Built to butcher-- when leasing just won't do

Wolfgang and Cathy Gedicks spent about a year looking for a new home for their business before striking a deal for a custom-built building in a new business park on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway at Hyer Road.

The Gedicks needed a larger place to accommodate their custom meat processing business, Mat Valley Meats. They also planned to diversify into the retail butcher shop market.

"From the day we started doing custom, we knew we wanted to go into retail," Cathy Gedicks said. Gedicks was giving a tour of the new building, where her husband leads a crew of butchers who make everything from steaks to sausages for local customers who hunt or raise their own animals for meat.

The retail cases sat empty last week, waiting for final approval from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation. But that doesn't seem to bother Gedicks as she gives a tour of building -- three weeks ago she was presiding over customers' orders from a cramped entryway where butcher's coats and office organizers were side by side. A customer who took three steps was already inside the butcher's work area, and employees would sometimes take their breaks in their cars.

The new store has more room for everyone, and in some instances there are two of everything. Separate receiving areas are located on either side of building with roll-up doors and separate meat coolers. The knife, grinder and spice magic happens in the middle, but inspected meat for the retail market can never be allowed to share a table or grinder with un-inspected meat from the custom cuts business.

"Wolf's experience in the industry helped a great deal with navigating the regulations. But still there are always hitches," Gedicks said. Gedicks describes building modifications as "little tweaks here and there." Things such as moving a grease trap in the floor or adding a hand-washing sink where a dish washing sink sits two feet away qualify as "little tweaks."

"One of the things a meat shop desperately needs is floor drains. There's just so much water and so much cleaning," Gedicks said.

There is an alphabet soup of regulators in the food business to protect consumers, USDA, AKDEC and EPA among them. The regulations were responsible for some of the little tweaks, and that is one of the reasons Gedicks and her husband decided on a custom building instead of a leased one. A flexible contractor helped, as did a heads-up attitude toward the federal and state regulators.

"What did take a lot of time was designing the separations -- we had the inspectors in during the building phase," Gedicks said.

The previous building came with little more than a drain on the floor and a sink on the wall. At that location, the Gedicks added plumbing, a cooler and freezer, a suspended rail system for sides of meat, a smoker, and the band saws, grinders and cutting tables where Wolfgang applies his skills.

The motors that run a professional butcher shop require three-phase electricity, otherwise the off-and-on current draw would trip breakers. Gedicks said the three-phase modifications alone cost the company about $13,000 when they modified the leased building four years ago.

The new store has six compressors running three retail display cases and four walk-ins that line the back of the shop.

The shop's smoke house also draws quite a bit of current-- it's about as similar to a consumer electric smoker as the shop's building is to a warehouse. It has an electric smoke generator the size of a small oven. A chip hopper on top drops sawdust-sized chips onto a turn-table heating element inside the smoke generator. Smoke is channeled through a stove pipe from the smoke generator into an oven where meat is loaded in.

The oven chamber has fans like a convection oven to make sure all of the meat is smoked evenly, which is vital when smoking a 300-pound batch. There are three timers for recipes with up to three stages -- Wolfgang normally uses two -- and each stage has temperature, humidity and timer settings. The smoker even has a shower, which bathes sausages after they've been smoked.

"Not all sausage gets showered, but some of it does. Polish sausages get a bath when they're done," Gedicks said. Naturally, she is standing near yet another floor drain as she says this. Someday, a second smoker will double the shop's capacity, and the Gedicks plan to smoke fish in the future as well. The fish processing will likely bring another round of inspectors, she said.

Gedicks described designing and building the new shop as an "Odyssey" but also said they would do it all over again the same way if they were to start over.

"We've been looking for property for over a year," she said. "Maybe there's more prudence to leasing than I know, but it didn't seem prudent to me to lease and make all of these modifications."