[Cover Story] From Sea to Table

Maryland is a state known for its crab, with the Maryland Blue Crab as a state symbol and recipes for Maryland Crab Cake found in kitchens across the country. When the Phillips family opened its first restaurant in 1956, it was, in fact, an abundance of crab that led to the family opening its own dining table to guests.

Since then, however, the state has experienced off-and-on shortages of the Blue Crab and an overall decrease in Blue Crab densities. Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources Fisheries Service estimated the 1990 density of Blue Crabs in the Chesapeake Bay at 82.1 crabs per 1,000 square meters. In 2007, that number was down to 27.8.

While the shortages have plagued the menus of seafood restaurants across the state, even causing some to shut down entirely, Phillips not only continues to feature blue swimming crab as a key item throughout its menu, it produces crab products for foodservice and retail sales across the country, while sourcing nearly 100 percent of its crab from its own processing and production facilities.

Phillips Foods, a prominent seafood processor in Baltimore, takes the sea-to-table concept literally with company-owned seafood-processing plants not only in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, but in even larger capacity plants in Southeast Asia, Central America and South America.

INTEGRATED GLOBAL OPERATION. It is this vertically integrated global supply, processing to distribution within its own operations — with  Phillips employees hauling the crab from the sea, processing it for production, producing hand-worked crab cakes, and serving the crab plates directly to its customers’ table — that enables Phillips to maintain hands-on control of its product quality, safety and consistency from sea to table.

Picking of the meat is a critical quality point. As Global Quality Assurance Manager Bobby Love noted, “There are only two people who will find shell (in the crabmeat) — us or the customer. Who do you want to find it?” Phillips brands its crab as “virtually shell-free,” which it ensures through a highly controlled hand-picking process conducted beneath shell-illuminating blacklight.

“Quality starts right at the dock; it starts right with the fishermen,” Love says in a video on the company’s Web site. “So owning our own facilities enables us to really procure a quality product to start with.” Each crab is steamed immediately upon arrival at the mini-plant, then the crab is picked in temperature-controlled rooms, graded, then packed into its “black can” — all within 24 hours of being taken from the sea.

Before the crab leaves its Asian plant, sample cans are tested to ensure the crab meets all Phillips quality standards. “In Quality Control, what we do is ensure the highest quality product is coming into the country,” Love said. Before the crab meat goes into production in the U.S., it undergoes a five-point quality check:

• upon purchase of the raw materials
• when the meat is picked prior to hermetically sealing
• after pasteurization
• when the meat is shipped from Asia to the U.S.
• on arrival in the U.S.

The checks include sensory testing for taste, texture and aroma; testing for shell content and appearance of meat; and microbiological testing. While testing also continues throughout the production cycle — at the beginning, middle and end — it is the front-end checks which are among the most important. “We definitely want to make sure, before we start, that we’re where we need to be,” said Process Improvement Manager Greg Kraft. “We want everything to be prevented in the front. If we put it only at the end, we’d miss too much.”

TESTING. “Phillips has very strict standards on visual and sensory properties,” Love said. To uphold these standards, samples of Phillips crab meat undergo organoleptic testing at virtually every major production step. The meat is rated on four key points: flavor, aroma, appearance and texture.

These four tests are the key to determining quality of the meat and whether it is good enough to be a Phillips-brand product. Although regulatory standards accept as passing anything above the grading “borderline,” Phillips accepts only mid- and high-passing grades for its crab. “If it fails, it fails. We don’t care about the level of failure,” Love said, adding, “If it’s not of the highest quality, it’s not our product.”

Despite this stringent level of acceptance, Phillips goes far beyond the sensory and standard microbiological in its testing processes, Love said. “If the validated process is strictly adhered to and all monitor records verify we followed our regulatory, food safety and quality protocols exactly, then there’s no deviation.”

THE SIZE OF THE LUMP. The phrase was stated by so many during the morning tour of the plant that it seems to have become a Phillips mantra: “The value of crab meat is in the size of the lump.”

