The Day the Division President Called Me Out

Hey Reader,

Four years ago, I got a butt-chewing from a division president over quality issues coming out of one of my Case Ready facilities.

It was one of those moments where you can either deflect or own it. I owned it.

That decision changed everything about how I thought about quality in fresh meat operations.

When the Wheels Came Off

The facility had an earned reputation for inconsistent quality but holiday week four years ago took us to another level of problems. What started with poor raw material quality exploded because quality had never been built into the process. It was inspected at the end. Flagged after the fact.

Managed as a problem instead of a discipline.

The Conversation That Started It All

Five years prior to this situation, I had been challenged on quality by Russ Richardson, the 3rd VP of Meat I worked for during my tenure at Kroger. He was asking if we had the right specs and if we should be tighter. My response, "let us consistently hit the current target before we start moving it." That conversation stuck with me. Five years later, it became a lot more relevant.

Going Down the Rabbit Hole

The challenge from Russ prompted me to go down a rabbit hole I have not fully climbed out of since.

Toyota. McDonald's. Chick-fil-A. Apple. Companies who deliver a consistent quality experience every single day, no exceptions. I not only studied them from a distance but dove in deep with Chick-fil-A building a multi-year collaboration with their team.

What I kept finding was the same principle underneath all of it: quality is not a checkpoint. It is a design decision. You either build it into the system or you chase it forever.

Until that point in my career, quality was an assumed outcome. We had a spec so therefore we should be delivering quality. That assumption blew up in my face five years later.

Full Circle

When this holiday crisis hit, it became the full circle moment from that initial conversation with Russ. Years of thinking about quality, finally being put to work.

Owning the outcome meant first flight out on Monday morning and spending a week breaking down the operational process. We realized you can't inspect at the end and hope to catch any problems. Instead, we instituted work cells at specific transition points. Defined quality in and out of the work cell. And mandatory QA inspection leaving the cell with the most critical element being an E-stop that QA could hit any time they thought quality was getting out of control.

Not throwing out steaks or packages. Doing dedicated learning and training on the expectation. Again and again. After six weeks, the steak trimming team was policing themselves. That's the moment I knew we had this thing moving forward.

The Industry Is Still Chasing It

Fresh meat operations are still largely chasing quality problems.

We inspect, we rework, we markdown, we write off shrink. And most of that cost is invisible because it never shows up as a single line item. It bleeds out across yield, labor, returns, and customer complaints spread over months.

The operators who are getting ahead of this are not doing anything exotic. They are asking a different set of questions: Where does quality actually get created or compromised in this process? Who owns it? What does the team see every day that leadership does not?

The Real Leadership Lesson

Those questions require humility. They require being willing to look outside your own walls.

That is the leadership lesson I took from this situation. The butt-chewing was not the problem. It was the signal. The work started the moment we stopped defending the operation and started asking what we needed to fix.

If you are dealing with quality issues that feel like a recurring fire, the problem probably is not your QA team. It lives in your process design, not your QA department.

Let's talk about it. Reply here or connect with me directly.

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​Judson Armentrout​
FreshOps | Practical Insights for Fresh Food Operations

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