How will the facility segregate processing risks from the market and cafe?

Swift Run Station has been in the planning stage for nearly a decade, and during those years we’ve given a lot of thought to the problem of how to create a feasible business model for local poultry processing, local red meat processing, and retail - all in a single urban facility - while still ensuring food safety.  Our overall philosophy has been that good design can solve problems. In the end, we settled on giving up efficiency in operations for strict separation of poultry processing, red meat processing, and retail operations. These separations are enforced by both the business structure and by building design.

One way that the operations at Swift Run Station ensure this separation is by dividing this work into different business entities. Doing this meant we had to give up many potential efficiencies, such as being able to deliver small meat scraps produced during processing directly to the retail kitchen, to be used in making soups or pot pies. Instead, the retail market is a legal business entity separate from the poultry business entity, which is also separate from the red meat business entity. This means that every time the retail market takes delivery of raw poultry or red meat, it will be subject to the same packaging regulations that would be required if we delivered those raw meat products across town. It’s inefficient!  But it also means that there will never be raw unpackaged meat or poultry moving from the processing areas to the retail areas; all transfers of meat products will have to be in a clean, covered, labeled, container. It also means that no people working in the processing areas - who might have raw products on their shoe soles or shirt sleeves or aprons - will casually be traveling into the retail areas as part of their job. They won’t because that retail area will be a separate business entity from the one where they are employed.

All of this is further enforced by the physical design of Swift Run Station. Since we have divided this work into three different companies, there are physical walls that separate these companies within this facility, with (almost) no doors between them. This enforces the separation of the people and the work, but it also means that other efficiencies that we could have had - like shared bathrooms or break rooms - are not an option. It’s inefficient! But it also means that a retail worker won’t be touching anything that someone from the raw poultry or raw meat areas has touched, since those workers don’t share the same space. In both the structure of our businesses and the structure of the building, we have built-in separations of this work that is all being done in the same building.