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Membership Has its Privileges
by James Dudlicek
Processors say Quality Chekd offers a wealth of
resources to help them do business better.
For more than 60 years,
Quality Chekd Dairies Inc. has offered dairy processors valuable assistance
in marketing, education, training and quality testing. Using an independent
testing laboratory, its Cow Tech training program and the familiar
“Blue Q Red Chek” logo with consumer recognition nearing 90
percent, the association gives its membership of regional and independent
processors some leverage in a highly competitive marketplace.
Dairy Field recently got a closer look at three
member processors that the folks at Quality Chekd say are fine examples of
the high standards the group strives for in marketing, food safety and
overall high quality: Smith’s, Super Store Industries and
Alquería.
Smith Dairy Products Co.
Orrville, Ohio
“It’s nice to be able to learn from and be
challenged by a group of dairies scattered across the United States,”
Steve Schmid, president of Smith Dairy Products Co., says of his
company’s membership in Quality Chekd (QC), which dates back to 1947.
Smith’s uses QC’s purchasing services
extensively, and has used its marketing services at times over the years.
“We haven’t needed to have a huge purchasing department
here because QC has done so much of it for us,” says Schmid,
QC’s secretary/treasurer. “They negotiate with the many
suppliers. That is very beneficial to us. Early on, when QC first got
started, they provided a lot of marketing assistance — carton
designs, advertising programs. We don’t use that service as much as
we used to; we wanted our own carton design so we weren’t competing
with someone down the street who had the same design.”
Steve Hines, vice president of finance, says being
able to join forces with other dairies through QCS Purchasing has been a
plus. “I think the billing process has worked very well for us
— not that we enjoy bills,” Hines quips. “But when you
have your billing process centralized, it helps to eliminate the number of
vendors that we might have had if we had to go out on our own.”
In particular, Smith’s — which processes
fluid milk, ice cream and cultured products — goes through QC for its
ingredient needs. “They have standards higher than Grade A PMO
standards,” notes Eddie Steiner, vice president of production.
Meanwhile, Schmid says QC is “coming on
strong” with training programs. “We use one of their people for
some training. They provide professional programs that help us develop the
skills of our associates,” he says. “They also have some
production counselors who audit our plants, provide assistance on specific
problems and help us improve our operations.”
In its third generation of family ownership,
Smith’s was founded by John and Peter Schmid (regular customers
called them “the Smith brothers” because it was easier to say)
in 1909. The company maintains a milk plant, built in 1924, on North Vine
Street in downtown Orrville — not far from the town’s other
claim to fame, jam-giant Smucker’s — kitty-corner from its ice
cream plant, opened in the mid-1980s. The 1994 acquisition of Wayne Dairy
in Richmond, Ind., gave Smith’s its ultra-high-temperature processing
plant; production from other acquisitions over the years has been absorbed
by existing facilities, including the traditional ice cream business of
Canton, Ohio’s Superior Dairy, acquired earlier this year.
Smith’s relocated its corporate offices in 1992
to Dairy Lane north of downtown, where the company also buit a refrigerated
distribution center that was expanded this year. With space at a premium in
downtown Orrville, Smith’s would like to eventually move all its Ohio
manufacturing facilities to the Dairy Lane site. “That would be the
next logical step, but an expensive one,” Schmid says, noting the
company staked its first claim to the site with its fleet maintenance
facility some 20 years ago. “That’s the ‘wish
list.’ Specific plans aren’t ready for that.”
In the meantime, Smith’s does a brisk business
manufacturing some 300 SKUs of its own fluid milk and frozen dessert
products, including its Ruggles by Smith’s line of premium ice cream,
the Moovers line of ultra-pasteurized single-serve milks and
Smith’s-branded milk in yellow light-blocking plastic jugs.
The company, which reported sales of $120 million last
year, also does contract packaging for major retailers and other customers.
