Introdution

The following two videos are interviews with Mr. John Butt and Mr. Brett Swiecinski. Mr. Butt is a manager of a chain privately owned deli's in the New York/New Jersey area. Mr. Swiecinski has worked a various fast food chains, most notably Friendly's and Hooters. The interview with Mr. Butt took place in his home, while the interview with Mr. Swiecinski took place at a local Wendy's. Our original goal for this project was to interview two people who work in the food industry, one who worked in "fast food" and one who worked at a privately owned company, and compare the two. Our definition of "fast food" was supposed to be a restaurant such as McDonald's or Burger King, but we were not able to find someone who worked in such a restaurant in the time allotted. We changed our definition of fast food to a chain of restaurants that appear throughout the country and serve the same type of food, such as a Friendly's or a Chili's. After reviewing the two interviews, we are starting to believe that our research question for our Collaborative Research Project will take a different direction.

Part one interview with John Butt

Part two interview with John Butt

                

                Transcription of the interview with John Butt:
The bakery comes in frozen. Products have a manufacturing date on them and an expiration date on them. You would take it from the expiration date from frozen product. It can stay in the freezer sometimes up to six months, but, once you open it, now you have cut the product almost in half. And then when you thaw it, you have even brought it down more. On a loaf of bread, which we can put out we have 48 hours to sell. What we do, and what I have implemented is, we don’t give it 48 hours. 48 hours is too long for it. You give it a day and a half depending when you make it, so what I have our people do is when they put the bread out, put the time on the sticker when it went out, then we go to the sticker time, to the following day, then I put it out and salvage. We do not keep product on hand. Cold cuts, once you open a package, say it’s a ham, once they open it up, they have 7 days to sell it. Otherwise if you don’t sell it, you have salvage it. Uhh. Salads would be 3 days from the time you open the master container. Everything we do is from what the military tells us. Certain products they have given us 10 days on cold cuts and we say not to that. 7 days is the top. 10 days is ridiculous. No product can hold up 10 days once it hits the air.

Dietz and Watson is a local uhhh meat packing err uhh in Philadelphia, so we get a large amount of Dietz and Watson products. Boars Head is from New York and we get a large amount of theirs. Now the low quality uh products can be from Pennsylvania, New York, from Delaware, it depends, from Virginia. Smithfield is from Virginia they make hams and turkeys, so which is not the high quality like the Boars Head. But every product we get is approved by the military and it must have an expiration date labeled on its package otherwise we cannot accept it. So um not only that uhh a new thing has come in the last year in which we have delved into because the great amount of German, Asian and Italian, we have went to those type of products. So basically some of our products has come from as far away as China, the Philippines, uhhh Italy, Germany and that is a very interesting part of our business, which has grown tremendously. Most of the products from overseas have a longer shelf life than the products from America. They’re better preserved than what Americans have. Doesn’t mean it’s better quality, it’s just better preserved.

We have started with organic about 2 years ago. It didn’t catch on right away. Uhh I imagine it’s flavor issues involved with that. We have tried cold cuts but the price is too much for them. Once the prices goes down I imagine that will also move.

Interview with Brett Swiecinski:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Editted Video

Reflection

Although our project took a different direction than we were hoping it would, it still left us with valuable information that could be used in our Collaborative Research Project. The interview's were very enjoyable to do; we were able to gather a lot of information we would have otherwise not have known about. We had some slight trouble finding a second person to interview, but as soon as Mr. Swiecinski volunteered, we were right on track. Even with our mishap of our recording device not working for half of his interview, Mr. Swiecinski was willing to redo his interview another day to help us. Trying to get one interview onto YouTube was a nightmare, but as soon as we figured out how to change the file, we were back on track. We chose to do one transcription and one edited video to give our project some variety. Editing the video took a lot longer than expected. Transcribing one interview was tedious because we had to stop the video every few seconds to make sure we wrote Mr. Butt's words correctly. As for our participants, Mr. Butt still commutes two hours to work in New York, and Mr. Swiecinski is still not working in any food place. All in all, this project was fun to do, and we have learned a lot of new things about the food industry.