Paying someone else to make it

At some volume production stops being the fun part and starts being the ceiling on sales.

What a copacker actually does

Makes your product to your specification in their facility, on their equipment, under their license. You deliver a formulation and a scheduled process; they deliver cased finished goods.

Most have a minimum run, and the minimum is usually larger than a producer expects at the point they first ask.

When it makes sense

When production is the constraint on sales rather than the other way round. When an account requires a facility with an audit history you do not have. And when the cost of your own time in a kitchen exceeds what the copacker charges, which happens earlier than people think.

It rarely makes sense as a way to save money at small volume, because you are paying someone else's overhead to do what you can currently do in a day.

What it costs you besides money

Same-day control. You cannot adjust a batch on the bench any more.

Scheduling dependency, in the one season where timing matters. Their run calendar will not rearrange around your market weekend.

And process authority implications: a scheduled process is established for a process in a facility. Moving production can mean revisiting the filing rather than transferring it.

What stays yours

The recipe, the brand, the label and everything it claims. Packing under someone else's roof does not move the labeling obligation, and the name and address on the bottle still has to identify who is responsible.

Agree the specification in numbers: target and maximum pH, viscosity, fill weight, color tolerance. The terms most often left to assumption are pH and viscosity, and those are the two that decide whether the product is still yours.

References