“We try to differentiate ourselves with our
yellow gallon jugs — our Super Jugs, as we call them — that
protect the milk from light and have a foil cap for a little bit more
protection,” Schmid says. “The label is a belly-band, so it
lets us tell a bigger story on the product. We try to give consumers a
product that’s a little better, and I truly believe it is. Someone
once told me, ‘I hate your yellow jugs but I sure love the product
inside.’” Someone else told me they love the consistently good
flavor out of our yellow jugs compared with the product she used to buy.
She said it was getting to the point where she didn’t want to drink
milk.”
Smith’s uses the three-legged milking stool to
illustrate its mission statement. The first leg represents its customers,
without whom the company would not exist. The second leg stands for the
company’s associates, who must be provided with a satisfying and
rewarding work environment. The third leg represents the owners, who
provide the capital needed to operate and manage the business profitably
for future growth.
High-quality products and excellent customer service
has been Smith’s formula for success for nearly a century, Schmid
says. “Excellent distribution is very expensive,” he says.
“But if you can fill the customers’ needs with great service,
you create long-term customers.”
Good service includes the little things, like having a
person pick up the phone when customers call rather than an automated
system, Hines notes. “Through the years, we’ve constantly put
money back into the company, to be the best in technology, service —
anything we can provide to be more efficient and serve our
customers,” he says. “We’ve been willing to put that
money back into the company.”
Schmid adds: “You have to be continually
improving.”
A significant part of that improvement will be fully
on line this fall, when the expansion of the refrigerated distribution
center is completed. A 25,000-square-foot expansion has nearly doubled the
size of the existing 30,000-square-foot facility, from which Smith’s
makes all its direct-sales deliveries.
Products manufactured on North Vine Street are
transferred to the Dairy Lane site for sorting and shipment. A clamp truck
grabs pallets of finished product off the transfer vehicles and sends them
through a system of conveyors and racks to be sorted based on customer
orders. Data for orders is tracked on handheld computers; a
computer-controlled crane sorts product into the center’s
three-tiered rack system.
Back at the plant, more than 20 trucks each day drop
off loads of raw milk in the two receiving bays. Most of the milk comes
from farms within a 50-mile radius in Wayne County, Ohio; Schmid notes that
Wayne is Ohio’s top milk-producing county.
Milk that passes lab testing is offloaded into the raw
tanks. Inside, the plant’s blow-molding operation creates both clear
and yellow light-blocking jugs, which get a sticker or belly-band label
before reaching the fillers. Six fluid fillers handle gallon and
half-gallon containers, along with 5-gallon bags and gabletop cartons for
school milk.
The plant also makes ice cream mix, sour cream and
cottage cheese. Mix is sent over to the ice cream plant through pipes
carries in a trough above the street.
Frozen lines include half-gallon scrounds and 3-gallon
tubs for foodservice and dip shops. On the tub line, gravity-fed cartons
are placed by hand on two fillers, which raise the cartons up into position
and lower them as they fill. Manually lidded, they’re sent down
a conveyor to the hardener. Scrounds are lidded, get tamper-evident bands
applied and are shrink-wrapped in bundles of four before going to the
hardener for a stay at -25 to -35 degrees F (or -80 with the forced-air
wind chill).
“Many times what we ran on the fillers depended
on what truck was out here,” Schmid says of production in the days
before the new distribution center, which provided sorely-needed space to
stockpile finished product.
“This room would only hold a third of our
biggest day’s production,” production manager Karl Kelbly says
of the North Vine Street cooler, now used only to transfer loads to Dairy
Lane. “We had to adjust our production schedule which caused a lot of
changeovers and inefficiencies. Now, only a portion of our production will
even hit a pallet anymore until it’s loaded.”
Steiner says new technologies have created challenges
in the production process. “We were the prototypical family dairy of
days gone by, running a little bit of everything. In some sense, we still
are,” he says. “We take a lot of pride in quality. We want it
to be the same Smith flavor profile every time.”
But Steiner sees a shift in the industry from offering
products to managing a supply chain. “We’ve marveled at how
technology allows you to do things faster and more efficiently, but as soon
as you need something slightly different than the computer is set up for
… it’s not like the good old days,” he says.
