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Enterprise Minnesota Magazine - December 2011
HELPING MANUFACTURERS GROW PROFITABLY
Forward Thinking Flavors
A global food and flavoring company’s New Ulm manufacturing plant has gone from an afterthought to one of the company’s best run sites.
Manufacturing Director Jim St. Peter, left, and General Manager Doug Cook.
You won’t come across the name Firmenich, Inc., on your grocer’s shelves, but if you’ve ever eaten at a fast food restaurant, picked up a ready-to-eat meal in the frozen foods section, or sipped a flavored coffee drink, chances are you’ve tasted products manufactured at the Firmenich plant in New Ulm.
“We have 1,174 active formulas at our site,” says Jim St. Peter, director of manufacturing at the New Ulm facility. “None of our food flavorings are sold as ready to eat; they’re going to large Fortune 500 companies who are using them in their products.”
Firmenich, founded in 1895 and based in Geneva, Switzerland, is the largest manufacturer of fragrances and flavorings in the world. The company’s product offerings are split about 50-50 between fragrances and food flavors. However, the New Ulm plant deals exclusively in flavorings—from spray-dried cheese powders to vanillas—that go into food products around the world.
In 1991, Firmenich acquired two plants owned by Borden: the New Ulm facility along with another plant in Anaheim, California. The Minnesota facility is now one of the company’s 26 manufacturing sites worldwide. When Firmenich bought the Borden plants, “the intent for the [New Ulm] site was to shut it down, because they were really after the technology at that other location,” recalls
St. Peter.
Fortunately for New Ulm and the Minnesota business community, the site got a reprieve thanks to its performance. During the past 20 years, the New Ulm plant has proved itself an asset to Firmenich, even winning awards for its safety and good performance. Firmenich corporate has invested millions of dollars into the New Ulm plant in the past five years alone. In addition, product volumes continue to go up, and in 2010, the plant received a supplier of the year award from one of its customers, a Fortune 500 company.
“We’re hearing from global vice presidents [that] this is probably one of the better run flavor sites around the globe,” says St. Peter. “I can’t attribute the success to one thing because it’s many. It’s everyone pulling their weight. We’ve started to take on more of a continuous improvement push and keep striving to do better.”
In recent months, Enterprise Minnesota teamed up with the New Ulm plant as part of the location’s mission to improve. Fifteen employees completed an Enterprise Minnesota Lean Manufacturing 101 workshop and an on-site leadership skills development class in the past six months.
In addition to starting down the lean path, the Firmenich plant implemented 5S training by making a few minor adjustments to office processes, a move that already has saved about 40 minutes in one person’s workload.
“This site is clearly going to be a site of growth. It’s quite evident we’re not done yet,” says St. Peter. “Everyone is pushing and they want to do better. They want to satisfy the customer; they don’t want to let the customer down.That’s embedded in this site.”
©2011, Enterprise Minnesota. All rights reserved.Reproduction encouraged after obtaining permission from EnterpriseMinnesota. Additional Magazines and reprints available for purchase.
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