Charlie’s Chicken Roll Factory was started by Chef Charlie that turned one of his most feared assessments at Prue Leith Culinary Institute into a business, which is the Chicken Galantine.
A chicken galantine is a whole de-boned Chicken that is carefully de-boned leaving very little meat on the carcass and removing all the bones without piercing the skin. The chicken is then flattened and stuffed with different filling combinations, rolled and trussed. It is packaged in a ready made labelled oven foil container with complete cooking instructions. It is a gourmet de-boned chicken roll and customers just de-frost it and pop into the oven.
Charlie’s Chicken Roll Factory was started by Chef Charlie that turned one of his most feared assessments at Prue Leith Culinary Institute into a business, which is the Chicken Galantine. A chicken galantine is a whole de-boned Chicken that is carefully de-boned leaving very little meat on the carcass and removing all the bones without piercing the skin. The chicken is then flattened and stuffed with different filling combinations, rolled and trussed. It is packaged in a ready made labelled oven foil container with complete cooking instructions. It is a gourmet de-boned chicken roll and customers just de-frost it and pop into the oven. We sell the product frozen and have 14 different filling combinations.
We take away the enormous task of de-boning a chicken without piecing the skin and stuffing it and making it a ready made delicious gourmet chicken roll. Nobody has the time to do it, so we have taken away the time and effort from the customer and making it easy for them to present and impress their guests and family with this Chicken Galantine.
I have added a link to an article written by Prue Leith Culinary Institute that perfectly describes my journey here.
Our roadmap started with just online orders during lockdown level 5 in May 2020. We then explored food markets. We have been so blessed with our markets in Pretoria. We have successful got into a food retail popup shop in Irene Village mall and we are looking at more Retail Deli’s. At this point our online orders have been hugely successful all over Gauteng. I have trained my friend Sonia when she was retrenched from her job in Fourways and she is now covering the Fourways area for us.
We have been invited to a market in Dullstroom that runs every second month, so we will exploring the Dullstroom Market as well and will use this market for marketing purposes for all those customers from Gauteng that is visiting for the weekend and obviously pop one of our chickens into their ovens or on the Webber for the weekend while sipping on some wine in front of the fire. Our journey going forward would probably to look at South Africa, how we going to get there I am not sure yet. But this is part of the plan.
Food prices is probably the biggest problem for any food vendor and chef. We have secured some great suppliers with reasonable prices and the quality of the product and it’s ingredients. So we are always exploring new possible suppliers that can offer us better prices, but yet quality products.
Another challenge obviously is Covid and the restrictions on markets, but we have been marketing our online orders and deliveries on Fridays that assisted with this challenge. It has become a market of its own and we planning to expand even more on this.
