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 out temperature logs, and there’s never quite enough time to step back and assess how the entire operation is running. Meanwhile, the little things add up: over-portioning, a cleaning check that gets skipped on a busy day, a supplier price increase you haven’t passed on yet.

In this session, Claire shares the most common production, costing, and compliance issues she sees in food businesses, along with practical ways to reclaim time and protect your margins without turning your kitchen upside down. Expect a live example demonstrating how a routine price increase actually affects your product costing, group discussions with fellow founders about where your own operation is under pressure, and ideas you can implement on the floor the very next day. Compliance is part of the equation, because a tightly run operation is also one that can withstand inspections.

Theexpert-
, Claire Sullivan, a longtime member of Kitchen Republic, 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 producing 250 products a day into a production kitchen churning out over 1,500 organic-certified fresh salad meals a day. She has firsthand experience with the compliance, costing, and staffing challenges of a growing kitchen—and knows 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 (such as ready-to-eat meals, pasta, baked goods, or 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 an 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
1:45 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Welcome
2:00 p.m. – 2:15 p.m. Introductions
2:15 p.m. – 3:15 PM The three silent killers + table discussion
3:15 PM – 3:30 PM Break
3:30 PM – 4:40 PM Practical solutions: compliance, costing, and a smoother production floor, plus Q&A
4:40 PM – 5:00 PM Wrap-up & closing

Registration for this event closes on November 11. You can submit your questions in advance when you sign up. We’re looking forward to an interesting session! 

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