As explained by Shirley Phillips in the company’s online video, “My mother always used to say, ‘Handle that crabmeat like they were eggs. Do not wreck my lumps. They’re precious.’”

This same consideration for the lumps remains a key part of Phillips today and one of the primary reasons that Phillips still uses hand production — from sea to table. At its origin, every crab is hand-picked and each crab lump counted then placed — by hand — in precise position in the cans,  which are never larger than one pound.

Even at the production plant, which processes six million pounds per year, crab is received in the one-pound cans, a quality control which ensures the integrity of the lumps. In addition, Phillips still follows the original family recipes for its crab cakes — recipes based on one-pound cans.

Cans of crab are opened by a hand-driven machine, and the meat is then gently hand-mixed in eight-pound tubs. When producing Phillips’ signature lump crab cake, the flake meat is mixed in first, then sauce and cracker meal are blended in. Finally the jumbo lump meat is laid on top. It is not mixed in at all, said Quality Assurance Manager Earl Nichols, in order to preserve the lumps.

Corrective action flow charts are a common sight throughout the Phillips plant. The tub is out of weight specs? Check the chart — it tells the worker to first check the calibration of the sauce pump, and move on from there to the cracker meal weigher. And if it is a fraction of a fraction of an ounce out of weight, the tub does not get passed on to the line.

Consistency is an absolute at Phillips. “It all started with Mr. Phillips trying to get a consistent product in his restaurant,” Love said. And the standard has been retained to ensure that “the customer gets the very same product every time.”

Once formed, the cakes pass over a check weigher to ensure consistency, then are quick frozen by a two- to three-minute passage through a liquid-nitrogen tunnel, coming out “rock hard,” Love said, explaining that the quick freeze protects the integrity of the product and enables it to retain its internal moisture.

Even with the plant temperature maintained well below regulatory requirements, Phillips’ quality standards ensure that every crab cake, once it hits the line, is in the warehouse freezer immediately.

FOOD SAFETY. In many ways food quality and food safety are inextricably linked, but in just as many ways the extra steps taken for safety at Phillips simply add to the final quality of the product:

From the sea — Phillips believes that only the best raw materials will result in the best product, thus only live, active, sizeable crabs make the first cut, with lightweight, undersized, paper shell or dead crabs rejected at the point of collection. Those wild-caught blue swimming crab that do get accepted are immediately steamed upon arrival at the mini-plant. Once cooled and debacked, the meat is picked over ice in a cooled room to keep the crab at the proper temperature. Phillips even processes all its own ice — even though the crabmeat never touches the ice.

Into the can — From the outside in, Phillips crab containers are constructed for safety. It is such an important safety point for Phillips that the can is checked both before leaving the Asian processing plant and when coming into the U.S. production plant, with seam checking as a critical control point. With double-seamed sealing to create a thermal barrier; a double lacquer interior liner to stop tin migration; and origin, plant and time/date coding enabling half-hour traceability for each individual can, Phillips cans for safety.

Into the heat — Phillips pasteurizes its crab, implementing the controlled thermal process to destroy natural pathogenic microorganisms such as Salmonella, Listeria, E. coli, and C. botulimn, and extend shelf-life while using high-tech equipment to monitor the can’s interior temperature for quality.

Across the ocean — To maintain quality, it is essential that the crab be maintained at a temperature between 28° F and 38° F. Maintaining this temperature through the two-month voyage from Asia to the U.S. is not always an easy thing, but, at least for Phillips, it is always a monitored thing. In each container ship on which the crab is transported time and temperature monitors are placed inside two master cartons to record time and temperature. The devices take a temperature reading every 52 minutes from the time the crab leaves the Asian plant until it arrives at the U.S. plant where the device recordings are reviewed to ensure the temperatures remained within the safety ranges.

Through the process — While many plants distinguish areas and assigned employees by garment color to prevent cross contamination, Phillips takes its color coding a step further, distinguishing managers, sanitarians, line workers, maintenance personnel and visitors by hairnet and coat colors. If any employee leaves the processing area, he or she must change into a new garment before returning.

