Baking & Snack - October 2017 - 26

HEARTHSIDE/VSI

"We were watching the [bar] market
like everyone else. It popped quickly,
so we moved as fast as we could."
Rich Scalise, Hearthside Food Solutions

ing its number of SKUs to more than 1,200. In a market that has seen double-digit growth over the past decade, VSI went from producing almost 15 million bars
to more than 150 million annually since its first bar line
started up in 2003.
Between the explosive market demand and new product development, VSI became a viable acquisition target
for Hearthside when it was ready to enter the nutritional
bar fray. "When you look at energy and nutritional bars
today, they're so much better ... they're chewy and greattasting and have multiple layers with chocolate, caramel
and nuts," Mr. Scalise said. "VSI was one of those driving
factors; they played hard in texture, flavor and aroma.
They've helped us think about these types of bars in a
different way."
VSI's R&D capabilities allow Hearthside to reinvent
product innovation that was practically unheard of for
co-manufacturing in the US bar market. But as consumers clamor for need-specific bars, it's only a matter of
time before Hearthside's customers will help to develop
more original, targeted products. VSI carved out a niche
for a very specific market. "The bars we were focusing on - nutritional and sports bars - were only for
dedicated groups like dieters, athletes or body-builders,"
Mr. Janssens said. But today, dieting is no longer considered a punishment; it's a lifestyle. And while consumers weren't necessarily asking for a healthier snack bar,
the fitness and sports communities were seeking functional products that had the texture and flavor of snack
bars. Then mainstream consumers jumped on those
functional products, and ... boom. Market explosion.
"With the complexity of bars and speed to market,
bringing innovation is what our customers are asking for
now," Mr. Hughes observed. "In 2010, they'd bring formulas to us. But today, they want us to bring formulas
to them. They're asking, 'What can you do?' VSI has enabled us to rethink bar innovation."
Additionally, VSI has taught Hearthside how to deal
with a new type of customer base. "Historically, we
were all size and scale," Mr. Scalise said. "With VSI, we
are learning about a whole new set of customers who
aren't always about that. By bringing this to the US, we're
thinking out our business in a new way, in how we can
do things with customers who aren't as big."

26 Baking & Snack October 2017 / www.bakingandsnack.com

Workforce sustainability through
equipment reliability
Hearthside Foods, Downers Grove, IL, places
a heavy emphasis on process efficiency
and continuous improvement through its
Hearthside Performance System (HPS),
implemented in all 24 plants across the US
and in The Netherlands.
With HPS, each plant has a "toolbox," a
three-ring binder chock full of almost 60 best
practices available for implementation (15
of which are mandatory). At the H1 plant
in Grand Rapids, MI, "EAM" an equipment
reliability system, maximizes equipment life
through preventive maintenance (PM).
For example, the H1 plant has 15 Campbell
wrappers for its bar production. "PM is very
important there because if you have a wrapper down, you're losing production or making out-of-spec product," said Dave Adler,
plant manager for Hearthside's H1 facility.
To keep this from happening, Scott Perry,
maintenance planner for H1, developed a
"kit" system for EAM. A kit is simply a box
of replacement parts for a specific piece of
equipment. If, say, a bearing needs to be
replaced, the kit includes all the bearings for
that particular item, and all are replaced at
once to avoid multiple PM requests for the
same equipment.
EAM also operates by run time based on
replacement, rather than the calendar. "We
have data that says parts will likely fail at a
certain time, so we get in there before that to
replace them," Mr. Adler said. When a part is
ordered, a mechanic is assigned to it, but the
machine operator is also assigned to help
take care of his or her equipment, which led
to maintenance apprenticeship.
"Apprenticeship is the future in this
facility," said Dwayne Hughes, Hearthside's
senior vice-president, supply chain. "There
are very good operators who have mechanical aptitude. They can become an apprentice,
and we can teach them the skills to become
a master mechanic."
These programs are not only HPS tools,
but one also feeds into another to address
the industry's workforce gap. "We have a
shortage of mechanics, just the same as our
friends and competitors," Mr. Hughes said.
"We need to develop people ourselves. We
started this maintenance apprenticeship program so we can build up our own mechanics. Three or four years from now, they'll be a
huge value-add for us."

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Baking & Snack - October 2017

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