City Slicker

Meat Masters

Jennifer tours a sausage factory in Red Deer and comes out feeling a little jerky

By Jennifer Cockrall-King

At 9 a.m. I arrive at an enormous white building that’s festively trimmed in red. It’s in an industrial neighbourhood in Red Deer. Touring a sausage factory early in the morning is not my first instinct, but I’ve attended post-breakfast wine tastings, many times in fact, and they are surprisingly easy to enjoy. And I’m keen to learn more about the value-added products made from Alberta-grown beef, pork and other meats from a family whose traditions include three consecutive generations of master butchers. I prepare to enter the world of Nossack Fine Meats Ltd.

Karsten Nossack, the tall, well-dressed president of Nossack Fine Meats Ltd., greets me right at the front door. He immediately apologizes for being somewhat sleep-deprived as he leads me to his second-storey office, though I see no sign of fatigue. With his six-foot-four frame, he bounds up the staircase, taking two stairs at a time. I’m an entire foot shorter, and even after only 30 seconds of knowing him, I’m wondering if I could even keep up with Karsten after a full night’s sleep.

He whisks me into his spacious office. There are family pictures hanging on the walls and propped up on the floor, alongside slick promo posters of sexy European sportscars on the mantle of the fireplace opposite his desk. “I usually don’t get into work on Friday mornings,” he says enthusiastically, rattling off his schedule. “I do the weekly production planning schedules on Thursdays and they are usually 16- to 18-hour days.”

He’s also just returned from a whirlwind tour of Dubai, Kuwait, and Cairo via Hamburg and Frankfurt. Next week, he’s bound for the Pacific North-west, south of the border, and Japan later in the year. It occurs to me that he naturally operates at a higher velocity than most of us, even on four hours of sleep. I guess this is how you build a company from the ground up in a mere quarter of a century.

Karsten came to Canada in 1982 with his new wife, Ingrid. His parents and brothers followed shortly after. Canada held opportunities that they couldn’t fathom in Germany at the time. In his early 20s, he was a trained master butcher and sausage maker, and he had expertise in import and export.

“I remember how proud I was when I became a master butcher,” Karsten says, his Frankfurt accent softened somewhat after 25 years in Canada. He points to the room adjacent to his office. “That’s our heritage room,” he says proudly, where his framed certificate hangs next to a picture of him in his earlier years. His great-grandfather was also a master butcher, and a black-and-white poster of him in a long, white butcher’s smock also hangs on the walls here. He points out his grandfather and father’s certificates. “There were three generations of master butchers trained at the same school,” he says.

When the family arrived in Red Deer, they operated a deli for a short period. Then Karsten’s parents went into the abattoir business. His brother started a trucking company (which now operates in conjunction with Nossack Fine Meats on the distribution end), and Karsten opened a sausage production facility, albeit on a much smaller scale than the current 40,000 square-foot distribution centre and the nearby 23,000 square-foot production facility. Nossack Fine Meats Ltd. is a booming family business. The Nossacks’ grown children, Catharina and Carsten Junior, are already rising through the ranks of the 80-employee company.

We head over to the production facility. In Karsten’s jet-black sportscar it’s just minutes away from the office. “I want to race cars,” he declares as we careen around a corner effortlessly. “This is how I relax,” he says with a grin.

We suit up in the production facility; my borrowed steel-toed rubber boots are actually not too far from my shoe size, and I figure this will help me keep apace with Karsten’s lengthy strides. Hairnets and white coats are also a must. I get a grey hard hat, which I later find out signals to the rest of the employees on the floor that there’s a visitor in their midst. New employees in training for up to three months sport green hardhats. Veterans wear yellow, lead hands wear orange, supervisors wear red, and management wears white. Everyone is colour-coded for safety and to help food inspectors identify people and their roles when it comes time for a routine check.

