Page 24 - Food&Drink Magazine August 2019

MEAT, FISH & POULTRY
New pie era, old pork habits
A funding injection from the Coles Nurture Fund allowed boutique pork pie producer Pacdon Park to grow its business dramatically. Doris Prodanovic reports.
24 | Food&Drink business | August 2019 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au
EIGHT months ago, a small business butcher and pork pie producer based on the New South Wales and Victoria border was making 100 pies per hour on a well-engineered, hand-operated machine. Today, Pacdon Park pumps out 2000 pies an hour while maintaining quality and consistency, reducing waste, and saving power and space, thanks to its new, customised machinery and production line.
“We’d been trading for ten years when the Coles Nurture Fund came along. When you’re growing a business from nothing, it’s slow and steady,” Pacdon Park co-founder Jim Arrowsmith told Food & Drink Business. The company was among the recipients in Round 5 of the Fund, receiving a $221,577 interest free loan to buy new equipment and enhance efficiencies on site.
“The fund has made our wish list happen faster and easier, which has been great.
We’ve just installed a pork pie machine, customised from the UK, a new dough spiral machine for our pastry, an automatic jellier and metal detectors for having our products in Coles.”
SCALING UP
Pacdon Park is one of the few businesses in Australia producing pork pies using traditional British methods. Served cold, the pork pies have a pork filling surrounded by jellied pork stock in a pastry crust. Arrowsmith, along with his wife Jane and co-founder Pete Tonge, first started production in 2006 on a pig farm named Pacdon Park in Bunnaloo, rural NSW.
“We built our first factory ourselves but it was so basic
it was very rustic,” says Arrowsmith. “It got us going and was a great place to start but it was more of a test kitchen than a production factory.”
Pacdon Park now resides in a
vineyard along the Murray River in the towns of Echuca and Moama, ensuring its tradition remains despite the equipment upgrade.
“The old machine was very well engineered but it was hand operated. Everything was done by eye, feel and baker’s skill. Now with the new machine, it is air-compressed and semi-automatic. The elements are the same but
the machine works by itself rather than using manpower to pump out volumes.
“We’ve changed into precision and timing and everything is by the milligram. We are still making a high quality and bespoke product but it is consistent in every pie. It’s also better on power and space – we’ve seen a thirty per cent reduction of pastry wastage and that may go up again as we learn more about the capabilities of the equipment. It’s really changed everything.”
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