Sarnia Foods

rost 31/03/2023 15:17:43

Success Stories

Food & Beverage

Sarnia Foods

Customer: Sarnia Foods

For success choose an ERP system that can grow with you

Sarnia Foods develops and manufactures food products for a variety of brands that, for whatever reason, are unable to take their own ideas forward into manufacturing. This allows their clients to concentrate on sales and marketing while the Sarnia team source packaging and ingredients and manage stock, production, packing and shipping. Through a direct link to some of its clients’ websites, the Sarnia team can take orders directly.

Sarnia currently produces products such as soups, sauces, juices, smoothies and vegetarian sausages and burgers. Clients also send products manufactured elsewhere to Sarnia for them to pack and ship. To keep transports costs down, the team has designed specialist packaging that keeps products frozen for 48 hours. Director, Patrick Finigan, said, “Generally we act as an extension of our clients’ business. We’re often the point of contact for their customers too if there are any issues.”

“To save us the disruption of moving again in around five years, we recently decided to take a big step and move to a much bigger factory,” continued Patrick. “Upgrading from a 3,000 sq ft site to one of 21,000 sq ft has enabled us to operate larger manufacturing, packaging and storage facilities and to keep everything on one site.”

Patrick and his business partner set up Sarnia Foods in 2013 and both had clear views about the type of software they wanted to drive the company. “We knew we wanted to work directly with a software provider, rather than a reseller, because from experience we knew this would give us more influence over the software’s future development. We also wanted a system that held all our data in one place - rather than having to resort to using tons of spreadsheets. And it obviously had to have all the functionality we needed as a food manufacturer, such as batch traceability and the ability to cope with variables – the weight of cauliflowers for example! Finally, we wanted a Cloud based system so we didn’t incur the capital costs of installing our own server or have the hassle of maintaining it and running back ups.”

When the team from Kerridge Commercial Systems (KCS) contacted Patrick to talk about K8 LV software, he thought it sounded too good to be true! “It gave us everything we needed, and I know we made the right decision,” he said. “We wanted to reduce the paper trail involved in our business and the system has allowed us to utilise scanning throughout all our processes and barcode everything as it goods in. We were able to address rotation issues and start seeing exactly what yields we were getting.”

We wanted to reduce the paper trail involved in our business and the system has allowed us to utilise scanning throughout all our processes and barcode everything as it goods in.

- Patrick Finigan. Director, Sarnia Foods