1. Extended Operations
The food business is highly-competitive with sometimes razor-thin margins. Your board or CEO is challenging you to increase efficiency and reduce cost. You need to think of simple ways to improve output and scale your production. Extended Operations, also known as “Less than Daily Sanitation Procedures” could be right for your business. It makes sense that once your equipment is set up and running product, why not run it as long as possible without increasing risk. We help clients navigate this change by assessing risk, collecting and analyzing meaningful data, verifying maintenance and performance of your SSOPs. We take this information and liaise with the government to make sure you get the approval to go to Extended Operations.
2. Extended People
No, not “overextended” people. I used to work for an incredibly successful CEO whose mantra was, “take care of good people.” Extended People means putting people in a position to succeed, giving them the tools to succeed, and then educating and empowering your personnel to do the best of their ability. It’s been said that businesses thrive when decisions are made at the lowest possible level. Building trust throughout a company is necessary in order to achieve that degree of empowerment. You need to realize that you may be in the food business, but you are really in the labor business. Whether you serve consumers or foodservice customers, they have outsourced the labor of raising, harvesting, packing, processing and delivery to your company. How many of your quality or food safety complaints, withdrawals, or recalls could have been prevented on the production floor? How much did these slip-ups cost you last year? Get out of the vicious cycle of turnover, and let us help you get into the virtuous cycle of trained, engaged, empowered, and stable workforce.
3. Extended Shelf Life
What would a longer shelf life mean to your business? Extended shelf life could allow you to build inventory, capitalize on raw material costs, or plan and save more on your hourly labor costs. Data-driven shelf-life testing and validation is the key to any good shelf life program. Too often, companies don’t realize that their products can legitimately have a longer shelf life and still maintain safety and quality standards. We’ve seen companies gain huge advantage by simple data collection to validate a longer shelf life, or by minor tweaks to formulation and processing procedures that resulted in many more days to work with.
