Canadian Vending

The glass fabricating plant of Duplate of Canada in
Oshawa which employs some 850 persons has also
clianged its food setup. Prior to coming to an agree-
ment with TRS it had its own manually operated cafe-
teria plus Venders operated by an outsider. All this has
now given way to countervends, attendants and Venders.
Well known food service man, Harold Brown, who
ran Coffee Time Limited from Queen Street East, in
Toronto, sold his company to TRS a year ago. Al
Teeter is the Manager of this operation which now
sezyices principally office buildings through cafeterias
and snack bars.
These new and extensive activities have necessitated
greater output from the large commissary located in the
11,000 square foot Oshawa, headquarters building. This
has been achieved by better use of space, more employ-
ees, improved methods and the installation within the
last three months of a new automatic packaging machine
which wraps sandwiches and bakery items at the rate
of up to 130 pieces per minute and which can rapidly
be altered to. cope with different sizes and shapes. It is
manually fed but cuts its own cardboard mounting
cards, form fills and heat seals the cellophane overwrap
into a pillow shape. This new piece of equipment bears
the trademark of "Rose-Forgrave" - Gateshead-on-
Tyne, England. It replaces a U 6 "National" machine
from the Package Machinery Co. of Toronto and
Montreal which had a wrapping rate varying between
12 and 24 pieces per minute. In action this new bit of
equipment has to be seen to be believed; its output is
quite fantastic.
always shown an exceptionally high degree of initiative
in administrative and technical matters. Among the
things it has employed - often the first to do so in the
industry - are
* Production line assembly of sandwiches from a mov-
ing belt system designed and built in 1966 by the
firm's commissary to give a 50% - 66½ % increase
in output per employee.
* It was the first firm in the industry to go to high
speed packaging machines with the U 6 which multi-
plied manual efforts by anywhere from 150% to
466% .
* Early large scale use of Litton Micro-wave ovens.
* The design and use of Countervend - hot and cold
mobile buffets for rapid lunch time feeding was an
original with TRS or Tony's as it then ·was.
* The firm designed and had built in Oshawa to its
specifications, aluminum bodied mobile catering truck
bodies which showed great savings and advantages
over previous types.
* Attended locations - if only for reasons of sanita-
tion have always been a feature of this firm's philos-
ophy.
* Supermarket type checking and control out at selling
price of items - in-returns at selling price. Mid-
Using Lates Innovations
Always innovative and "quick-on-the-draw", where
new methods and ideas are concerned, TRS has gone
over to freeze-dried coffee in a big way, selling it from
machines and manually
from its trucks. The locations at Goodyear of Canada
and Ontario Hydro at Pickering vend freeze-dried coffee
at 15c with good customer acceptance reflected in sub-
stantial sales. The catering trucks now use all "pow-
dered" ingredients for tea, chocolate and coffee and
only carry a supply of hot water. One of the firm's
employees has devised a simple hand cranked dispenser
which "throws" the set amount of freeze-dried coffee
or other product into a cup to which the hot water
is added. This makes for very speedy serving and no
returns of unsold brews. Truck hot drinks sell at 15c;
again the freeze-dried coffee has gone down well with
customers, there have been no complaints about it, sales
have been good.
Big Canned Drink Business
(ii
TRS also vends a great many canned soft drinks at
15c. Asked if the profitability of vending soft drinks
in cans was worthwhile at that price, Mr. Sinclair had
this to say, "Yes, it is, when you buy them by the car-
load and take into account that can venders are rela-
tively cheap to buy compared with cup machines and
there is no comparison when it comes to ease of servic-
ing and reliability. This cuts down investment in outlay
of cash and labour and .results in very little down time
because of machine unserviceability". You just don't get
the problems with can venders."
Leaders in This Field
TRS has an impressive record in the food service
industry as a rapidly expanding company which has
Canadian Vending Magazine
25