Overcoming Legacy Challenges with Unified Solutions
Blount Fine Foods, a family-owned and operated manufacturer, marketer, and developer of fresh prepared foods, has been bringing their love of food to families for five generations. Known for premium, restaurant-quality products, Blount offers single-serve grab-and-go fresh soups, macaroni & cheese, and entrées available in grocery stores, retail hot bars, and restaurants across the country. The company’s fresh soup and entrées selection feature well-known brands including Panera Bread, Legal Sea Foods, Blount’s Family Kitchen, and Blount’s Clam Shack.
Their extensive product line includes hundreds of items, many with specialty certifications such as organic, gluten-free, and dairy-free. Blount serves all 50 states as a trusted partner to restaurants, institutions, retailers, and club stores, providing innovative and satisfying food experiences backed by a dedicated team committed to growth and success.
As Blount’s business has grown in recent years, they encountered significant challenges in managing demand planning and supply chain operations. These challenges stemmed from their reliance on spreadsheets for demand and production planning, as well as a legacy ERP system with site-specific views, which hindered visibility and collaboration across teams.
Seasonal shifts and changing consumer preferences added to another layer to demand variability, making it difficult to forecast accurately at both the weekly and daily levels. Day-level forecasting, in particular, is critical for fresh food production to ensure optimal production schedules – increasing throughput and minimizing waste. Inefficiencies in inventory management led to stockouts of high-demand items and an overstock of slower-moving products, resulting in the need for discounting lower-margin items and inefficient workforce allocation, ultimately impacting profitability.
Additionally, the company’s highly automated production lines — which include a complex network of pipes and processes for filling, cleaning, and packaging large volumes of soups, pastas, and sauces — added another layer of complexity. The complex manufacturing process made it challenging to fully understand the downstream impact of operational decisions throughout their supply chain. Managing 1,500 SKUs across 10 distribution centers further compounded these operational complexities, emphasizing the need for a unified, advanced solution to streamline their processes and enhance decision-making.
Streamlining Supply Chain Operations
Blount selected RELEX Solutions for their comprehensive demand planning and master planning solution to address their need for better visibility, efficiency, and integration across their operations. The new solution aimed to unify sales demand forecasts with manufacturing capabilities, creating a cohesive plan that linked all aspects of their supply chain.
Blount leveraged RELEX’s advanced AI-driven planning tools to accurately forecast demand, plan their supply, and optimize their inventory and production accounting for their unique production environment complexities and constraints.
The collaborative implementation process, led by the RELEX team in partnership with Establish, ensured that the solution was tailored to Blount’s specific requirements. The project kicked off in 2023 with a phased approach to minimize disruptions, leading to a full rollout successfully completed in April 2024.
Transformative Results and Future Growth
Following the successful rollout, Blount began to quickly see transformative results across their operations. Over the last five years, the company has achieved a remarkable 20% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), demonstrating the sustained impact of their optimized processes and advanced planning capabilities. During this period, the business has also experienced a significant shift from wholesale to retail, a trend accelerated by the pandemic. Even as their business mix evolved, Blount continued to drive operational improvements and achieve strong growth.
“We accomplished our goals and then some, with RELEX,” said Jonathan Wells, Sr. Director of Demand Management at Blount Fine Foods.
They achieved enhanced forecast accuracy, enabling better production planning and reducing both stockouts and overstock issues. Blount achieved a 50% reduction in forecast error over two years, reflecting the benefits of improved visibility and more accurate demand planning.
By improving visibility and instilling confidence in larger production runs, Blount significantly minimized changeovers which increased production efficiency by 2%. Additionally, they reduced finished goods waste by over 35%, resulting in substantial cost savings. The company also experienced a 5% annual increase in production output, highlighting the effectiveness of streamlined operations.
Improved decision-making became a key benefit, as the ability to analyze the impact of sales forecasting or capacity changes on service levels allowed for more strategic and proactive planning. These advancements collectively enhanced gross margins and provided Blount with the confidence to pursue additional capital projects.
“Having the ability to see how changes to sales forecasting or manufacturing capacity availability impact potential service levels on a longer horizon has allowed us the ability to strategize in advance before the situation arises,” said Wells. “This has allowed us to make better decisions and explore alternate paths while linking all of our constraints within our manufacturing and supply chain ecosystem together to realize the true impact of a decision throughout the process.”
Through RELEX’s AI-powered solutions, Blount not only met their initial objectives but exceeded them laying the groundwork for continued success in future value improvement initiatives.