Guide
Visiting and vetting a co-packer before you commit
Updated
A co-packing relationship is a supply chain dependency: if it fails, your product stops existing. That is worth a day of your time before the first purchase order rather than after it.
Go and look
Visit the site. A packer who will not host a visit before a first run has answered a question you were about to ask.
Look at the line your product would run on rather than at the reception area, and ask what else runs on it and what the changeover involves.
Certification, in the document
Ask for the certificate rather than the claim, check the scope covers your product category and your format, and check the expiry date.
Scope is where this goes wrong: a certification covering ambient production does not cover a chilled line, and a brand that checked only that a certificate existed finds out at the audit.
Six questions worth asking
What else runs on this line, and what is the allergen position between products? What is your lead time from purchase order to delivery, in a normal month and in November? What happens if a run fails quality checks, and who pays?
Who are your three largest customers by volume, and how big am I relative to them? What is your notice period, and mine? And how have you handled a recall?
Three answers that should stop it
Vagueness about the allergen position on a shared line. That is a safety question with a documented answer, and a packer who cannot give it does not have one.
Refusal to put lead times or notice periods in writing. And no answer at all on recall, because the cost of one falls somewhere by default, and if it has not been allocated deliberately it will fall on the brand at the worst possible moment.
Then start small
A first run should be sized so that a failure is survivable. Everything about a new relationship that can go wrong goes wrong on the first run, and that is normal.
Book the second run only once you have seen the first arrive, on time, in specification, with the paperwork you were promised.