Form-Filled Bulk Grits: How They Ship, Store and Re-Heat in a Commercial Kitchen

The format

Frogmore's pre-cooked grits are cooked to each client's specification, frozen quickly and form-filled into bags of roughly 4 to 4.5 lb.

Stone-ground and quick grits are the two styles best suited to this process. Every bag is lot-coded so any batch can be traced back through production.

How they ship

The bags are cased and palletized frozen to distributor spec. They then move through the client's frozen distribution, whether that is a broadline distributor program or a dedicated cold-chain carrier.

Frogmore is the manufacturer, not a broker. Product leaves the plant ready for the distributor's frozen network.

How they store

Keep the bags frozen until you need them. Shelf life is nearly one year frozen.

Because each bag is a manageable size, a kitchen can pull only what the day's service needs instead of planning around one large batch.

How they re-heat

The grits are built for a boil-in-bag re-therm. The bag goes straight into the re-therm to bring the grits back up to temperature, then they are held in a warming third pan in the back of house. Follow the re-therm steps in your own kitchen SOP and the product spec for your program.

How long they hold

This is where the process pays off. Because of the way the grits are cooked and frozen, their viscosity holds for nearly an hour after re-therm before they start to thicken.

If service slows, the grits stay servable longer. When a late table orders grits, the cook re-therms a bag instead of cooking a new pot.

Who uses this format

• Breakfast, brunch and Southern restaurant chains where grits are a daily menu item
• Foodservice distributors adding a frozen grits item to their line
• Brands putting their own grits recipe under a private label

Most clients find a batch of about 800 gallons is the sweet spot.

See specifications and FAQs for cooked grits manufacturing, or start a discovery form.