Known as America’s first fast-food hamburger chain, the Columbus, Ohio-based White Castle owns and operates over 325 restaurants and a retail division bringing their iconic Sliders to retail freezer aisles nationwide.

In January, the company promoted Anthony Joseph as its next president, the first non-family member to hold the position in its 104-year history. Joseph, who has been with White Castle since 2016, has led the company’s legal, risk management, organizational development, technology and corporate relations functions. Fourth-generation family member Lisa Ingram remains CEO and board chair.

“Our CPG business has one, very differentiated part of product development, compared with our competitors and that’s, of course, our Castles,” Joseph said. “We are able to leverage favored menu items that are proven performers for developing and extending our portfolio of grocery items. In addition to our Castle menu as inspiration, product ideas and enhancements originate from our internal research and development team, consumer studies and great ideas we receive from customers. Our CPG business has great reach that extends beyond the footprint of our restaurants.”

Joseph now oversees White Castle’s retail and manufacturing divisions, as part of his new role. White Castle owns and operates its own Slider Provider meat plants, bakeries and frozen-Slider retail plants.

White Castle last month gave R&FF a tour of their Vandalia, Ohio production facility responsible for the majority of the company’s retail frozen slider products, which are carried in retailer freezers in all 50 states.

Originally opened in 2014, the plant is also known as the “House That Bill Built” in honor of Bill Ingram, the former president and CEO who created the company’s retail division. Customers were taking Sliders home from restaurants and freezing them for future meals. While some in the industry scoffed at the idea, White Castle became the first fast-food restaurant to offer its menu items for purchase at grocery stores for preparation at home.

A plant expansion in 2022 doubled the size and production capacity: the 150,000-square-foot facility is capable of producing up to 1 million packaged sliders a day. It also allowed the installation of more technology.

“When we entered retail, a lot of people told us we were nuts, that nobody would buy restaurant food in a grocery store. You know what? It’s been fantastic,” said Dave Rife, vice president of manufacturing at White Castle and a fourth-generation family member. “These lines are very unique to us. Our product is so unique that no one really had an off-the-shelf solution. As we look at technology, it’s not about replacing people. It’s all about working smarter not harder.”

Logs of meat come in frozen from the company’s two processing plants (Ohio and Indiana) and are sliced on one of the site’s four production lines – separated for plain or cheese sliders. Buns come in whole from the company’s Cincinnati-area bakery, and are tempered and sliced on the production line.

Patties are placed onto onions and steam cooked to 190 degrees Fahrenheit on massive grills, where they are flipped midway so the onions land on top. Sliders are married with buns, cheese dropped (if applicable), and then inspected for quality and food safety both.

“It’s the exact same process we use in the restaurants,” Rife said.

In fact the only difference between the CPG and restaurant Sliders: no pickles on the frozen product.

“We don’t put a pickle on because it doesn’t freeze well and it doesn’t microwave well when you heat it back up,” Rife said. (Pro tip: add your own pickles at home).

Finished sliders go through a flow-wrapper and enter a spiral freezer for 90 minutes to cool down to temperature. Sliders then drop via a slide onto the packaging line.

“At our home office we have a replica of the freezer slide for our team members to get from the second floor down to the first,” Rife said.

Each production line has its own packaging line, with the 2022 expansion adding robotic case packing and automated packaging and palletizing. A vision-guidance system looks at the orientation of each slider two-pack, something still done by hand in the other half of the building.

An orchestra of about 200 people and equipment make about 120 pallets of finished product per day in 16 hours of daily production. Another eight-hour shift is known as the “clean team.”

The company is embracing different flavors, forms and subcategories that appeal to new customers and longtime fans known as Cravers.

“We pursue a creative approach to elevate the brand in other ways as well, such as our ‘Borderlands’ movie promotion in 2024 with special restaurant and retail packaging that featured augmented reality, all in efforts to entice new buyers, initiate trials and remind lapsed purchasers of our presence in the frozen aisle,” Joseph said. “New items, non-product innovation, packaging changes and meaningful promotional spend all works in concert to expand our connection with consumers.”

Joseph’s current crave: the new French Toast Slider.

“And in the grocery aisle, it’s our recently launched Double Cheese Sliders, which we are excited to see is gaining distribution nationwide rapidly,” he said. “I am very proud and humbled to be the first non-family member to be named president of White Castle. White Castle is an iconic brand with an incredible legacy that means so much so many of our most loyal customers, who we call Cravers, and to the many team members over the years who’ve made White Castle an important part of their lives. So, I am excited about the opportunity to contribute to this legacy and to help build and sustain the brand into the future.”

With over three decades in the frozen aisle, the CPG product has brought the brand nationwide.

“It helps on the restaurant side too, because as you go to a new market, people know who you are,” Rife said. “When you don’t live in an area where there’s not a White Castle, you can still feed the Crave. As long as people keep buying Sliders, we’ll keep making them.”