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Clarity

Mark Haas

San Francisco Bay Area

Founder of The Helmsman Group - professional advising service for emerging and high growth food brands.

COO - Cup 4 Cup GF flour developed at The French Laundry
Supply Chain Director - Annie's
Founder & CEO - Bridgetown Natural Foods
Ops Head - Kashi
GM - Health Valley, Casbah, Breadshop and Nile Spice brands of Hain Celestial

$2.92/min

Mark donates to Donate Online : Give Help : Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano ($291.81)

4 Calls

2 Reviews

29 minutes
Avg. call

Business Development Product Development Business Strategy Sales Operations Food & Beverage CPG Industry Strategic Sourcing Commodity Contract Manufacturing

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Organic & Natural Brand Growth

Focus on self sustained brand building activities funded by margin optimization.

Answers 1
Reviews 2

Answers

Mark Haas answered

How do I locate a small to medium bottling company to outsource for my iced tea drink? My company will be located in Queens, New York. Thanks!

Small is a pretty subjective word. In the world of beverage packing small might still seem pretty big. Most plants that are set up for hot fill are designed to run 100's of bottles per minute. For example the last tea project we helped with ran about 300 bottles per minute. Speed (throughput) equals cost. The faster a plant goes the lower your price of co-packing. There are small lines out there but because the throuput is relatively low the cost can be quite high. Recently, we designed and installed a small four head filler. This line runs about 4,000 bottles an hour and given the setup time and cleanup time it doesn't really save money unless its used for about 4 hours. So I think the answer to your question is what is your target co-packing fee and how many bottles equals a production run? If your run is under a few thousand bottles it may be difficult to find a plant at both your target cost as well as the appropriate certificates and infrastructure to handle your run - often it makes sense to self-fill until your business scales to a plant's minimum order quantity (MOQ).

I know of a relatively small hot-fill co-packer in New England that is affordable - price based on volume. Let me know if we can be if any further assistance.

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Beverage Industry

Contract Manufacturing

Distributed Systems

Reviews

Mark is clearly an industry expert and provided extremely valuable insight. We needed feedback on copacker pricing and margins and his advice was very helpful, we look forward to speaking to him again.

Matt Sedlacek Source: Clarity

It was a pleasure speaking with Mark. In a short period of time, I gained knowledge from him about that food industry that only an insider would have access to. I strongly recommend speaking with Mark when it comes to anything food-related. I'm certainly planning on connecting with him again.

Darren Wong Source: Clarity

Member since June 2015