Situation
- Our client, an international soft drinks brand with specialised bottling requirements was looking for support to grow profitably in the UK. Our client was co-manufacturing with bottlers in Europe and wished to explore the feasibility of supplying the UK market with a UK co-manufacturer
What We Did
To support our client, we:
- Identified an extensive list of potential UK co-manufacturers based on information from within our team, expert contacts, co-manufacturing industry associations, and desk research including searching aggregated Companies House data
- Contacted the long list of potential co-manufacturers on an anonymous basis on our client’s behalf, to avoid jeopardising their relationships with existing co-manufacturing partners and agreed a shortlist based on responses
- Co-created and distributed a Request for Information to shortlisted candidates, to determine co-manufacturers’ capabilities and ability to accommodate our clients’ specialised requirements
- Managed the Q&A process and RFI responses from shortlisted candidates, plus discussions to establish co-manufacturers’ openness to invest in required capabilities where they lacked them
- Profiled interested co-manufacturers to provide additional context on these businesses beyond their RFI responses
- Shared complete and summarised RFI responses and debriefed on offline conversations with co-manufacturers
Results Delivered
- We identified 5 co-manufacturers with serious interest in working with our client and connected our client with the most promising 3 with NDAs in place. Most co-manufacturers were not interested due to an unwillingness to meet our client’s specialised requirements, plus capacity constraints.
- Following direct co-manufacturer discussions, our client was ultimately satisfied that a suitable co-manufacturing partner did not currently exist in the UK, decided to continue co-manufacturing in Europe, and used co-manufacturing price benchmarks gathered from the exercise to negotiate with current partners.
- Our client is actively considering working with Food Strategy Associates to optimise their UK warehousing & logistics network.