“Everything has to be set up very specifically. As we tailor things
to our customers, it ensures our future but narrows down the services
we’re providing.”
To be sure, the future looks good at The Dairy in the
Country. With QC’s assistance, Smith’s should continue to
flourish.
“We need to make sure we are competitive, and
have efficient equipment and well-trained, dedicated associates. Quality
Chekd helps us do this,” Schmid says. “We’re always
working to create a successful future. As customers demand more and
competitors get tougher, we must continually improve.”
Super Store Industries
Turlock, Calif.
“The name ‘Quality Chekd’ is
indicative of what we’re looking for in our products,” says
Kelly Olds, vice president of operations, sales and marketing for Super
Store Industries (SSI).
To that end, SSI has taken advantage of many of the
services QC offers its members.
“Having that independent third party looking
over our shoulder and monitoring our quality and assisting us when we have
problems is something that has been a value to us,” Olds says.
“Quality Chekd also offers some good training programs, and we have
been a participant in the purchasing program for a number of years and find
that to be of value to the organization.”
SSI’s ownership impacts its participation in
QC’s marketing programs. “We’re a little different from
the average Quality Chekd member in that we’re a captive, and we
don’t participate in some of the marketing programs offered by
QC,” Olds explains. “But that particular department has helped
in the past with packaging design and nutritional labeling, and some of the
packaging issues for which we didn’t have the internal expertise
to handle.”
SSI was formed in 1991 as the result of a partnership
between three major grocery chains in northern California: Save Mart,
Raley’s and Bel Air. With corporate headquarters in Stockton,
SSI’s manufacturing operations consist of the Turlock Dairy Division
and Fairfield Dairy Division; and the Lathrop Dry Grocery/Frozen Division.
The dairy plants manufacture fluid milk, ice cream,
cultured products, juices and drinks under private labels including
Sunnyside Farms, Bay View Farms, Cowabunga and Denali. Four out of 10 cases
of product made at the Turlock plant go to partner stores; SSI also
performs contract packaging for numerous regional and national processors.
With some 440 SKUs produced in Turlock and up to 50 at
the Fairfield facility, QC’s purchasing program has come in handy.
“We utilize QC purchasing for some of our larger items —
packaging, some of the commodity ingredients like orange juice concentrate
and sweeteners, and in particular plastic resin for our blow-mold operation
at our Fairfield plant,” Olds says. “Where we can combine our
volume with those of other companies, that’s where we’ve had a
lot of help.”
That help is particularly useful as SSI, which
reported sales of $400 million last year, attracts more and more co-packing
business to support the rest of the operations and reduce costs to its
retail owners. “We’ve been able to focus on going out and
getting additional business outside of what our partners have,” says
Stefan Edh, Turlock Dairy Division controller. “Our partners are
regional grocery chains, and their growth is going to be through new
stores, which is coming through new population in the Central Valley. That
helps quite a bit, but we’re trying to get as many customers as we
can that make sense for our operation. The small bottle line we opened up
four years ago gives us new opportunities in a growth area. We’re
seeing a ton of single-serve business out there and we want to be part of
it. All these things will lower our overhead which essentially lowers the
costs to our partners.”
About two hours east of the San Francisco Bay area,
the 200,000-square-foot Turlock plant was built in 1988 as an ice cream and
cultured facility; the juice operation was added in 1994. Total tank
capacity is 443,900 gallons.
As many as 10 truckloads of milk, cream and condensed
arrive at the Turlock plant daily, along with 17 loads of orange juice
every week. It’s one of the few dairies in the area with a totally
enclosed receiving bay (many California dairies sport open-air offloading
areas) that can unload two trucks simultaneously.
All the milk comes from Dairy Farmers of America
members and other farms within a 90-mile radius. Once it passes labs,
it’s pumped into one of two 60,000-gallon raw silos. The plant also
features two 20,000-gallon whey silos and a 20,000-gallon water storage
tank for treated water. Used for blending juice and soy products, water is
treated at an on-site plant after being pulled from the local city well
system. Treated water is pulled through several filters and a chiller
before use.
