Chef Fresh

Waupaca County Post

October 27, 2005

New Owners Plan to Expand Chef Fresh

By Robert Cloud, Post Editor

New owners are taking the helm at Chef Fresh Foods LLC in Waupaca.

Terry and Barb Teske started producing fresh pizzas for walk-in customers in a small retail location in 1977. Seven years later, they purchased a 23-acre dairy farm, built a 7,000 square-foot manufacturing facility and began making and selling frozen pizzas for private label, branded retail and fund-raising customers in Wisconsin.

“Barb and Terry were in the fund-raising business,” according to Amy Shambeau, the human resources manager at Chef Fresh. “The would bring pizza ingredients to the schools and the students would make pizzas for fund-raisers.”

Today, chef Fresh products are sold nationwide, the plant has grown to 35,000 square feet and more than 50 people are employed by the company. Chef Fresh has shifted its focus from pizzas to frozen specialty dough products and is now among the top 20 producers of frozen appetizers and snacks in the U.S.

In late July, the new owners finalized the purchase of Chef Fresh. Jerry Graf is the company’s new president. He owns the business jointly with Gary Pryor, of Pinnacle Co., which provides capital for the purchase and expansion of businesses in the food industry.

“The neat part of our acquisition is that the former owners retired and a new group of owners have come in, but we have retained all of the employees,” Pryor said.

Pryor said Rod Gehrt, Chef Fresh’s vice president of operations, moved to Waupaca from Milwaukee after taking charge of plant operations prior to the sale.

Graf moved from Bozeman, Mont., and is currently living in the farmhouse on Chef Fresh’s property.

“In early 2004, Jerry Graf and I started looking for a food manufacturer to buy that had available the capacity to meet the demand of all of Jerry’s former partners,” Pryor said.

Graf has been in the pizza business for 30 years.

“I started out as a store manager for Pizza Hut, then I moved to the international headquarters at Wichita, Kan.,” Graf said. “I used to buy all the food and equipment for Pizza Hut during their growth phase when they were building 500 stores a year in the “70s.”

Graf was subsequently recruited by Domino’s Pizza, where he was in charge of purchasing, then of international distribution.

“I purchased all of their food and equipment, when we were putting in 1,000 stores a year,” Graf said.

Graf left Domino’s in 1993 to start his own company.

“We developed a shelf-stable pizza shell that had a shelf life of 120 days in ambient temperature,” Graf said.

“That’s pretty amazing from a technical standpoint because most dough products have a very short shelf life,” Pryor added.

Graf said his company’s bakery did projects for McDonald’s and Kraft and developed the technology for pan pizza at Pappa John’s.

The two owners see major potential for Chef Fresh products.

“Some of the largest pizza and dough-related companies in the country are in Wisconsin,” Pryor said. “We’re right in the center of the shipping lanes for the main suppliers of cheese, meats and pizza shells.”

Pryor explained how Chef Fresh markets its products. Although Chef Fresh still gets the occasional phone call from an individual trying to order a takeout pizza, the company’s customers are large frozen food distributors usually seen in retail stores. Frozen pizza customers include Palerino’s and Schwan’s home delivery.

“We’re a co-packer. What we do is primarily assemble pizzas for our customers. We take all the ingredients and make a finished product for other companies,” Pryor said.

Pryor and Graf believe Chef Fresh is poised to take advantage of growth opportunities in the frozen pizza market.

“We have the capacity to grow to 750,000 pizzas a week,” Pryor said.

While frozen pizzas provide the base of Chef Fresh’s product line, the company anticipates that most of its future growth will come from frozen specialty products.

“We have a co-extruded product with a proprietary technology that allows us to stuff many different types of flavored filling in the dough,” Pryor said.

Chef Fresh custom makes rings, pods, loaves, fingers and pull aparts that are sold to distributors.

“We do not brand our own product and sell directly to retail stores,” Pryor said. “We sell to the companies that sell to retailers.”

Pryor said there is growing demand for frozen food products that can be baked in an oven or microwave and eaten as snacks, appetizers, or entrees.

Chef Fresh is also developing new product lines for restaurant chains. Pryor noted that virtually no new products have appeared to compliment the standard appetizers of buffalo wings and onion rings. Chef Fresh’s owners plan to develop and market new appetizers that will be sold only to specific restaurant chains. Specialty items are also being developed for distributors to grocery stores, convenient stores and wholesale clubs.

Pryor noted that the U.S. Gross Domestic Products is about $12 trillion, and food, which is nearly 10 percent of the total, is the GDP’s second largest category.

“About 40 percent of the food Americans consume is hamburgers and pizzas,” Pryor said. “We have the capacity to produce more products quickly and meet the growing demand.”