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Attention to the Details

You Have to Put your Eyes on It

CAPEX Heuristics
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Asa Bielenberg

Attention to the Details

I was in Chicago last week for the National Restaurant Association (NRA) trade show. It was my first time there. We are regulars at the retail-focused shows (Expo West, Sweets and Snacks, Supply Side, etc,) but we had not attended a show geared towards food service. A few of our clients have pivoted into food service, and it’s something investors are now coaching brands to do. Between slotting fees, marketing, chargebacks, and resets, retail is TOUGH. Food service is tough in a different way.  My objectives were simple. I wanted to understand if this show was worth attending next year, and in what capacity. How many days should we be there? How many people should we send? What areas of the show floor are our target customers? If we host a seminar or panel, will anyone come? Who represents the brands at these shows and can we make meaningful connections? Essentially, this was a reconnaissance mission. I got what I needed and so much more. My takeaways:  I want to focus on the details, because I perceive these subconsciously when dining, but I never thought about how each detail was a decision that had to be made. Even while watching

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May 30, 2024 No Comments

Problem of the Week

You Have to Put your Eyes on It

Week of: May 13, 2024
Highlighting John Castillo

FoodOps been providing some pro-bono work for a local BIPOC brand for the last 3 or 4 months. Recently, conversations have pivoted from strategy and are now focused on their manufacturing process. We are now fielding questions about ways to improve their yield, throughput, and efficiency.

We love these conversations and can always make an impact when asked to help about manufacturing. But these conversations are hard to have over the phone, sharing videos, or even in-person if we are not at the facility. It is imperative that we can see things. How do ingredients flow through the process? Are the operators being utilized in the best way? Where are the bottlenecks? What low hanging fruit is there from an automation standpoint?

John and Craig were able to visit this customer at their manufacturing location last week and answer all of these questions. We’re now working with the brand to help them build some custom tooling to improve efficiency and source a user’s manual for a machine that’s causing them issues. There’s no way we could have gotten to this point over video calls.

We love it when our clients empower us to go to their manufacturing sites to see things first-hand and build the necessary relationships to troubleshoot issues together.

CAPEX Heuristics

Week of: May 6, 2024
Highlighting Asa Bielenberg

FoodOps helps brands plan growth and define their manufacturing plan. More often than not, this comes in the form of CAPEX assessments when the brand is thinking about purchasing and installing equipment. Whether the equipment is for self-manufacturing or going into a co-manufacturer, it’s important to know the true cost of the project.

What entrepreneurs don’t realize is that the equipment cost is only a fraction of the cost. The equipment need to be engineered, transported, installed, integrated into existing equipment, and commissioned. To that same end, finding a used piece of equipment for 50% off might only be a 10% total savings when all is said and done.

We worked with an experienced industry veteran to define reasonable heuristics on what additional costs brand could expect when installing a piece of equipment. This helps us provide realistic expectations to our clients about what they need to plan and fund as they scale.

Add Another Co-Packer to the List

Week of: April 29, 2024
Highlighting Craig Swiecichowski

At FoodOps, we’re always on the lookout for manufacturing solutions for small brands. They’re actually all over the place: butcher shops with vemags, bakeries with excess capacity, the mercado that makes fresh salsas and tamales every day. Many times, these proprietors are eager to take on extra business and have processes in place to be a successful co-packer for a growing cottage business.

In this case, Craig ventured into a chocolate and candy store and struck up a conversation with the owner. After a quick tour in the production area and discussion of capabilities, we have added them to our co-packer list as a viable option for a small chocolate company.

We look to make useful connections that help our clients and manufactures while living our lives. Building a strong network is core to our success!

Crop Seasonality in Processing Facility

Week of: April 22, 2024
Highlighting Nayan Shukla

Nayan is developing an operations plan for a crop processing and aggregation facility. This facility is intended to serve small scale, emerging farmers by providing value added products in addition to whole produce. The impact this facility will have on the community is huge – it will serve dozens of farmers and is expected to process an average 40,000 pounds of crops per week.

Obviously, different crops are harvested at different times of the year and need to be packaged as fresh as possible. This means that designing the facility based on average throughput means that equipment is underutilized during slow weeks, and the facility will be stressed during high harvest times.

Nayan aggregated crop delivery receipts from previous harvests and plotted expected throughput in the facility by week. Looking at this information graphically is a game changer. This data informs how we think about equipment sizing, staffing needs, and storage requirements for the facility.

Solving Sourcing Issues

Week of: April 15, 2024
Highlighting Bill Long

Bill is managing a commercialization project for a small beverage company. During our manufacture search, we found a great fit for the brand. They have all the capabilities needed to produce and store a safe and quality product. They also have reasonable MOQ’s, a fair price, and are in the geographic region that the client wants.

