I was pretty excited to be buying blocks of Mozz for under 2.00 today, except that I didn’t really need any. I mostly just wanted to buy some at that price. About a month ago I got the equipment to shred our own cheese and after seeing the pricing and how simple it was, I’ve been kicking myself for the 3 years of waste when we bought shredded. Considering how little shelf space blocks take up, I’m considering stocking up next week, but I don’t know how much I could safely buy.
How long does it take the person to do the shredding in-house? What was the cost of the pelican head? How much over block price does the shred cost you?
In the past, at former jobs, the payoff was surprisingly low. Once we’d gotten to 200# of cheese a day, it was obvious that buying shred would be well worth the extra money.
No question it is worth it to us. One person can do 100 lbs in our store in about 20 minutes. We have enough slow time during the day that there is ZERO extra labor cost in doing this. It saves us about $100 week in food cost. Our Stefan VCM does about 20 lbs in 30 seconds. The rest of the time is getting the cases out and taking the wrappers off.
No extra labor, we can do about 50 lbs in just a few minutes. Pelican head we actually found in storage with all the existing kitchen stuff we bought. I save about .20/lb buying block.
I think you have this backwards. The more cheese you use, the more profitable it is to do it yourself. At 200# a day, I could take the $40 I saved a day and hire a high school kid to spend an hour doing cheese, 2 hours of cleaning and 2 hours of door hanging every day. Seems worth it to me.
Shelf life of shredded is waaaayyyyy less than block. So, it’s harder to capitalize on price drops. My experience with shred is that price reductions aren’t as low as block, and the rises are a bit higher. Block can generate spot savings not realized by shred. Each guy gotta decide if their operation can use it.