“I think probably the biggest thing we’ve
done is in our cultured operation, putting in three new fillers in the last
two years,” says David Trenkenschuh, Turlock operations manager.
“We used to use the plug-style lid on our yogurt with the tamper
band, and by putting in these new fillers we increased our efficiencies and
productivity. We were able to go to a top-seal type of cup that our
consumers really preferred over the tamper band.”
The plant’s three cultured filling lines handle
6- and 8-ounce cup yogurt, 6- to 24-ounce yogurt cartons and 24- to
32-ounce yogurt and cottage cheese. The small-bottle line handles products
including drinkable yogurts and cultured soy drinks, plus a co-packed
sports drink called Aloe Splash. Incoming bottles are labeled upstairs,
then pass through a rotary washer on their way down to the filling lines.
“We’ve ordered additional processing
equipment for our cultured department that will essentially double
our production,” Olds says, noting it was expected to be installed
later this fall.
Among fluid milk products packed here is the Sunnyside
Farms brand, including the Cowabunga single-serve line. In ice cream, the
plant does round and square half gallons, along with various-size pails.
“At one time, we had over 30 different vanilla
ice creams that we made,” Olds explains, referring to the diverse
product needs of SSI’s retail owners. “Different brands,
different labels — many with unique formulas.” In fact,
SSI’s various ice creams, as well as its other products, have won
recognition at QC annual meetings (SSI has won QC’s Weber Award 10
times in the last two decades and the Gingrich Award twice since 1993).
Earlier this year, QC arranged for an ice cream short course to be
conducted on site.
Turlock’s chilled juice operation packages 96-
and 128-ounce plastic bottles and 64-ounce gabletop cartons. Supplied
bottles are moved through a depalletizer that sweeps them into rows and
onto a belt on their way to the fillers. A 30-valve rotary filler handles
125 jugs per minute; a gabletop filler does 140 cartons a minute.
All orange juice arrives at the plant pulp free, with
pulp and calcium fortification added as needed for the various varieties.
The plant also handles bulk and tote packaging of juices and drinks for its
partners and co-pack clients.
“A couple years back, we did a complete overhaul
of our chilled juice operation and installed ESL fillers — more
efficient, higher-capacity fillers,” Trenkenschuh says. “We put
in the accumulation units to allow us to keep fillers running full
time.”
The plant fills juice four days a week for West Coast
customers, with operations sometimes running up to six days for nationally
distributed products. The plant is certified organic and is the sole
co-packer for Whole Soy, the No. 1-selling soy smoothie in the United
States.
Finished products are stacked on pallets and
shrink-wrapped, stored pending delivery in 23,000 square feet of cooler
space added in 2002, when a 14,000-square-foot dry warehouse also was added
for ingredient and packaging storage. With a computer-managed inventory
tracking system, the plant’s delivery area extends from Yreka near
the Oregon border down to Bakersfield and Tehachapi, and also serves stores
in Reno/Lake Tahoe area.
“We recently had a firm come in and do an
engineering study to look at expanding our marketing capabilities via
multipacks and different pack configurations,” Trenkenschuh says.
Other improvements are on the way. “We’re
doing some other mechanization and upgrading within the plant,” Olds
says. “Total capital expenditures this year are almost $3 million.
Some of that is going to biosecurity. We’ve got a big push on
maintaining security, limiting access, protecting food that’s being
produced and shipped to the customer.”
Of course, with QC’s help, quality stays
topnotch; the lab at Turlock conducts more than 3,400 tests each week on
food products.
“We have a food safety manager on staff;
he’s been with us a little over two years now,” Trenkenschuh
says. “Quality Chekd has helped; we use them as a resource.
We’re also going through all our existing labeling to make sure
we’ll be compliant with the new regulations in regard to trans fat
and allergens. We also took the opportunity to upgrade some of our
art.”
Trenkenschuh says SSI took a HACCP approach toward
food safety. “We did a risk analysis of entry points, exit points and
all the different risks involved, all the way from package delivery, mail,
visitors, contractors, outside drivers — analyzed all the risks
involved with the points we have to protect,” he explains.
