Workshop: Production efficiency and cost control for food producers

About the session
Every food producer knows the feeling. You’re cooking, packing, managing staff, chasing suppliers and filling in temperature logs, and there’s never quite enough time to step back and look at how the whole operation is running. Meanwhile the small things add up: over-portioning, a cleaning check that gets skipped on a busy day, a supplier price rise you haven’t passed on yet.

In this session, Claire shares the most common production, costing and compliance issues she sees in food businesses, and practical ways to win back time and protect your margins without turning your kitchen upside down. Expect a live example showing how a routine price increase really impacts your product costing, table discussions with fellow founders on where your own operation is under pressure, and ideas you can take back to your floor the next day. Compliance is part of the story, because a tightly run operation is also an inspection-proof one.

The expert
Claire Sullivan, long-time Kitchen Republic member, ran a high-end catering company in Amsterdam for 12 years before founding CRAVE Good Food in 2016. Over the next 10 years she grew CRAVE from a small operation making 250 products a day into a production kitchen turning out over 1500 organic-certified fresh salad meals a day. She knows the compliance, costing and staffing headaches of a growing kitchen first-hand, and how to manage them to maximize profit while keeping everything running smoothly.

Who is this for?
Food producers with their own production kitchen or facility, whether you make fresh, frozen or ambient products (for example ready-meals, pasta, bakery, catering), who:
– Don’t know their true cost per unit, or watch margins shrink every time a supplier raises prices
– Feel the business can’t run a day without them
– Have a HACCP plan and some daily logs, but aren’t confident they’d hold up in an inspection, audit or recall
– Are growing and want systems their team will actually adhere to

The agenda
13:45 – 14:00 Welcome
14:00 – 14:15 Introductions
14:15 – 15:15 The three silent killers + table discussion
15:15 – 15:30 Break
15:30 – 16:40 Practical fixes: compliance, costing and a smoother production floor, plus Q&A
16:40 – 17:00 Wrap-up & close

Registration for this event ends on November 11. You can submit your questions upfront when signing up. We’re looking forward to an interesting session! 

If you’re unable to attend, please let us know at least 12 hours in advance.