Hearthside Food Solutions
Hearthside Food Solutions, with production bakeries located across the U.S., is the largest contract manufacturer in the baking industry with capabilities for bars, cookies, crackers, snacks and more. For the full story on Hearthside Food Solutions, see "The path of continuous improvement at Hearthside Food Solutions"
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Hearthside Food Solutions, Downers Grove, IL, was founded in 2009 by Rich Scalise, chairman, CEO, with the help of a private equity partner, Wind Point Partners. The company began producing bars, crackers and various snack components at four bakery facilities in Grand Rapids, MI. The company grew quickly through acquisitions, and as it attracted more projects from top U.S. snack and bakery companies. Today, Hearthside operates 24 facilities with 3.3 million square feet of production space, employing 7,500 people manufacturing bars, cookies, crackers, snacks, pretzels, snack components, croutons and more.
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Hearthside is one of the largest bar manufacturers in the U.S. and Europe. The bar market is the fastest-growing segment Hearthside serves, with capabilities for baked and cold-formed bars, including snack, energy, nutrition, granola, breakfast, protein, sports and nutraceutical bars.
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The competitive nature of the bar market requires continual study, and Hearthside has developed an extensive research-and-development function that has created over 4,000 bar recipes. Hearthside has 23 bar lines cross its production network with annual potential output of 3.1 billion bars.
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Through the wide range of product capabilities, including extrusion, layering, enrobing, inclusions, toppings, and so on, the number of potential bar variations Hearthside can accommodate hits 500,000. “We have a lot of flexible capacity for bars,” says Dwayne Hughes, senior vice president, supply chain. He notes that many of Hearthside’s customers don’t like to do low-volume product runs—especially for products that contain allergens like peanut butters, and gluten-free products. “We’re very good at allergen segregation,” he says.
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Hearthside is also one of the largest cookie and cracker manufacturers in the industry. Hearthside’s cookie and cracker capabilities include wire-cut, rotary, sandwich, minis and laminated styles.
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The core drivers of contract manufacturing are quality, speed to market and innovation. Almost all of Hearthside’s customers have production capabilities. These are companies who own top-selling, world-renowned snack and bakery brands. So, in order to succeed, Hearthside needs to provide a value proposition that exceeds the internal abilities of its customers. That’s where daily innovation factors into the discussion, extending to its products, processes, business and finances.
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All Hearthside manufacturing facilities run on SAP, which helps ensure brand protection for its customers. “We have all of their formulas and confidential information locked in SAP,” says Dwayne Hughes, senior vice president, supply chain. The company continues to leverage its investment in SAP to produce more-accurate, valuable and predictive information to help with ongoing business management.
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Hearthside maintains a wide range of snack production capabilities, including pretzels, rye chips, bagel chips, snack mixes, extruded snacks, clusters and popcorn. Natural and organic options exist, too.
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Dwayne Hughes, senior vice president, supply chain, notes that Hearthside has end-to-end supply-chain capabilities, including everything from planning a project to procuring the required ingredients, production, warehousing and distribution—or any desired combination of those tasks.
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“We’re a food manufacturer without brands, only value,” says Dwayne Hughes, senior vice president, supply chain. “The only thing we have is our customer’s trust in us.”