UPSCALE restaurants specialize in delight. Food is just the method used to light up the faces of patrons. To work their magic, chefs need vendors that can supply both the basics and the wonderfully exotic at a moment's notice on a consistent basis.
Keany Produce Company in Landover, Maryland, has built its business on doing both — supplying the basics every day and providing whatever a chef needs to impress diners with apparent ease. “Our customer list covers the whole spectrum of produce users from local sandwich shops to gas station convenience stores that need a few apples and bananas to large business cafeteria operations to the finest restaurants along the middle Atlantic Coast,” says Kevin Keany, president. “We even serve an operation within the Department of Defense known as the Terminal Market Office that is responsible for maintaining retail produce stock at 12 military commissaries in the Washington/Baltimore area.”
However, it was with upscale restaurants where Keany got its start and where it still lavishes its attention. “I was just out of college and in need of a job,” he says. “My father, who had a contract to provide custodial services to military foodservice operations — that means cleaning up mess halls after meals — suggested that I contact someone he knew in the food business. I was basically looking for a job as a truck driver. No driving jobs were available, so the produce wholesaler I had contacted gave me some price sheets and put me to work selling produce. At that time, the produce business in Washington was extremely fragmented with commission merchants at the market who specialized in particular commodities such as only onions and potatoes or lettuce or tomatoes only. I think Washington had only one full-line produce house at that time.”
Upscale restaurants first
As he learned the business, Keany began purchasing produce from merchants on the market and delivering consolidated orders to restaurants. A great deal of that business was with fine restaurants in downtown Washington and in Arlington, Virginia, across the river. “In 1979, when we started, the restaurant scene in Arlington was just exploding,” he says. “For a while it seemed as though there was a restaurant on every corner. We just about owned the upscale restaurant business in Arlington in those days.
“Everybody thinks of New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans as hot spots for fine restaurants, but Washington DC has one of the highest densities of upscale restaurants of any city in the country. With all the lobbyists and Congress, the business runs nonstop. But in August when Congress goes into its summer recess, everything stops for almost a month.”
In addition to restaurants, downtown Washington is home to many businesses and institutions with internal foodservice operations. One of the first accounts secured by Keany Produce was the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. It still is a big account, taking large deliveries every business day.
Metro area concentration
The bulk of the business remains concentrated in the Washington/Baltimore area, possibly as much as 85% of the total, Keany says. However, expansion is underway as well. Keany Produce has routes that go south to Richmond, Virginia, north to Philadelphia, northwest into the mountains of Maryland, and southwest to the university town of Charlottesville, Virginia. Outside the city, the company has a strong hold on business in Northern Virginia. In a city dominated by the federal government, Keany Produce does not do much business with the government proper. “That's not to say that we do not deliver to government buildings,” he says. “However, most government foodservice operations are run by contractors.”
Keany Produce operated as it began for 10 years, buying from other wholesalers and delivering consolidated orders before finally reaching the critical mass necessary to buy directly from growers in California and other areas. Transactions between growers and wholesalers are regulated by the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act, which, essentially, grants a license for wholesalers to buy from growers. “Producers simply will not talk to wholesalers unless those wholesalers have a track record of proven performance and strong credit,” Keany says.
Those early accounts pressed Keany to supply high-end exotic produce. The result has been growing confidence by the chefs that Keany will supply what they want when they want it. “They know that we will provide up-to-date information and that we will be honest about the quality of our products,” he says. “Good chefs know that quality can fluctuate with even the finest produce. They trust us to monitor quality levels; some have told us not to fill their orders at all if we don't think the product available will meet their standards on a given day.”
Special pick program
This special rapport between Keany Produce and its customers has led to some internal programs to ensure that customers remain satisfied. As the business grew, Keany learned to meet the requirements of individual chefs. This has resulted in setting up a program of special pick pallets with orders selected by workers who handle the company's most critical customers such as the Four Seasons hotel or the world famous restaurant, the Inn at Little Washington, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of rural Virginia.
“Orders for the Inn at Little Washington would get special attention even if it were not a high profile account,” says Dana Rolander, assistant general manager. “We can't afford to make a mistake with this delivery, because it is a three-hour drive one way from our warehouse.”