“Once we identified all the different risk levels and risk areas, we
set into motion plans to control those particular aspects of entry into the
facility. Our first phase was all the exterior doors into the plant. The
current phase this coming year is to restrict access within the plant, from
area to area.”
Olds notes that a lot of this planning has been in
cooperation with co-pack partners who have an interest because of the
franchise value in their name. “They want to make sure they’re
offering the safest product available and minimizing risk, so we’ve
utilized their advice and expertise in assisting us in putting together our
plans for food safety, along with Quality Chekd, IDFA and all the other
resources available,” he says. “We’ve had two or three
FDA audits of our HACCP programs, and have had positive results from all of
them.”
Employee safety is top of mind as well; SSI’s
Fairfield plant recently hit 500 days without a recordable accident.
“We do this not with a policing-type approach but proactively,”
says Tim McGarvey, vice president of human resources. “We have
periodic operational reviews, and that’s always the very first thing
Jay [Simon, SSI president and general manager] wants to know about. It
truly is first in everybody’s mind. We stack our safety record
against dairies all over the country. This is key from a financial
standpoint, of course, but most of all it’s something that’s
appreciated by the people because it’s their limbs and their health.
We have an awful lot of pride in the work being done. A lot of training is
one of the keys to that. The people really have a sense of ownership of the
product. They know we made millions of things that end up on
somebody’s table or somebody’s spoon, and that it needs to be
right every time. It shows in the work force, the great camaraderie and
great appreciation for the work they’re doing.”
Having some fun along the way doesn’t hurt
either, as Olds explains. “At Fairfield, when the plant reached its
200-day goal, I had promised to kiss a pig, so I had to do that. When they
hit 365, the operations manager promised to kiss the other end of the pig,
and did. The 200-day goal for Turlock is ‘Shave Dave,’”
he says, referring to mustachioed ops manager David Trenkenschuh. The
company also participates in an annual truck rodeo that pits partner
trucking companies against its own transport fleet in a challenge of
driving skills. Banners heralding the winners hang from pallet racks in the
warehouse.
Pride in work and fun doing it are part of the recipe
for low turnover, which SSI folks estimate at about 2 percent. “Ours
is so low, we don’t even measure it,” McGarvey remarks of
Turlock’s workforce of 205 non-union employees. “We just
don’t lose people. If you’re here six months, you’re
here. That makes your training load so much easier, makes people work
together so much better.”
Trenkenschuh offers: “We have a truck driver who
is 71 years old, and this gentleman is probably more fit that anyone
you’d care to meet. He’s like a rock. And when asked,
‘When are you going to retire?’ his response is, ‘It
hasn’t even crossed my mind.’ It’s those types of people
that make this company what it is.”
That dedication makes production challenges easier to
handle. “We’re basically four different plants under one roof
here,” Trenkenschuh says. “The coordination between the
different operations requires effort to make everything happen on a daily
basis, because of the diversity of the products that we do here.”
One of the biggest challenges more recently, he adds,
is increased fuel prices that have taxes SSI’s ability to
economically move products across the country. Controlling such costs will
be important to future growth.
“We certainly have to continue to monitor our
costs very closely and keep them in line,” Olds says. “We have
to be able to attract and retain good quality employees. We have to monitor
and continue to maintain the quality of our products. While we’re
doing all of that, we have to keep our eye on opportunities to expand the
business into different areas, different packaging, different
products.”
Making that easier is the flexibility that SSI
managers say makes their company unique in the industry.
“We can stop the company, turn it on a dime and
go a different direction without calling headquarters, and I don’t
mean we’re reckless at all,” McGarvey says, crediting the
flexibility to skilled, cross-trained employees. “But we have a great
situation where we’re really self-contained from a management
standpoint. If it makes financial sense, we can do what needs to be done.
It’s not writing up a 20-page proposal and defending it in five
meetings. It’s a very nimble company.”
Olds agrees. “We’re not afraid to look at
different product lines. This is first and foremost a dairy plant, but we
committed the heresy of bringing soy into the plant,” he quips.
