What Is Contract Juice Manufacturing and How Does It Work?

Synergy Food Group Operations Director, Adrian Hall explains what is contract juice manufacturing and how does it work, so that you can understand and find the ideal Contract Juice Manufacturing or Private Label Beverage Manufacturing partner for your company. 

Essentially, a contract juice manufacturer is the process of outsourcing your production to a third party. 

Let’s say you’re a juice or nut milk company. 

You don’t want to make that product yourself. 

You want to find the assistance of somebody who’s already in that field and already in that market, already creating those products and you’re going to get them to make your product for you. 

Now, let’s say you’re a juice business and you may just want one part of your product made, you can’t make the orange juice yourself. You may call on a contract juice manufacturer just to provide you one ingredient to be able to complete your product. 

The other options are they may want to make the whole product from start to finish. 

A contract juice manufacturer can help you develop it, they can help you manufacture it, they can warehouse the product, they can distribute the product. 

It’s quite a varied thing, so depending on what you need, it’s really important you ask the right questions to find the right contract juice manufacturer for what you’re looking for. 

Your contract juice manufacturer should be really acting as a business partner to you as well. 

So you want them to be able to provide you with opportunities to find efficiencies in how your product is made, find cost savings so that your end product, can be less expensive to the end consumer. 

They want to be able to find improvements potentially before your product has even gone to market. 

A lot of times, small businesses have a great idea, but conceptually, when they actually try to make that product, there’s often things within that process that may not be efficient or may not be right when you’re scaling. 

A contract juice manufacturer is going to be able to help you pinpoint what those things are and make the adjustments before you’ve gone to market. 

They can act as an advisor. 

You want to be able to pick up the phone. You’ve got a serious business question about dealing with a supermarket or dealing with a cafe or dealing with a new customer or creating a new product. 

Your ideal contract juice manufacturer should be able to give you some great tips to avoid making costly mistakes. 

It’s really important that a contract juice manufacturer is aligned with where you are now, where you’re going and where you want to be as well. 

Oftentimes you could be working with a business who’s great for the small scale, but as you start to get more contracts and grow, that business may not be able to grow with you. 

It’s important to understand what are the limitations with their businesses, so that you know, when to make the decisions and who to make them with. 

Now, one of the really important things about working with a contract juice manufacturer is being able to utilize their expertise in food safety and traceability. 

As a small business you just want to make your products, put it in the hand of the end consumer. That’s what you’re really passionate about. 

Food safety is probably the last thing on your mind when you’re making the products on your kitchen bench. Contract juice manufacturers are experts in this. 

What they’re going to be able to do is:

Look at the process of how your products made,

Identify all the critical steps that will avoid any potential things going wrong and what that will do is it’ll end up saving you money and creating a much, much better product, where you’re never going to have to have issues with damage to the brand or the reputation of what you’re trying to achieve. 

They’re also specialists in what they do. So often as you’re starting out and starting to grow, trying to decide what machines you need to make your product, it can become very, very overwhelming. 

A contract juice manufacturer, as a specialist in manufacturing is going to be able to make those decisions for you or at least work with you to get a great result. 

So how does it actually work? 

You’ve got a product you want to get it made. How does it work? 

What are you going to do? 

You’re going to pick up the phone and hopefully you’re going to call the Synergy Food Group. 

Otherwise you’re going to call a contract juice manufacturer. 

You’re going to tell them all about your product. 

They’re going to want to know how you’re currently making it. 

What kind of volumes you’re making? 

What are the processes? 

Where are you trying to sell it? 

The more information that you convey at the start, when you’re going through that initial stage of development, the easier it’s going to be for them to be able to get a clear picture of how they’re going to be able to provide value to you as a business. 

Once you’ve gone through those steps, you’re going to want to do is make sure that you’ve got all of your legal stuff covered. 

Ensure sure you’ve got an NDA signed. 

Be sure that you’ve got all of the specification sheets for the ingredients that they’re going to be using in their products. 

Make sure you’ve got their food safety certificates. Maybe that’s HACCP, maybe that’s SQF. 

Having all this stuff documented early just alleviates any issues further down the track. 

You may also want to sign a contract as well. 

That’ll just put in place some very clear rules, to show who is responsible for what, at different stages of the productions.

Last thing you want is to have an issue pop up after working with a company for six months or 12 months, that causes issues that could have been easily rectified, if they’d been discussed at the very start. 

Once all that paperwork side of things is done, you’re going to want to start doing some samples. 

Often the contract juice manufacturer will work very closely with you to make replicas of the way that you’re currently making your product and see where they can make improvements, whether it be to the end product, to the food safety or to the design of how you’re finishing your product. 

Okay, samples are great. Where do we go from here? 

You’re going to want to do your first small production run. 

I often recommend doing a really small run to start with, just to make sure that as they start to scale it, the product is exactly the same as the samples that you received. 

Once you’re happy with that, it’s all systems go. 

Phones are called, emails are placed, orders are in and hopefully it’s a nice seamless transition of placing your order, receiving your stock, and then you selling it. 

Now, the beauty of all of this is as you grow and as you scale, you’re only paying for what you need. 

You’re not having to fork out huge amounts of money to buy bigger machinery or a new factory because you’ve outgrown the one that you’re already in or a bigger truck. 

The contract juice manufacturer is already established. They’re already set up and they’re going to be able to help you through each of those stages of growth. 

And at the end of the day, the more economies of scale they get, potentially the cheaper you’re even, even able to get your product. So it works as a double win. 

In summary… 

Make sure from a contract juice manufacturer that they’re going to be a great adviser, that they’re going to act as a business partner for you, by looking at efficiencies and looking at ways to save you money. 

Make sure you find someone who’s a specialist in what they do. 

Don’t go to a toothpaste manufacturer, if you’re making nut milk. 

Find someone who’s already working in that field. You’re going to get greater results much, much faster. 

Make sure they’re an extension of your brand and your ethos and you’re on the right path. 

Finally… 

If you’ve got a cold pressed juice or a range of nut milks or nutritional beverages that you’re looking to get to market or looking to scale, contact Synergy Food Group and let’s have a discussion about where you’re at, where you want to be, and let’s see how we can work together.