Going once, going twice...

The Oscar Mayer auction draws crowds for some very big equipment

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“We’ve condensed it a lot,” Sam Reese says, sweeping his arm across a basement room loaded with equipment. “Here we have some scales, some label printers. Metal detectors.

A lot of motors and pumps.” And this is only the start. “Loaders, conveyors and mixers are scattered throughout six floors.”

Reese is the communications director for Rabin Worldwide, which now owns Madison’s Oscar Mayer site along with Reich Brothers Holdings. Rabin is an auction firm that specializes in industrial and food processing auctioneering, so this is their kind of job. We’re about an hour away from the start of the three-day auction to liquidate everything that isn’t nailed down in here — and a lot of stuff that is.

“Today we’re doing 700 lots, and it’s the majority of the big equipment, a lot of the big money items. About 30 grinders, mixers and blenders. They can go for anywhere from $10,000 to 80,000 on a good day. Apiece.”

Rabin holds about two auctions a month, and one or two of these major auctions every year. So they know what to expect. Reese says it always works out about the same way.

“Locals want the shop equipment, maybe a couple tubs. Then there are the big producers, who are cooking meats and stuff, that want the sausage stuffers, the grinders, the mixers, the loading elevators and conveyors. And then there are the scrappers.”

The auction is broken into three days. Wednesday, day one, includes the big-money items, the really specialized stuff. Day two is smaller items — pumps, compressors, tanks. Day three is devoted to the shop, which includes everything from three-foot-long wrenches to arbor presses and drills.

“We have regular customers for all the big-ticket items, and people who follow Rabin around for the electrical items, the bearings. We see a lot of familiar faces at these things.”

Flipping through the auction booklet is wild. Vat dumper. Chub conveyor. Jacketed vacuum paddle blender. Meat pump. Wiener loader.

Have you been thinking of getting a smoker? Skip Costco. Get this one, which occupies 150 square feet and can smoke about 12,000 pounds of meat at a time. Rabin even offered bidders a deal before the auction started — if you buy a full 10’ x 15’ stainless steel smokehouse unit, they’ll cover the cost of removing the walls to get it out. You have to pay only for the crane to get the equipment down from the sixth floor.

This is very specialized equipment, much of it custom-created for this building, that operates at an unimaginable scale. There are precious few people who need industrial tubs and smoker racks.

But Jonny Hunter does.

Hunter, of Madison’s Underground Food Collective and its sibling, Underground Meats, goes to plenty of auctions. But he’s never been to one like this.

The scale of the equipment at Oscar Mayer makes it a tough sell, even to someone whose business is to produce a lot of meat and sausage. “You can do more production out of this in an hour than we can do in a month,” Hunter says. And he’s pointing at a single machine.

We walk into a cavernous former production area on the third floor.

“So this is a refrigerator that we’re in right now,” Hunter says. “At least 4,000 square feet. This is twice the size of my house.” There are heavy-duty stainless-steel bins stacked as far as the eye can see.

“These could each hold about 1,500 pounds of meat. There’s probably” — he counts and multiplies quickly — “what, 200 here? 1,500 times 200, that’s 300,000 pounds of meat in just this section. All the bins in here, total, could do 500,000 pounds of meat. In a year, Underground [produces] about 100,000 pounds. This production area could probably do 150,000 in a day.”

Which is why Hunter is instead setting his sights on some smaller pieces, including a collection of 30 stainless steel racks for hanging sausage. “These racks would probably cost $2,500 each, new. My hope is to get these for 300 bucks a cart. So I would do all right.”

Once bidding starts, in the former corporate offices, it comes fast and furious. A Hobart mixer goes for $2,000. A metal detector hits $15,000. A paddle grinder goes for a hundred grand.

Afterwards, Reese declines to give a number for the total value of the auction. But he says Rabin was “extremely pleased” with sales.

Hunter walks away with the racks he wanted, some baking equipment and a vacuum sealer.

At least some of Oscar Mayer’s equipment will remain in service in Madison.