Bacon That Brings More to the Plate

“We cooked bacon raw for 35 years. It was messy, labor intensive and honestly, kind of miserable,” recounts Richard French, founder/CEO of The Works Café, a 14-unit New England-based chain. “You’d burn it one day, undercook it the next.”

To meet their volume needs, The Works Café kitchens cooked a wide shingle bacon on sheet pans in a deck oven. The daily process required more than two hours of dedicated labor, created challenges for cooking other menu items at varying oven temperatures and was a chore to clean. “Dealing with the grease was as big a pain as the cooking,” he recalls.

French effectively distills the top pain points that most foodservice operators experience with cooking bacon from raw. But leaving bacon off the menu is simply not an option. After all, it’s an essential component of breakfast platters, as well as of a bevy of sandwich builds—notably the eponymous BLT—and is a flavorful addition to any number of other dishes.

But its preparation presents a serious disincentive for operators of all sizes. Enter pre-cooked bacon. The initial offerings to the market largely addressed the operational challenges, but too often carried a reputation for poor flavor and texture characteristics, undercutting diner satisfaction.

The innovation team at Hormel Foodservice was determined to do better. “We asked ourselves, ‘What if a pre-cooked bacon existed that tasted like it was cooked from raw? A cooked bacon that wasn’t rubbery in texture? A cooked bacon delivering big flavor?’” says Blake Flores, director of marketing, Hormel Foodservice. After five years of innovating and new technology investment, the first fully cooked bacon that’s truly indistinguishable from raw was born. HORMEL^® BACON 1™ Perfectly Cooked Bacon is smoked for 12+ hours over 100% real hardwoods to create a hearty, flavorful bacon that both solves BOH inefficiencies and consistently delivers high-quality results that operators can rely on and guests can taste.

 

BRINGING HOME THE (FULLY COOKED) BACON

For Richard French, the tipping point that led him to give up on cooking raw bacon and turn to HORMEL^® BACON 1™ Perfectly Cooked Bacon to supply the bacon needs for The Works Café came three years ago. “One day, a pan of bacon caught on the oven as it rotated, and it just got stuck. It was chaos,” says French. “That was the moment I said, ‘Enough. We’ve got to change.’ It was a lightbulb moment. We had to stop cooking raw bacon.”

But switching bacon meant risking the integrity of a standard French had upheld for decades—because a fully cooked option that met the brand values of his operation didn’t exist.

The Works Café is a concept with a socially minded, mission-driven approach to ingredient sourcing “We’ve been committed to thoughtfully sourced ingredients since day one,” explains French. This includes maintaining a Clean Meat Initiative since 2010, exclusively serving all-natural, nitrate- and nitrite-free meat and bacon sourced from loose-sow house-raised pigs. “We needed something that aligned with our clean label standards and worked better in the kitchen. Most companies would tell you, ‘Pick from the catalog.’ Hormel said, “What do you need?’”

After reviewing existing SKU formulations, Hormel and The Works Café worked in partnership to produce a custom solution that would align with the brand’s values. “I was pleasantly shocked that Hormel, as a large company, was willing to innovate on our behalf,” says French. “It wasn’t about pushing SKUs, it was about solving for our goals. They took the time to understand what we needed as a mission-driven brand. We’re a 14-unit chain, not a giant, and they still treated us like a key customer.”

As a result, The Works Café owner was confident in the product, ready to implement it across all sites on the first run. “We’ve been using HORMEL^® BACON 1™ Perfectly Cooked Bacon for over three years now,” says French. The benefits have been well-evident since the start, he reports. “The labor savings are enormous. We’re not sheeting bacon or cleaning greasy trays anymore. It frees up the staff to focus on food quality and service.” He also speaks highly of the product’s reliable quality: “The consistency is unreal. Every strip is the same. No burning. No variation.”

 

ADDING MORE SIZZLE TO MENUS

HORMEL^® BACON 1™ Perfectly Cooked Bacon is a proven means of distinguishing your menu from those featuring “good enough” cooked bacon alternatives. Customers can discern the difference—especially when they’ve been asked to pay extra for a sub-par flavor experience. This product not only makes prepping existing menu items easier—it makes them better.

Plus, the quality and ease of use gives operators a better platform to “stretch” and do more with bacon across their menus.

“We always had some bacon on the menu, but we were limited by the workload,” says French. The Works Café was able to apply their signature Cajun rub to the fully cooked strips and serve their differentiating, fan favorite Cajun bacon as more than an LTO. “It’s in our Cobb salad, our turkey bacon avocado sandwich, the quinoa bowl—it shows up everywhere now!” French attests. Plus, locations have run “more bacon” campaigns—offering up to 12 slices on a single sandwich. “It’s so craveable,” he says.

Members of the Hormel Foodservice Culinary Collective suggest additional “stretch” applications that operators can consider when using a better bacon option. Each leverages a different form of bacon that can be easily executed with a fully cooked product.

• A Sweet-Savory Combo: Southern Belle Crunch. Creamy goat’s milk ice cream is topped with a warm compote made of peaches and HORMEL^® BACON 1™ Perfectly Cooked Bacon, crushed pistachios and a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil.
• An Unexpected Shareable: Bacon & Miso Butter Roasted Sweet Potatoes. Roasted sweet potato wedges are tossed in miso butter, topped with crispy pieces of HORMEL^® BACON 1™ Perfectly Cooked Bacon, sesame seeds and scallion curls.
• A Premium Experience: Pan-Fried Brown Butter Gnocchi with Bacon Aioli. Golden, pan-crisped potato gnocchi is finished in nutty brown butter, drizzled with an aioli made from HORMEL^® BACON 1™ Perfectly Cooked Bacon and topped with fried sage, cracked pepper and shaved Parmesan.
• A Trend-Forward Global Application: Bacon & Hot Honey Churros. Warm churros are rolled in bacon dust and sugar, drizzled with hot honey and served with a maple cream dipping sauce.

TAKEN WITH BETTER BACON

HORMEL^® BACON 1™ Perfectly Cooked Bacon is a high-value, no-compromise solution for operators and their customers. French points to the numerous features of this fully cooked product, noting that it’s faster, produces less bacon grease, can be prepared heat to order and boasts consistent quality. “When you factor in reductions of labor and waste, there’s no question that it’s worth it.”

The Works Café owner couldn’t be happier to have raw bacon in his rear view. “This Hormel Foodservice product fits our mission, and we don’t have to compromise anywhere. It’s clean. It’s delicious. It checks all the boxes,” French says. “It’s not just a better product, it’s a better business decision.”

Discover the premium advantages of HORMEL^® BACON 1™ Perfectly Cooked Bacon for yourself. Click here to receive a sample.