Pure Garden: Flexible production of tasteful goods
Pure Garden, from Skanderborg, Denmark, have achieved great success in the food industry based on their high-quality products. The implementation of the financial system Uniconta has also contributed to their achievements given the increased flexibility, overview and speed. The interaction between features such as inventory, production orders and purchase orders give Pure Garden a highly efficient production when regarding the company size.
When entrepreneurs Marie-Louise Beuchert and Aron Hamann launched Pure Garden in 2018, the ambition was to become the largest supplier of spice mixes, sauces and dressings for meal boxes. To begin with, the business did not see much growth. Then the Covid-19 crisis became a reality and the interest in meal boxes exploded.
“Suddenly we were very busy, and we experienced an increasing demand for a rapid change. A large client can purchase 300,000 bags of spice mixes a month. When they suddenly change their product, we may have to change the contents of 50,000 bags within a week. This requires a highly efficient and streamlined production,” Aron Hamann explains.
Prepared to act fast
The combination of an efficient warehouse full of raw materials and ingredients and a flexible production supported by the contract manufacturer form the foundation of PureGarden. The latter allows PureGarden to switch between 24-hour operation and single-team shifts as needed. In order for this to work, an efficient financial system is required. Therefore, Aron is very pleased with PureGarden’s choice of Uniconta and the IT partner Morsing Data.
“It is the interplay between Uniconta’s features such as inventory overview, production orders and purchase orders that we achieve the flow that enables us to deliver at the required level. Currently we have around 350 product numbers of which a large number are unique and predominantly organic spice mixes. The recipe for them is in Uniconta as lists of parts. Based on the lists of parts, we generate a production order for the employees, who must mix and package the products. The order includes all the requirements for the specific spice mix ranging from raw materials and ingredients to packaging and labeling.”
Flexible processes
A production order ensures that the necessary materials are picked from the raw material warehouse and passed on to the mixing and then packaging stages. Uniconta registers the decrease in inventory and automatically notifies you if the stock of a given product or raw material falls. PureGarden works with a minimum/ maximum warehouse, where the stock is set at a given size in advance. When a new order brings the stock below the set level, Uniconta generates a purchase order for the relevant supplier. The employee in charge can then either send the order or wait a little.
As in all food production, there are strict requirements regarding control and management. In this case, Uniconta is very useful. You can use the “reference number” for simple serial/ batch number tracking if an ingredient from a specific batch across orders must be followed. When bookkeeping, the field is saved to the warehouse transactions and invoice entries. The field can be used for anything for example, to register a serial number on stock entries.
Easily customized
It is also easy for the individual user to create new fields in Uniconta with references or practical knowledge, Aron Hamann emphasizes.
“For example, on the warehouse picking list, you can underline that they must manually check the expiration date on the product. Without being tech-savvy, we are able to adapt the individual screens and create coherence between data on different functions. The user interface in Uniconta is comprehensible and provides easy access to streamline our processes.”
Growth and more space
“Uniconta is an amazing tool when it comes to the democratic distribution of knowledge in an organization. In the past, the majority of our information was in our financial system, but it was difficult to get a hold of. Today, we can use virtually all data to streamline and digitize our process,” he concludes.
Pure Garden has just moved to new premises in Skanderborg, Denmark where they with 800 have plenty of space to experiment with their tasteful spice mixes.