Baking & Snack - August 2014 - 28

SNAK KING

paper and memory to fill and ship orders, but with the
new warehouse came handheld scanners and inventory management. "We now have real-time inventory
visibility," Mr. Bull explained. "We know exactly where
everything is and when it was made. When we go to
ship a load we know exactly where to pick it from."

Stretching even more

To accommodate new business, Snak King built an 80,000-sq-ft warehouse onto
its Freeport facility.
significantly because of that," Mr. Bull said.
This boom in business has to have somewhere to go
after the packaging room, and to handle new national
distribution, Snak King needed to take advantage of
the extra land surrounding the facility. "A whole variety of new customers is now being serviced out of
this facility, and it gives us the ability to distribute the
product shorter distances and faster to the customer
to make the value equation more attractive to them,"
Mr. Bull said.
To handle that distribution, Snak King built a brand
new warehouse. Previously, C.J. Vitner's used off-site
warehouses to store its products before shipping, but
at the end of 2013, Snak King finished construction
on an 80,000-sq-ft warehouse onsite with 22 bays and
space for 5,280 pallets. Despite its size, products - including those shipped in from California - typically
are shipped out in less than two days.
"It's nice to have everything all under one roof," Mr.
Bull said. "It gives you much better visibility to see exactly what's happening with your product, inventory
control and freshness management. All these things
improve when it's all in one warehouse, and you can
store and ship it efficiently."
To aid those objectives, Snak King also brought in
a warehouse management system. Previously with C.J.
Vitner's, the distribution team was relying on pencil,

28 Baking & Snack August 2014 / www.bakingandsnack.com

As far as the future goes, Snak King intends to continue stretching its new legs in Freeport. While grading
the land for its new warehouse, Mr. Bull said they had
the construction crew grade for another 80,000-sq-ft
warehouse to be built in the future. The existing warehouse has 45-ft ceiling clearances, providing ample
room to expand vertically before a new warehouse is
necessary. But Snak King is ready.
For now, the company intends to fill its Freeport facility with more production lines, matching the capabilities of the California plant.
With the immediate need for additional capacity
now answered, Snak King still plans to move some
of its rolled tortilla chip products to Freeport as well
as a new popped chip product the company recently
launched. In fact, Snak King began receiving equipment for the new popped snack line earlier this summer. Eventually, Mr. Papiri expects the Midwestern
plant to exceed production in the City of Industry.
To get there, Snak King has the culture, employees,
systems and equipment in place to keep taking on the
growing national demand for new age snacks.

California roots
What started as a pork-rinds-and-cracklins
business now has a finger in most of the
other major snack categories. At its City
of Industry, CA, headquarters, Snak King
makes everything: popcorn, caramel corn,
cheese puffs and curls, tortilla chips, nuts
and nut clusters, popped snacks, all manner of extruded snacks and, of course,
pork rinds and cracklins.
Covering 180,000 sq ft, the California
facility boasts energy-efficient equipment
upgrades and reuses the excess heat it
creates. But the plant is land-locked, making external expansion impossible at this
site. While much of the company's current
production pressures are being relieved
by the new Freeport plant's extruded,
tortilla chip and potato chip capabilities,
production of pork rinds, cracklins and
snack nuts will stay in California.

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Baking & Snack - August 2014

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