Catharina Nossack joins us. Her business card doesn’t have her job title on it, and I soon learn that is because it likely wouldn’t fit on such a small space. Catharina is her father’s right-hand, a sort of executive assistant, but she is also in charge of quality control, workplace and food safety, labelling and marketing, just to name a few of the responsibilities that fall to her.

We also meet up with Trygve Mamchur, a bear of a man. He’s the operations manager, and we’re on his turf. He instructs me on how to wash my hands as we enter the food production area, and then he supervises to make sure I don’t miss a step. These days food safety is the over-arching concern at any production facility and “Tryg”, as his employees call him, doesn’t miss a beat.

In the first room I enter, several women are feeding three-foot sausages into a dicer that emits startlingly loud bangs. Rectangular slivers of diced ham are propelled out the other end and fall into clear plastic containers. The diced ham then gets placed into two-kilogram sealed transparent packets and placed in boxes destined for the pizza industry. “Size reduction,” shouts Karsten over the tympanic ruckus of the room, “is a very big industry.” Pre-sliced, pre-shredded and pre-diced are value-added products that labour-short foodservice companies and restaurants are happy to pay for.

As we circulate, Karsten greets each employee by name and takes the time to exchange a quick joke or bit of conversation. I ask how many employees work for him and he does a quick mental calculation: 80 or 85 is the current number, but then he adds his employees work with him, not for him. He says his view, that his employees are all part of a team, is the reason that he’s been able to weather the labour shortage in Alberta so far. Some employees have been with him as long as 17 years, he says, as he points and waves to Myrna, a woman working a packaging line, where long, slender sausages are being shrink-wrapped and labelled.

But the labour shortage is affecting his business, especially now, with a none-too-modest expansion plan in the works. An 80,000 to 100,000 new square-foot production, warehouse and storage facility is in the final design stages, and the plan is to break ground in October of this year. That’ll mean a 400 to 500 per cent increase in production over the next few years. Earlier today, Ingrid collected the company’s newest employees, two travel-weary Sri Lankans who will join their multi-national workforce.

As we make our way into a cool storage area I’m suddenly transported to a deli, thanks to the peppery, fragrant and spicy combinations of sausages and cured meats. I linger, but Karsten presses forward to the next stop, determined to give me a complete tour. We stop briefly outside another very cold room, where a crew of meat cutters is working on various cuts of beef. It becomes a blur: from rooms with giant stainless meat grinders that can process 10 tonnes an hour to a heavenly-scented area just outside the room where meat is being smoked with real hardwood chips.

“I still believe we’re a large butcher shop,” says Karsten, and I see what he means when I finally meet the last member of the family, Carsten Junior. He and two other workers are making Bavarian Cheddar Smokies. Yes, there’s large equipment involved, as the stuffing - with clearly visible nuggets of cheddar - gets pushed into casings which are linked and fed onto a herringbone metal conveyor belt. But at almost every step, Carsten Junior and crew are helping it along by hand and watching carefully as every sausage is neatly formed and hung on the rack by hand. It seems Junior is keen on continuing in the family trade with hands-on sausage-making, and becoming the fifth generation of master butchers in the family.

We head back to the distribution facility for the final portion of the tour. With seven loading bays along the 250-foot dock, Nossack moves a lot of product, including smoked hams, wild boar and cheddar smokies, seasoned roast beef and pastrami, to turkey breast.

Nossack also caters to the pizza industry in Western Canada. Currently, products are mainly wholesale items destined for the foodservice industry and some private label products for other retailers and businesses ranging from Thunder Bay, Ontario to Victoria, British Columbia.

The company is starting to focus more in the retail industry with the launch of its Canadian Outback Beef Jerky products. But Karsten’s plans are global. With the ground-breaking set for October on the new building and Karsten’s boundless energy and enthusiasm, Nossack Fine Meats Ltd. seems poised for great things. Paul Nossack, Karsten’s great-grandfather and a master butcher who lived in 19^th century Frankfurt, would approve.

For  more information, visit Nossack Fine Meats Ltd.