Workers who select orders for the special pick pallets are the more senior personnel in the warehouse. Like all Keany Produce warehouse workers, they started on the job with training from a more senior working partner who taught them to recognize top quality goods. In addition, all warehouse personnel are certified for electric pallet jack operation.
“Although we assign senior workers to the special pick program, we try to make order selection easy for everyone,” Keany says. “Our process is not difficult. We still use a gummed label order verification system. If product is in the correct warehouse location, and if the selector goes to the right slot and picks up the correct number of cartons, the order should be correct.”
Double check specials
Just in case, Keany's operations manager double checks the special pick pallets. He reports to the warehouse early every morning and inspects every carton in the orders for the critical customers before releasing the trucks for their routes. “He does this out of habit,” Keany says. “It certainly is not required as a part of his job.”
In addition, any customer order may be subject to a special handling sheet. This is a green sheet given to warehouse workers and to dispatch to alert them to take special care with an order. A good example might be a note that an order was incorrect the day before and to take special care to make sure that the current order is selected and shipped properly, Rolander says.
Officially, Keany Produce operates with an order cut-off at 10 pm for next morning delivery. In reality, that cut-off is almost infinitely flexible to make sure that customers get what they want when they need it. The company dispatches 94 routes every morning by 5 am. Trucks assigned to local Washington or Baltimore routes, especially downtown Washington, usually are empty and back at the warehouse between 10 am and noon. Longer runs require nine to 10 hours for completion. Of those 94 trucks, an average of 25 are used again the same day for afternoon deliveries. “If we can't get a late order on a truck for the first dispatch, we send it out later in the day,” Keany says.
Keany Express for emergencies
If the customer is in a panic and simply cannot wait for an afternoon delivery, Keany Produce maintains a fleet of five Ford E350 van chassis with 12-ft refrigerated bodies for emergency delivery. The trucks use Thermo King V280 truck engine-driven refrigeration. This hotshot service is promoted to customers as Keany Express. It has been so successful that many customers ask for the service by name when requesting a special delivery, Rolander says.
If Keany Express or the afternoon routes are not enough to meet customer needs, Keany still gets product to the restaurants. “We have eight fulltime sales personnel,” Rolander says. “On almost a daily basis, our sales staff will put cartons of produce in their car and deliver to their customer, either during the day or on the way home in the afternoon. If we really run out of delivery capacity, we will send out one of our warehouse workers with an order. The bottom line is that the customer is never left hanging.”
To ensure that orders get picked and delivered on time, the Keany Produce warehouse crew works in two groups. The first group reports for work at 1 pm and begins selection for the big customers that always place their orders early. The main crew reports at 9 pm and works through the night to allow most trucks to depart by 5 am. Route building begins about 7 pm using Roadnet routing software. The company uses the repetitive routing functions of Roadnet. “We would like to use the fully dynamic routing capability of the system, but our own processes keep us from doing that,” Keany says. “To make efficient use of dynamic routing, we would have to have all the orders in the system before routing starts. With our insistence on flexible order timing, we don't get all the orders in the house ahead of time, so we can't go dynamic. If we did, some of the routes would have an odd configuration and would probably be less efficient than the repetitive routes we are using. Besides that, dynamic routing would move drivers from route to route, and our customers really like having the same delivery guy day after day.”
Custom cutting department
In its quest to provide service and quality, Keany Produce does more than simply deliver fruit and vegetables. Building on a trend several years in the making that helps restaurants take labor costs out of the kitchen, the company set up Keany Premium Kuts, a preparation operation to provide produce precut to restaurant specifications. The precut department takes up 5,000 sq ft of the warehouse, employs 82 people, and runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, says Jorge Paredes, production manager.
“Restaurant chefs are always looking for something different, a competitive edge to put on the plate,” Parades says. “We work with them to develop custom cuts to develop appearance and flavor. At our end, the time required for production and the yield from a given quantity of produce determines the pricing of the product.”
