Niche chicken processor moves from Riverbank to a Modesto plant with a long history
A Modesto meat plant dating to 1951 is now home to a chicken processor that outgrew its Riverbank site.
Campfire Meats employs 91 people just off Crows Landing Road, doing custom cuts for restaurants and other clients. It leases the former space of Yosemite Meat, which moved its processing of beef, pork and other items to Stockton in 2018.
The switch allowed Campfire to increase its volume by about 20% to 1 million pounds a month, owner Thomas Mathias said during a tour Thursday for The Modesto Bee.
He has about 65,000 square feet at the new site, along the Tuolumne River just south of downtown. His former plant, on Roselle Avenue in central Riverbank, had only about 10,000.
The new site provides plenty of room for slicing, grinding and other processing of the chicken, some of it cooked before it’s shipped. It has much more refrigeration and five loading docks, up from one in Riverbank. Highway 99 is a block away, offering easy access for trucks.
But the extra space will not create many new jobs. Mathias said he might add about 20 for an upcoming beef line, but that’s it.
“The kinds of products we do are niches, small quantities,” he said. “I never want to be a big player.”
Campfire gets its raw product from other companies that slaughter the birds, mostly Foster Farms, an industry giant based in Livingston. This includes turkey at times along with the primary business of chicken.
Pandemic flips chicken business
Campfire relocated amid a COVID-19 pandemic that upended its markets. Sales to restaurants dropped about 70% because of limits on indoor dining, Mathias said.
The company has continued to fill orders for restaurants doing drive-thru and other pandemic-safe methods. One local retailer, the Cost Less Food chain, sells chicken under the Campfire label.
The business specializes in portion control, which saves slicing time in the kitchen for chefs. They can order plain or seasoned chicken pieces in various sizes, with or without skin or bones.
The company makes the nuggets for Chicken Barn, sliced from the breast rather than the pressed meat that many kids eat. It ships broth for the Pacific Foods brand of organic soups.
The buyers are mostly in California, Oregon and Nevada, but some products go as far as the East Coast.
And Campfire has sold cooked chicken to the federal government for food boxes for families in need during the pandemic.
“That’s been a nice boost for us,” Mathias said. “It’s kept us really busy.”
Campfire is among the “essential” businesses allowed to keep operating since COVID-19 emerged 11 months ago, with safeguards. Each worker is tested twice a week and must wear a mask and socially distance from colleagues. This in on top of the sanitation and protective gear long used to prevent food-borne diseases in chicken.
Owner has roots in England
Mathias started the company under the Compass Foods name in 2012. It was briefly in Waterford before moving to Riverbank.
The Campfire name evokes the time Mathias spent working cattle in the southern Sierra Nevada. But his is not the typical cowboy tale. He grew up in Glastonbury, England, the son of a local newspaper editor. An interest in the western lifestyle prompted him to move to California in 1997.
Mathias went from the beef industry into working for pork and chicken producers. His jobs have included broker for Foster Farms and, from 1999 to 2001, pig purchasing for none other than Yosemite Meat.
“When they offered me this lease, it was like full circle,” he said.
The plant’s previous occupant now operates in a new plant on East Mariposa Road in Stockton. It was renamed to Yosemite Foods and handles beef, pork, poultry, lamb and goat.
This company has its own roots in a distant part of the world. Founder John Lau came from Hong Kong to Modesto in 1969. He and his wife Gay started the business on Yosemite Boulevard in 1981 and moved to the Zeff Road plant a decade later.
The Zeff plant had processed pork under the Victor Meat name since 1951, according to Bee archives.
The Lau family has an even deeper history in Modesto. John Lau’s grandfather, Sing Lau, opened a meat market on H Street in the 1930s. He later returned to his native land.
John’s father, Chuen Lau, owned Whitmore Market in Ceres until the early 1980s.
This story was originally published February 16, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
