OVERVIEW
A regional confectioner with multi-location manufacturing operations.
THE NEED
Protect the confidentiality of their family recipe for their signature product offering.
Ensure consistency and quality of their signature product in a multi-location production environment.
THE SOLUTION
Sweetener Solutions provides precise pre-blends of key ingredients in packages calibrated to their batch size, both ensuring product consistency and formula confidentiality.
THE BENEFITS
Eliminated risk of formulation error and accompanying waste and ensuring to product consistency, flavor-to-flavor and batch-to-batch.
Enhanced production efficiency by eliminating the need for painstaking accurate measurement of multiple ingredients.
Protected the confidentiality of the franchiser’s proprietary formula, enhancing value of the brand.
This client, a regional confectioner with a wide offering of freshly-made products, faced a challenge with the signature product for which their brand is most known. Some locations are franchiser-owned, allowing the franchiser to control quality and maintain confidentiality of their proprietary formula. However, other locations are owned and operated by franchisees, who mix all ingredients for the product they produced according to the family recipe. Because the franchiser could not supervise the franchisee operations, they could not ensure that every batch of product contained the correct mix of ingredients such that the brand was consistent location to location.
The franchiser’s challenge was two-fold: Protect their brand value by ensuring consistent product quality in franchisee stores and eliminate the potential for copy-cat products by keeping the formula of their signature product confidential.
Sweetener Solutions worked with the franchiser to provide precise pre-blends of the dry ingredients in their formula in sizes calibrated to the correct batch size, which are then utilized in every location to make their signature product. This change not only protected confidentiality and quality, but increased store efficiency by eliminating the need to inventory, measure and mix multiple dry ingredients at each location. A single pre-blended package is simply added to wet ingredients at each location.
As an added value, Sweetener Solutions recommended an additional ingredient step that slowed degradation in the appearance of the product, reducing costs associated with disposal of product that, while still fresh, had changed in appearance, affecting consumer perception.