"You want our fat?" he asked, making sure he had heard correctly. Marlene explained that she wanted the cooked fat caps trimmed from finished briskets, kept separately from food scraps, packaging, and anything the kitchens could not account for. She would arrange the collection, assume the expenses once the material was transferred, and relieve Ironwood of the hauling fees attached to those barrels. Rick's eyebrows rose when he counted how many sites she was talking about.
"Lady, you'd save me fourteen hauling bills," he said. "But I can't have somebody driving up whenever they please and getting in the way of service." Marlene slid a one-page schedule across the desk and showed him a proposed route that would follow the kitchens' quietest loading hours. She had already spoken with a carrier that could handle sealed containers and had added a space for an Ironwood employee to sign at each stop. Nothing in her proposal depended on a cook stopping in the middle of lunch to explain himself.
Rick looked it over twice. What he found most impressive was not the potential savings, although he liked those. It was that the woman had apparently thought about the nuisance his company wanted to avoid. She had not arrived promising a miracle or asking for an investment; she had arrived with a practical way to remove a problem. He asked how much she would pay for the material, and she told him he would not receive a cent because she would not have an income from it until she proved what she could make.
Then she named her two additional conditions. Every barrel needed a clear stencil identifying its location, pit number, cook date, and the wood used for that cook. And she wanted copies of the pit logs that recorded the hours and batches associated with the fat. Rick smiled at the second request because it sounded to him like the sort of excessive recordkeeping newcomers adopted before discovering how messy real business became.
"You planning to write a book about grease?" he asked. Marlene told him she only wanted the facts that were already written down. He could keep the originals, and his assistant could send copies once a week. There was no need for a new computer system or a special employee; she would handle organizing the records herself.
Rick called his assistant, Denise, into the office and told her to add the new paperwork to the Monday packet. Denise asked whether the agreement should specify what Marlene could do with the material. Marlene said yes: once transferred, the fat belonged to her, provided she handled and sold the resulting product under whatever rules applied to her business. The written terms were plain enough that Rick signed after the company reviewed them, seeing no reason to complicate a deal that saved money.
As Marlene reached the door, Rick remembered a piece of equipment occupying a costly corner of the company's warehouse. It was a stainless steam-jacketed kettle, old-fashioned, heavy, and recently removed from a test kitchen. The maintenance department had declared it inconvenient to store, but no one wanted to pay to dispose of it. Rick offered it as a joke at first, then became serious when he saw Marlene's face.