Making more of it

Growth in a spice business hits a wall that is not the mill and not the market. It is the packing bench.

The bottleneck is not where you think

Grinding and blending are fast and scale reasonably. Filling, capping, labeling and packing are slow and scale linearly with units. Doubling output doubles the hours at the bench with no efficiency gained.

So the first real constraint is almost always filling, and the second is changeover: cleaning between materials costs the same regardless of batch size, which makes a day of four products mostly a day of cleaning.

Batch size has a ceiling

You cannot simply make everything bigger. Ground spice deteriorates, so a batch larger than your sell-through is a batch that goes stale on your own shelf.

Mixing does not scale linearly either: optimum time and speed have to be re-evaluated, and over-mixing breaks material down and widens the particle distribution that causes blends to separate.

The honest constraint is: batch to sell-through, not to capacity.

What to fix in order

Batch by material so you do one changeover instead of four. This is free and it is usually the largest single gain available.

A filler for powders, which addresses accuracy and speed together and is the first capital purchase that genuinely pays.

Labeling, either an applicator or outsourced pre-labeled jars.

People, last, because handing over a process you have not written down does not work.

When more volume is the wrong answer

When the margin per jar does not support it. Doubling the volume of a line that barely covers its costs doubles the work and not the profit.

Frequently the better move is fewer lines at higher value, or a blend that cannot be price-compared, rather than more units of a commodity single spice.

References