Through detection — Just before final packaging and the trip to the warehouse, the cakes are run through a metal detector. Rejected cakes, however, are not simply pushed off the line, they are dropped into a locked box which can be opened only by a supervisor or manager — all of whom are HACCP trained in accordance with FDA guidelines, as well as Serv-Safe trained. Immediately retrieved, the rejected items are marked and allowed only one redo, according to Phillips standards.

Out the door — Phillips focuses its packaging energies on labels and accuracy verification: Once sealed, Phillips cans and boxed retail products are packed in plain brown shipping boxes, and according to company specifications:

• Labels are produced the day before production, then verified for net weight, allergens and other specifications the day of production.
• Only the quality assurance and plant manager can access regulatory labels.
• In every run, sample boxes are pulled from the final conveyor for a net weight verification by QA personnel.

Frequent checks are run on the plant database to verify bar code/product compliance.

Most food recalls are allergen-based as a result of mislabeling, Love said, making label verification a critical component of product safety. That’s why the company goes to such great lengths to ensure the accuracy of its labeling.

HONORS & AWARDS. Maintaining high standards has not only made Phillips one of the most recognizable names in local seafood restaurants and retail stores — a recognition that is growing across the country, it has resulted in almost 30 awards for the family business since 2001, including the 2007 Lifetime Industry Achievement Award presented to founders Brice and Shirley Phillips by the Restaurant Association of Maryland; the induction of both into the Maryland Food Industry Hall of Fame in 2006; naming of President Mark Sneed, who passed away in July, as the Baltimore Museum of Industry’s Industrialist of the Year 2006; and SYSCO Corporation’s recognition of Phillips Foods as a Top 40 Supplier in 2006.

As such awards indicate, with all its quality standards, safety processes and consistency specifications, the final credit for Phillips quality and safety should go to its talented and committed staff. “Everyone has to own quality. Everyone has to own food safety. Everyone has to own production safety,” Love said. And it is this employee ownership that creates the real Phillips family.

Although actual execution of the business is now in its third generation of the Phillips bloodline, its family extends well beyond blood. Love himself has been with Phillips for 30 years, Vice President of Marketing Honey Konicoff for 15, and Plant Manager Steve Malecki for 35 years; and all feel just as close to the family and dedicated to the business as they would had they been descended from Great Grandpa Phillips himself. “It is a family business,” Love said. “And we are family.”

Lisa Lupo is staff editor of QA magazine. Companies interested in being the  possible subject of a corporate profile in QA magazine can contact Lupo at llupo@giemedia.com.

In 1956, Brice and Shirley Phillips opened the first Phillips Restaurant in Ocean City, Md. It began on a dining area of the porch of the carryout which also housed the family’s living area. Though the restaurant was opened simply as a way of selling the extra crab from their Hooper’s Island packing house, the family’s business expanded at a pace well beyond anyone’s hopes or expectations. Within a year, guest waiting lines led the family to expand capacity to 40 seats, then 80 seats the following year, and continue annual expansion until the restaurant sat 1,400 people.

With such success, the Phillips family was urged by friends to move to Baltimore where the friends predicted further expansion abilities. The move was incredibly successful, but within a few years the state’s crab populations began declining. The restaurant started to run out of the crab for which it had become famous.

By this time, son Steve (now CEO and President of Phillips Foods) had come into the business and took on the task of sourcing more crab. It was while on a trip in the Philippines that he found a blue swimming crab that was virtually identical to the Chesapeake Bay crab and  not considered as a valuable commodity in that country.

After conducting a vast array of self-funded research studies, Steve purchased land and built a processing plant on a remote Philippine island. There, he hired fishermen, supplying their equipment and teaching them to fish for crab, and hired plant workers to pick the crab and package it for shipping back to the States.

What began as a solution to the Phillips’ problem of crab supply became the foundation for Phillips Foods — a division launched in 1990 and now a  $160-plus million business, with its main production plant in a 270,000-square-foot structure in Baltimore and processing facilities in Southeast Asia and Central and South America.