From Starbucks’ rotating seasonal offerings to Kellogg’s new sugar-free options, many food manufacturers are expanding their product offerings to keep up with ever-changing consumer trends. There are many reasons why a food manufacturer would choose to diversify their product portfolio, seasonally or permanently.
Why Expand Your Product Offerings?
Introducing a new product or line is a great strategy for expanding your markets and minimizing the impact of price fluctuations. The right product can open your brand up to an even wider array of consumers. A new product can also stabilize your business, ensuring that profit isn’t solely dependent on a single product. Temporary or seasonal additions can also be an effective marketing tactic. Just look at the success of McDonald’s Shamrock Shake or Pillsbury’s holiday-themed cookie dough.
Expanding your company’s offerings is no small feat. It requires months or years of planning, investment, and infrastructure-building. You have to build out this new process alongside your current processes and products.
Depending on the manufacturing requirements of each, you may or may not be able to utilize the same processes and facilities. Often, diversified products mean investing in new capital equipment, utensils, and containers for the manufacturing process.
This introduces the problem of not only washing and cleaning all of these new items, but preventing cross contamination between the new product and others. Your sanitation practices and industrial washing systems must scale with your portfolio, and automation simplifies this process.
Use Automation To Streamline Growth.
With labor shortages, tightening food safety and transparency laws, and increasing consumer standards, managing growth in today’s food industry is a difficult task for manufacturers. Over the past five years, processors across industries have risen to the challenge with the help of automation. Sanitation is an especially relevant application for automation, with the heightened post-pandemic awareness of product hygiene.
Automated washers are versatile, effective, and can clean a high volume of soiled items at faster speeds. They prevent cross-contamination by creating repeatable wash results, and don’t require intensive training to implement.
If you already utilize an automated washer in your facility, you can likely upgrade the model to a larger capacity instead of purchasing a second one. If you don’t currently have an industrial washing system, explore how it can make your operation more efficient. To find an industrial washer tailored to your expanding operation, consult an industrial sanitation expert here.