A little history of our company

Since we started the company in 2017, we have made our meals and Plant Sliders ourselves at the Western Massachusetts Food Processing Center (WMFPC) in Greenfield, MA. When I say ourselves - meaning, we either worked with the knowledgeable, experienced staff at the processing center or we hired our own staff to produce and pack our meals. Before we launched our products in stores, we conducted a number of prototyping sessions at WMFPC to understand the best way to make and package our products. How long do we boil the vegetables in their kettles? Do we sous vide the vegetables? Do we cook the sauce? Do we flash freeze the vegetables using liquid nitrogen? Do we package the food in bags?

We had NO IDEA! Literally, none.

Not only did we have zero prior experience making food in a commercial facility, but we were also new to the regulations around packaging and labeling for small businesses and the food science of freezing food. So we worked with the experienced operations team at WMFPC to figure out the best way to cook and package our food for retail. This involved LOTS AND LOTS of tests and prototypes.

Just to back up a little bit, our original concept back in 2017 was a freshly-frozen plant-based meal kit - very different from the product we make today. The product included a sauce, vegetable, and a protein that you cooked on the stove in one pan and it was ready in 10 minutes. The brand we launched under was called Zoni. Below are a few photos of our Zoni meal kit prototypes.

Our product evolved from a frozen meal kit to a frozen microwaveable meal because we learned a number of things weren’t working. A LOT of things weren’t working in fact: The components of the meal kit cost way too much to package individually, consumers didn’t understand the concept easily, consumers expected the meal to be microwaveable, and the meal kit required too many cooking steps and there were too many ways for the prep to go wrong.

With any new product, you gotta start somewhere. Then you learn from what didn’t work and get better. There is no such thing as failure. There is so much stigma around failure and it doesn’t make any sense. If you’re creating something that’s never been created before, you don’t know if it’s going to work until you try it. The founder of Dyson created literally 5,127 prototypes over 5 years before he created the first bagless vacuum cleaner. Thomas Edison and his colleagues worked on at least three thousand different theories to develop an incandescent light bulb. Ok ok, we’re not inventing a lightbulb or a vacuum cleaner, but you get my point.

The learnings continue...

Even though we had made significant improvements to the product, simplified our production and packing processes, and reduced our labor and production costs, we still ran into problems producing the frozen meals ourselves. The costs of production were still too high and this was for a number of reasons: Our small batch size, the fact that we prepared three things separately (vegetable, protein, sauce) and then assembled them (instead of cooking and packing everything together), and the lack of packing equipment (we packed the vegetables, protein, and sauce into trays by hand, then sealed them in plastic, then packed them into meal cartons, then finally packed those cartons into corrugated boxes for delivery to stores). As you can imagine, all those manual packing steps took a lot of time!

So we needed to make some changes.

At around the same time, I had a personal revelation I spoke about in a previous blog post about my brand, Zoni, and the products I was making. I realized Zoni wasn’t the brand I wanted to stand behind and I didn’t love the meals I was making. So I took another profound risk: I completely rebranded and reformulated our meals to be better tasting, easier to produce, and most importantly, recipes that I loved and wanted to eat. This seems so basic now, but before, I was thinking about external trends instead of my own intuition and taste buds.

Not only did I decide to rebrand and reformulate our meals, but I also decided to make the leap from making the meals ourselves to partnering with a contract manufacturer (co-packer) who had expertise and capability producing and packing frozen meals. There were a number of reasons I decided to make this change:

Scaling: In order to scale our sales and impact, we needed to work with a wholesale distributor. In order to do so, we needed to reduce our production costs even further given the added costs of working with a distributor. So we needed a co-packer that had automated equipment that would reduce production and packing time.
Food Safety: I learned that some retail chains had strict food safety requirements and sometimes required brands to make their food in a certified facility.
Cost Consistency: At WMFPC, the per unit costs of making our meals depended on the # of workers, # of hours worked, and the use of storage space. As you can imagine, this number varied quite a bit. Sometimes a delivery was late, so that added on more hours, sometimes a machine wasn’t working so that added on more hours, sometimes ingredient costs changed, and the list goes on. This is the reality of a food processing facility and a startup - things don’t always go as planned, even when you meticulously plan ingredient sourcing and production (To be honest, I wasn’t super meticulous when planning production and often had to run out to buy an ingredient… I’ve gotten better!).

This is only part of the team at WMFPC, including me and an intern. Damian, Evan, John, Peter, Liz, Jason, and Ari are the rockstars.

The difference between a commercial kitchen or a shared processing facility like WMFPC and a larger contract manufacturer (co-packer) is that the co-packer specializes in making and packing specific products and they become very very efficient at making those products. Their profitability is based on efficiency and scale. The more product they make, the more efficient they become, the less it costs them. On the other hand, WMFPC produces a variety of products for clients on a relatively small scale (fudge, maple syrup, soups, veggie burgers, beverages, etc). They work with clients like us on prototyping and small batches, clients that are more established that are making a few thousand units every production run, and everything in between. This is why we love and appreciate the team at WMFPC so much. We, and many other small businesses, wouldn’t be here without them. Shout-out to their team!

There are a number of other differences between a co-packer and a commercial kitchen or small processing facility. Co-packers charge what is called a “tolling fee” for each unit of product made - guaranteeing a specific cost per unit. They also typically have a food safety team, a quality control team, and a sourcing team. So they are responsible for ensuring the safety and quality of the product (according to the client’s specifications) and sourcing ingredients for clients.

There are a number of benefits and tradeoffs when working with a co-packer.

Ultimately, we knew that in order to get our meals into more people’s mouths at a price realistic for the frozen meal category, we had to work with a co-packer. The other option would be to continue doing it ourselves and invest in our own packing equipment in order to reduce costs and scale up production. We decided that the value we bring as a company is our brand and our unique recipes, not our operational chops. Other food startups and companies don’t necessarily take this approach. Everyone has a different journey and goes about it in a different way and that’s great!

We are very excited to be working with a chef-driven co-packer in New York that is committed to making consistently high-quality frozen meals. We have conducted a successful test batch of each of our products, made some tweaks to the recipes and ingredients, and are planning our first larger production run this spring. Meals will be hitting store shelves SOON!!

Producing our Plant Sliders

For our line of Plant Sliders (small, tasty veggie burgers perfect on top of a salad, in a wrap, or on a bun), we are still figuring out the most efficient way of producing them. We had been making them at WMFPC for retail and foodservice. We felt like this product was more do-able to produce and pack at a realistic cost since the production steps weren’t as complicated as the meals. We had success cooking, mixing, forming, and baking the sliders there, but the costs were still too high. So I evaluated other facilities that specialized in making patties. I found a facility in New Jersey that had two walk-in ovens (yea that big!!!), a grinder, a mixer, and a patty-maker. We conducted a successful test batch at their facility. Unfortunately, they no longer had enough time in their schedule to produce the sliders so… that’s where we’re at! Hoping to start producing these again soon!

Long story short, we have learned a ton about food production, co-packing, and the most feasible way to make our food in order to fulfill our vision of making good food accessible to all.

To co-pack or not to co-pack? That is the question.