So what’s the issue? This facility does not have reverse osmosis (RO) water, which the brand strongly values. While it is possible to build the right water profile to get the desired taste at this facility, it is important that the label says “Reverse Osmosis Water.”

Bill worked with the co-packer to find a way to source RO water in totes from a nearby facility. We can now explore the cost and brand impact of getting the water shipped in vs. building a comparable water profile from the co-man’s water supply. Bill put the client’s needs first and prepared contingencies so we can collectively make the right decision for the brand.

Change is Good

Week of: April 8, 2024
Highlighting Asa Bielenberg

Asa was traveling last week to visit a client that wanted to build co-manufacturing space in their shared use kitchen. The building has inherent challenges to make efficient. It is on a narrow residential street, and difficult dock access for 53′ trucks. Once docked, the path to move materials into and out of the proposed co-man space is long and disruptive to other activities in the building. Additionally, the areas in discussion for co-man use were not contiguous, which would create difficulties getting SQF certified down the road.

We had prepped their leadership team with a few proposals that involved repurposing other spaces in the building and tearing down walls. At the time, we were encouraged by the client to think within the existing shell and not alter the building too much.

During the site-visit, FoodOps and our partner Food Works Group, we were able to walk the space and articulate the value in repurposing the building to provide better human and material flow. This will ultimately improve their operational efficiency and GMP’s, allowing them to be a great small co-man for budding businesses.

Yield Reporting and Chargebacks

Week of: April 1, 2024
Highlighting Krista Heilman

A client and their co-man recently negotiated terms for scrap and chargebacks for overuse. This is great for the brand, since there was a significant amount of waste every production run that they can get credit for. However, Krista was still in a position where she had to order excess materials just to produce the whole order; this number was different than the contracted scrap number.

She developed a yield report based on inventory before and after the production campaign. From this report, she could determine the pounds of excess ingredients compared to what was contractually allowed. This was used to:

  1. Concisely communicate the amount our client was due in credit for material overuse.
  2. Articulate actual overuse for each ingredient in the BOM.

The FoodOps team is working on the root cause of the yield issue with the manufacturer. Because of the report Krista made, we have already determined particularly difficult ingredients for the co-man to handle and can work with their technical team to problem solve together.

Simple Trade Show CRM

Week of: March, 25 2024
Highlighting John Castillo

One of the most overwhelming things about trade shows is the sorting through the scanned QR codes, new LinkedIn connections, and stack of business cards. Forming hundreds of new contacts during a sleep-deprived week means that recalling faces, names, and their needs is difficult to do if it’s not done in the moment.

When FoodOps attends trade shows, we collect this information using a simple Google Form that populates a database. After walking an aisle and forming 10 or so connections – or sometimes immediately after a positive engagement – a team member will fill out a form that summarizes the brand, contact, needs, and the trade show attended. Regardless of who fills out the form, all entries are timestamped and put into the database.

Doing this in real time allows us to fully decompress from long days of walking the floor. When it comes time to follow-up, centralization makes it a breeze. This system made Expo West very manageable this year.

Try Harder

Week of: March 18, 2024
Highlighting Krista Heilman

Krista manages the S&OP for a canned beverage company with a seasonal sales cycle. In this role, she works directly with the co-manufacturer to schedule production the client. This week, Krista had to push hard to secure necessary line time for her client. We needed to ensure the client had inventory, as they are approaching a heavy sales time.

Organization is key to make this happen. Krista came into the discussion prepared:

  1. She was able to appeal to partnership by showing the history of other times the co-manufacturer had shorted an order for this client.
  2. She was able to show the ingredients to produce were there by showing all POs, BOLs, and yield reports for previous production runs.
  3. She was able to be flexible by agreeing to dividing the production run into SKUs that worked with the co-manufacturer’s production schedule.

The extra day of production that Krista got for her client meant an extra 20,000 cases to sell during this key sales cycle.

Just ask the Supplier

Week of: March 5, 2024
Highlighting Craig Swiecichowski

One of Craig’s clients manufactures THC butters. The most time-intensive part of their production day was dissolving THC distillate in MTC oil so that it could be evenly dispersed for a homogeneous solution. Craig recognized an opportunity to push this burden onto someone better equipped to handle it.

Craig worked with the distillate supplier to develop a custom product for our application. They worked through issues like concentration, potency validation, new pricing, and minimum orders for a custom ingredient.

The client now receives a diluted, oil soluble solution that can easily add to the rest of the mixture. Production days are straightforward now, and Craig is shifting his focus to addressing throughput and process flow.

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