Another trend among creative chefs is more difficult for a high volume company such as Keany Produce to tackle. A lot of chefs want produce from local growers, Keany says. However, sourcing product from local farmers is expensive and time consuming. Many of the growers have such small production that Keany Produce finds handling the product impractical. In addition, small farmers don't always do the record keeping needed for food safety requirements. Sourcing from local growers is a narrow balance on which customers gain flavor but lose shelf life, he says.
Making sure that every customer gets every delivery and that the quality in that delivery is exactly as ordered allows Keany Produce to maintain its profit margins in an extremely competitive environment. “We try to go to the next level of service with every transaction,” Keany says. “The goal behind that is to turn merely satisfied customers into Keany fanatics who would never think of buying from anyone else.”
Rapid recent growth
Taking so much care with special customers and making sure that all customers get a high level of service and quality has resulted in rapid and continued growth at Keany Produce. In recent years, the company has grown at a rate exceeding 30% and has moved into expanded quarters twice. In 1993, it moved out of a 14,000-sq-ft facility into a 45,000-sq-ft distribution center, a building more than three times as large as it left. That building was completely renovated and equipped with a first rate refrigeration system.
Within eight years, the company outgrew the second property. “We just ran out of space,” Rolander says. “We needed more doors on the warehouse to allow us to ship more volume, and we needed more space on the yard to park trucks. At the time we moved into our new 90,000-sq-ft building, we were having to rent parking space on property adjacent to our warehouse.”
Moving entailed another building renovation. The new building that Keany Produce occupied in August 2001 was originally only 55,000-sq-ft. The company completely gutted the existing building to put in new insulation and installed a new roof at the same time that it added 35,000 sq ft for a 90,000 sq ft total. The whole project took about a year. “We could see it from across the street in our cramped space for the whole time that work was going on,” Rolander says.
The new building has 32 doors on a dock refrigerated to 40° F. Coolers are divided into eight temperature zones ranging from 33° F to 50° F. Humidity control, where needed, is provided by icing the product, but most of the product is stored under dry conditions. Warmer temperature zones are for products such as tomatoes, which lose flavor when stored at low temperature, and for fresh basil, which is easily shocked and turns black if kept too cold. Of course, bananas, which Keany says are the most delicate product the company sells, are maintained at warmer temperatures.
Rising fleet count
The fleet has almost doubled in the past seven years, growing from 54 trucks in 1997 to 94 today, of which the company owns 79 and leases 15. In addition, Keany Produce has 13 trucks rented on a short-term basis to provide extra capacity while 29 new units are phased into service. Of these, 21 represent fleet expansion.
The 21 trucks for expansion are 22-ft Morgan refrigerated bodies with Carrier Transicold Supra 644 refrigeration units mounted on Sterling Acterra chassis. The remaining eight are new Acterra chassis with refurbished Morgan bodies being moved from older chassis. When the time came to purchase new trucks, Keany Produce had a decision to make among the three nameplates already in the fleet — International, Ford, and Sterling. “We depended on our maintenance experiences and on driver preferences to tip the scales one way or the other,” Rolander says. “Based on what the drivers said, the Sterling Acterra came out on top.”
The new trucks are powered by C7 Caterpillar engines and use Allison 3060P automatic transmissions. Allison transmissions are becoming standard equipment in the Keany Produce fleet. “It's been years since we bought a manual transmission,” Rolander says. “A manual costs less to buy but more to own — at least in our operation. We always seemed to have a communication problem with drivers about clutch adjustment. Somehow, we never knew that a clutch was out of adjustment until it was about to fail.”
Depending on their condition, truck bodies stay in the Keany Produce fleet for at least 10 to 14 years, meaning that they almost always get remounted on a second chassis and sometimes a third. Refrigeration units are rebuilt when bodies are moved to a new chassis. Although the majority of refrigeration units in the Keany Produce fleet are from Thermo King, the company selected Multimarine Services, the Carrier Transicold dealer in Baltimore to rebuild refrigeration units for the most recent group of body remounts. “We had an interruption of service from our other dealer,” Keany says. “As long as we were using Multimarine to rebuild older units, we thought that purchasing new units from them would make sense as well.”
