Quantity meets quality
Culture and reach were not the only attributes that made South Coast an attractive target for acquisition. It was also the quality standards the company held its product to — the plant is GFSI-certified under IFS, and the Irvine facility has an R&D center onsite, both with bakers and food scientists on staff — and its ability to crank out millions of frozen cookie pucks every day.
“Kent helped give us scale that I could bring back to my national sales team,” Mr. Schultz said.
Fragmented as it might be, in-store bakery is seeing cookie growth, perhaps because cookies are becoming increasingly easier to produce. South Coast makes in-store cookie production user-friendly through its proprietary FastPan technology, which Mr. Hayden developed himself. “FastPan allows retailers the ability to execute the baking process in two motions for the pan,” Mr. Hayden said of the sheets, which adhere themselves to the cookies during the freezing process and then release during the bake.
“In the cookie industry, this is one of the most innovative technologies we’ve seen in the past decade,” Mr. Schultz suggested. “We’ve been able to capture quite a bit of market share much quicker than we’d have historically been able to do in such a mature market.”
With FastPan use, cookies are preplaced directly on the baking sheet during production, and their adherence to the sheet allows in-store bakery operators to move cookies directly from the box into the oven. “Instead of placing 24 cookies one at a time, the worker just places two sheets,” Mr. Hayden explained. “The labor savings is phenomenal. It has really opened the door to retailers who want to bake fresh cookies but control labor.”
At South Coast’s Springdale plant, the quality standards are visibly apparent. “There’s an element of trust,” Mr. Ahlgren said. “When you walk this facility, you can see why customers say, ‘This is a place I can trust to do the right thing.’”
Learn more about South Coast's Springdale facility in the next section.
