Free Day - Planning


We have some of the best employees around.  They rise to the occasion for Customer Appreciation Day.  

  Big D (Darryl) has been around since the beginning.  He was our first employee, and he still oversees one of the highest volume kitchens in the Valley.

  This year I asked Big D if he and his carvers were up to slicing chicken breast for a few thousand people.  Yup.  No problem.  And they will pull pork all day too.  Thousands of pounds worth.

  To give you an idea of how much meat we are talking about, imagine if you were having 10 people over for dinner.  You are in a BBQ mood and want to slow smoke some meat and make some tasty side dishes.  You’d need somewhere around 3 pounds of meat for your guests.  If you didn’t do this often, you might not know that if you were serving pork you would lose about 2/3 of the weight of the meat while it smoked.  You would need to load your smoker with about 9 pounds of meat.  Multiply that a few times and we’re smoking about 4,500 pounds of meat for the event.

  I’ll provide some of the pictures of homemade side dishes being made tomorrow.  It is quite an undertaking.   Each bun will make its way through the toaster before we add the meat.

  And we’ll need a few plates, some silverware, some sauce, pickles and onions.  For 6,000+ folks.  

  And we’d like to know throughout the day how many we’ve served.  You can see from the packages of plates that is how we count the number of meals completed.  The plates have 175 in a package, so if we do a good job of tracking we should know all day long what the counts are.  

  Planning had to start a year ahead.  Literally.  We sit down on the Thursday after the event and map out what went well, and what things we could do better.  We calculate what needs to be done when in order to open at 11am hitting on all cylinders.  We pray everything will go safely and smoothly, and that our bakery truck doesn’t get stuck on I-60.  The staffing plan is pretty simple.  If you work here you are working free day!  Say hi to the smiling faces tomorrow and know each of us sincerely appreciates you coming out!

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About

Gilbert guy who walks with Christ, sells BBQ, and appreciates those who care enough about his random musings to occasionally read his blog.