Foodservice News & Events

From Jake’s - Texas & Louisiana Foodservice Distributor and Restaurant Supply

 

Jake’s Finer Foods – Food Logistics Magazine’s “Golden Pallet Award”

Jake’s is proud to announce its selection as Food Logistics Magazine’s Golden Pallet Award winner for Best Large Distribution Center for 2010!  This category was open to warehouses larger than 100,000 square feet.  The Golden Pallets, according to Food Logistics Magazine, are the first food industry awards to recognize outstanding achievement in warehousing.  Jake’s new 180,000 square foot distribution center and corporate headquarters, which opened its doors in February, uses technologies and material handling systems designed to increase efficiency, reduce costs and significantly cut energy use and environmental waste.  According to its own internal projections, these solutions will help Jake’s save approximately $4.6 million over the next five years.  Armand Page, Jake’s vice president of operations and IT, is prominently featured in the April/May issue of Food Logistics Magazine, where he talks at length about the three-year process that Jake’s went through to design and build the distribution center, keeping in mind hundreds of best practices learned from within the foodservice distribution industry.

The following is an excerpt of the article entitled, “Jake’s Finest Moment,” published in the April/May issue of Food Logistics:

Sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith. That’s what Armand Page did when he decided to build a distribution center around an unusual method for picking slow moving items.  Page is the vice president of operations and IT for Jake’s Finer Foods, a full-line foodservice distributor serving independent restaurants, multi-unit restaurants and foodservice retail companies.  During the past three years, under his guidance, the company designed and built a 180,000-square-foot distribution center and corporate headquarters in Houston. The DC is Phase One of an eventual development of a 360,000-square-foot refrigerated facility. It uses technologies and material handling systems that will increase efficiency, reduce costs and signifcantly cut energy use and environmental waste-and help the company save $4.6 million dollars over the next five years.  For its environmental efforts as well as its commitment to passing long-term savings on to its customers, Jake’s Finer Foods has been named the winner of Food Logistics’ Golden Pallet Award in the large distribution center category.  The Golden Pallet Awards, sponsored by Food Logistics, are the first food industry awards to recognize excellence in warehousing.

Jake’s, which posted $80 million in revenue last year, was founded in 1946.  The family-run company has come a long way since Kervin E. Jacob (Jake) started the business delivering eggs door-to-door to household customers.  Today it sells more than 1 million eggs a week and delivers 8,000 SKUs to 1,500 customers in Texas and Western Louisiana. “We simply outgrew our facility. The old warehouse was just under 80,000 square feet across three separate buildings,” says Page.  “We consolidated the buildings into one and more than doubled the square footage and tripled the cube in this new DC…”

 

For the complete article as it appeared in the April/May issue of Food Logistics Magazine, please click here to visit their site.

 

Join Jake's Finer Foods for our 14th Annual Golf Classic!

Jake's welcomes its customers to take part in an exciting day at the 2010 Jake's Finer Foods Annual Golf Classic on the beautiful greens of Northgate Country Club.  The action will begin at noon with a crawfish boil, followed by a shotgun start on the course at 2:00pm.  Dinner and an awards program will follow immediately after tournament completion with prizes for our top foursome (and maybe the bottom one, too!). Please check out Jake's Facebook Fan Page for more details. For information on how your company can particpate, please contact your Jake's Account Manager today!

Jake's extends its thanks to the following partners for their generous sponsorship of the 2010 Jake's Annual Golf Classic: ISA, Pactiv, R3 Redistribution, Tyson Foods, First Place Foods, Oak Farms, Solo Cup, Dart, Ventura Foods, Tetley, KeyImpact, FSI Southwest, Hausman Foods, Allen Canning, El Matador Foods, Seattle's Best Coffee, Lott Marketing and Lakeland Marketing.

 

Now Open!

Jake’s Foodservice Central Corporate Headquarters and Central Distribution Center Located at 13400 Hollister (Inside Beltway 8 and Hwy 249) Our new facilities are designed with one thing in mind – to serve you better. Jake’s new headquarters was painstakingly designed with these features:

• State-of-the-art 180,000 sq. ft. of space, expandable to 360,000
• 7 different temperature zones for the ultimate in product quality
• A modern meeting facility with multi-media capability, where you can consult withJake’s foodservice professionals
• A full-featured exhibition kitchen, where you can get menu and food preparation ideas
• Logistics focused design for the efficient distribution of over 20,000 products

Ask your Account Manager for a sneak peek with a behind-the-scenes tour of our new facility!