“A big part of our plant is orange juice, for a major nationally
branded company. We are in the food processing business, not just limited
to dairy. If a project comes along that fits, we’re flexible enough
to accept the challenge and make a good product.”
Alquería Dairy
Bogotá, Colombia
“The Quality Chekd management team has provided
us with a very strong network of technology and processor contacts, not
only in the United States but the world over,” says Carlos Cavelier,
president of Alquería Dairy. “This gigantic synergy has
allowed Alquería to move swiftly within the industry, solving
problems in days rather than months and catching literally undreamt
opportunities.”
Proof of Quality Chekd’s influence across the
globe, Alquería has leveraged the association’s guidance to
maintain high-tech dairy production in South America, resulting in quality
products for Colombian consumers.
Alquería was founded in 1959 by Dr. Jorge
Cavelier, a University of Chicago urologist dedicated to improving public
health in Colombia, and his son Enrique, who drove the company under the
concept of “a bottle of milk is a bottle of health.” It remains
a family owned and operated company.
Offering a variety of ESL and UHT fluid milk products;
pasteurized milk, cream and butter; juices; and a milk-based oatmeal
beverage, Alquería projects revenues of $100 million in 2005 —
up from $16 million upon joining QC in 1994. The company has a long history
of firsts in the Colombian dairy industry, including paraffin coated milk
cartons, plastic pouch packaging and plastic cartons; the monitoring of raw
milk supply based on standard plate count; and shelf-stable milk pouches.
Alquería operates a modern ultra pasteurization
plant, with the highest UHT capacity in the Andean region and fifth in
Latin America, and has registered with the FDA to export its UHT oatmeal
beverage to the United States. The company’s new logo snared a
coveted Achieving Excellence marketing award from the International Dairy
Foods Association in 2002.
On its own, Alquería has made great
achievements, but QC has helped it go even further. “Quality Chekd
has had an enormous impact in Alquería over the past decade,”
says Cavelier, grandson of the founder and third-generation chief
executive. “It has not only advised us in the setting up of good
manufacturing practices and HACCP, but also in improving the quality of our
raw milk supply. Quality Chekd has moved confidence among
Alquería associates to sky-high levels and made them aware as a
strong cultural factor within the company that we can live and work in a
developing country and act like a company in an industrialized
nation.”
The UHT plant opened in 1995 at more than 92,000
square feet; since then, the facility has expanded to more than 342,000
square feet. With shifts working around the clock, processing capacity has
grown from nearly 16 million gallons to more than 58 million gallons, of
which 95 percent is for UHT products.
Alquería gathers its milk from farms and
cooperatives mostly in the center and southern parts of Colombia,
collecting more than 92,000 gallons per day.
Most of the latest important changes occurred after
1995, when the production plant had a technological renovation, changing
from a traditional pasteurization plant into a state-of-the-art facility
with the most modern technology for processing UHT products.
Processing capacity is maintained with three indirect
processors, two direct processors, three aseptic tanks, 11 aseptic pouch
fillers, three aseptic carton fillers, two aseptic dozers and one automatic
standardizing machine.
Several innovative processes have improved
manufacturing efficiencies. Incorporation of UHT technology has upgraded
the storage, distribution and commercialization lines, and also the
product, because no refrigeration is needed. Aseptic in-line dosage became
necessary with the development of new products, to implement
high-technology supplementary equipment to guarantee productivity,
efficiency and quality. Finally, direct equipment and aseptic tank
management is oriented to safely guarantee product qualities like color and
flavor.
The company has an investment plan for the technical
area of about 5 percent of the sales of last year, with the objective of
supporting the already increasing sales and the new coming developments.
As would be expected of QC members, safety is a
priority across the board for Alquería. The company has developed
and implemented a HACCP plan. Included are a training program, clean-up
plan, verification and follow-up of hygiene practices, preventive
maintenance and measurement management programs, identification and
follow-up of raw material and products, storage program for raw materials
and products, quality assurance program, sampling plan, machines validation
program and a cross-contamination and allergenic management program.
