Meat + Poultry - August 2016 - 32

COVER STORY

Creativity and perseverance is
Schoenfellinger's modus operandi. "The
maintenance department cringes when I
mention that I have a five-minute project,"
he laughs.

DRIVEN BY DAVINCI

Schoenfellinger's
fascination with
mechanical tinkering and
his inventiveness date
back to his childhood.
His projects evolved from
toys to automobiles. He
recalls that in the 1970s he
built a replica of a 1927
Mercedes Benz SSK.

32

times. They can utilize continuous runs to
make mass quantities of frankfurters per hour;
but they don't change over.
"We make over a hundred different SKUs
of frankfurters: six inch, five inch, footlongs,
different flavors, different brands, different
pack sizes," he says.
Rich Wright, vice president of sales and
marketing, adds, "It's not just skinless, mass
produced hot dogs. We are a German company
with German heritage dating back to the 1930s,
so we have a lot of hot dog and sausage recipes
made with natural casings. It's a 4th generation
family company where a lot of the recipes
and a lot of the techniques used back then are
currently used in present day production."
Talking to Schoenfellinger about
production throughput is like listening to a
lecture on the Theory of Constraints according
to Schoenfellinger. He is continually solving
the next bottleneck, reducing the next
changeover time, improving the operating
efficiency of the next forming, grinding,
extruding, cooking, chilling or packaging
machine. He refuses to acknowledge that a
bottleneck can't be improved.
"When things aren't right, it's not acceptable
to say, 'Well, that's how it works; there's nothing
we can do.' We're going to find the solution.
I always say, 'There are no problems, only
solutions.' And there always is. It's important
that everything that is to be accomplished
comes to fruition, no matter what. If it takes
three straight days, what we call marathon
weekends, so be it - whatever it takes to
accomplish things," Schoenfellinger explains.

MEAT+ POULTRY | 08.16 | www.meatpoultry.com

How many people can say that they look
back 500 years for their engineering
inspiration? Schoenfellinger credits the
16th century engineer, artist and all around
Renaissance man Leonardo DaVinci as one
of his inspirations. Prominently displayed
in his office is a picture of DaVinci, with the
accompanying quote: "It's a rare engineer who
has the resources to take a product full cycle."
Schoenfellinger explains: "To me, that means
to design it, build it, and run it. A lot of people
get to do one aspect of something. I've had the
opportunity to design, build, and then run the
equipment I designed."
One such DaVinci experience is the unitized
ham molding system that he nurtured from
conception through operation, which he named
the "Unimold System."
"It's an interlinked mold used for pressing
hams into shape during cooking and chilling,"
Schoenfellinger says. The Unimold System
provides consistency in the distribution of heat
during the cooking process, and uniform heat
removal during the chilling process. "Right
around 1986, I developed it while I was at Sandy
Mac, and brought it to Dietz & Watson when I
came here." Its compact size saved space and
labor in processing areas, and the Unimold
tower could be adapted for many different
styles of ham - "slicing hams, pear shaped hams,
round hams. It's perfect for smaller plants that
are doing a lot of different things.
"One thing I remember when I designed the
Unimold System is that I did all the drawings
in the top loft office in a townhouse that I had
in Penn's Landing, Philadelphia, overlooking
the Delaware River. This was a split level
townhouse so it had about seven short flights
of stairs. I had all the drawings which I drew by
hand taped to every wall from the ground floor
to the top floor so I could run up and down the
stairs to compare the interactions and fit of
all the components. This was almost a threedimensional perspective. I was working on the
systems design many times from the night into
the early hours of the morning," he explains.
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