoilage, was we prepped less, which was a problem. So when we have to prep less, and we go through it a lot quicker, now all of the sudden, a simple salad that had to be made... I have on the fly someone going and chopping up a tomato which they're now not going to take the time to do it properly, so they're most likely going to bruise it, even though they've made a quick tomato for that salad... they've had to quickly rinse off greens... they may not have been rinsed off well enough to preserve, so moisture gets trapped inside. So, it really creates a big wrench in a machine that already has a thousand moving parts. We would prep tomatoes for lunch, and half-way through, the bottom portion of the 1/6 pan would be... we couldn't use it. We would lose the shelf life of the tomato half-way through the day of operation. The solution really was the colander inserts. That's one of the biggest things that's helped extend the shelf life, because now you don't compromise flavor, and you're able to store a tomato outside of its use. Our processes now have substantially changed since we've now incorporated our new storage units, in that we're able to prep enough for an entire day part, like for a whole lunch or for a whole dinner, far enough in advance in a way that in the morning, we can prep everything that we would potentially need for a typical, whatever day it is. We're able to do the quantity of food that needs to be done, store them properly the night before, overnight. What we expect them to look like in the morning, they do. So it has cut down labor, product... it's a win-win situation. I mean, I'm using a highly perishable item that I have now extended the furthest I can go for shelf life. The Cambro airtight seal covers it, even using it in the pans. It can save your bottom line. I mean, we've saved about... 1.5 reduction in food cost, just by being able to extend the shelf life of the produce and not have as much waste.

The challenges that we had in preserving our organic chicken is... when the chicken gets delivered to us, because the manufacturer understands that there is no preservative, there's no sodium or any kind of preservative injected into the chicken. So they would bring it to us cryo-vacced, individually sealed, which is great. But operationally, you can't just break open this seal and just put the breast of chicken onto the grill. So you have to prep it, and for us butterflying the chicken breasts and prepping things, we've just opened this individually, cryo-vacced seal, and we put it into our inserts that now are being first prepped, (so the minute you've opened the seal you've cut the shelf life,) now we're putting it into our chef base that's underneath our charbroilers and next to our grills, and we're opening and closing this, and operationally, you can only prep so much in the beginning, because we've found that the chicken was getting glazed. It was being hit by the elements, the heat... sometimes it would even oxidize and turn a green color. Even though it was okay, it wasn't spoiled, no one is going to eat green chicken. So it was a very expensive learning curve for us. Once we were able to get the airtight Cambros incorporated into our prep, we were able to hold off... when we open our chef bases now, the operators are able to quickly open the seals, get what they need, and close it back up again so that quick second of exposure to heat that was happening before has been eliminated now.