“In 2001, we feel Alquería received one
of the most important quality certification of the world: the Quality Chekd
seal,” Cavelier says. “We proceeded then to implement a
sampling program with a laboratory in Colombia that is endorsed by Quality
Chekd.”
In October 2003, the INVIMA (Colombian FDA) certified
Alquería’s UHT line in the HACCP system. The following
November, IQNet and ICONTEC certified the company on ISO 9001:2000.
Employee safety is a priority as well;
Alquería’s strategic objective is to become OSHA certified.
“It is a tool that makes risk management a more agile task,”
Cavelier says. Alqueria is compliant with the technical advisory of ARP
Liberty Insurance (Professional Risk Administration) and occupational
health divulgation groups. The company also hired a nurse who monitors the
employees’ health status and leads the personal protection elements
program in the production plant.
Further, Alquería has established an auditing
program that includes quality management system efficiency verifications
every two months, plant visits by management to monitor GMPs, external
audits and plant auditing on behalf of Quality Chekd.
“Alquería has structured a very competent
department of milk purchasing, with the objective of giving the farmer
technical support in the production and continuous improvement of the milk
quality,” Cavelier says. “This same area is in charge of
permanently monitoring every supplier and establishing and improving
payment systems based on the hygienic, compositional and sanitary quality
of the milk.”
The company has special channels for retail sales and supermarkets in
Bogotá and the rest of the country. It also has warehousing
facilities in strategic places, as well as a fleet of specially designed
trucks and vans that allows storage and preservation of products in prime
condition.
Immediate challenges facing Alquería are
obtaining FDA certification for the exportation of its line of oatmeal
drinks, obtaining the HACCP Quality Chekd certification and responding
effectively to changing market conditions in Colombia.
“Because of all of these new processes and
changes, the company’s main efforts have been directed to the
training of work teams in the production plant, so we can improve our
competence levels,” Cavelier says. “Furthermore, the adjustment
of all our infrastructure is another important goal, not only through
acquiring new equipments but also by supplying answers to different needs
manifested by our employees.”
Alquería has 611 direct employees, 583 temporal
employees and 768 contractors, totaling 1,962 associates as of June 2005.
The company has a “unique, highly motivated
family management structure,” Cavelier says. “We run by TEP
— Todo Es Possible, Everything is Possible. Every associate
receives the same treatment that a family member does. We strive to be a
meritocracy, understanding the role we play in developing our associates
and their families as persons will have a great impact on the next
generation of Colombians.”
Cavelier says this motivation helped Alquería
grow by 24 percent organically, growth that became 41 percent with
the purchase of Andina, a medium-size dairy in Cali, the second-largest
city in Colombia, 300 miles southwest of Bogotá. “We also
consolidated market leadership in Colombia, reaching a market share of 60
percent in Cundinamarca and 35 percent in the rest of the country,”
he says. “The company continues to present highly dynamic levels in
terms of product launches, entering new categories that had not been
developed, such as ‘thirst quenchers’ and milk/fruit-based
beverages.”
Last year, Alquería implemented a company
strategy based on the Harvard Business School ORVA methodology (objectives,
resources, advantages and scope), which Cavelier says enables the company
to have clear objectives in the short and medium terms. “The entire
company participated, and the result was an ORVA declaration that compiles
objectives and expectations of all the areas,” he says. “Once
corporative ORVA was defined, a communication process within
Alquería took place, to generate the organizational alignment that
will take us to the accomplishment of all our goals.”
In addition, Cavelier expresses
Alquería’s commitment to understanding its consumers in order
to develop the best products and communication tools. “This process
is led by a growing marketing department that produced, with Grey
Worldwide, the best ad in the history of the agency in Colombia so
far,” he says.
It’s all underscored, of course, by QC’s
backing — insurance that quality of product will rule the day.
“The sole mention of Quality Chekd inspires great confidence in our
consumers,” Cavelier says, “because they know that when they
purchase our products they are automatically getting pure and globally
certified quality for themselves and their families.”
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