57 ways to get some cachet in a sachet

Andy Henderson, supply chain leader, Heinz Midlands Sauces hub

From a very early age, I had a tendency to take things apart - although I'm not sure I always put them back together. I also knew I wanted to do an apprenticeship, which I guess is a little bit weird as most kids want to become astronauts and rocket scientists when they are that age! But I didn't change my mind as I got older, and when I was 16 I was extremely lucky to get an industrial measurement and control apprenticeship with Dairy Crest.

This was quite unusual, but I think they realised that people with electrical and mechanical skills weren't necessarily equipped to cope with advancing technology, and they needed new people coming into the industry with a different skillset. So I studied for a year at Bristol and Newport in Gwent, which was great. But it also meant living away from home, which was a pretty tough gig at 16. For the remaining three years I then worked at the Crudgington factory on block release.

Not long after completing the apprenticeship, however, I decided to leave and go into the chemical industry. It was one of those situations where if you stay on, you always feel like the apprentice and I wanted to move on. But unfortunately, the chemicals trade really didn't light my fire - and after a few months, I went straight back into the dairy industry. This time it was with Eden Vale in Minsterley doing maintenance and engineering, although I moved fairly quickly into projects and production management.

Wide and varied experience

After that I joined a firm doing project engineering solutions for the food industry, which was an amazingly useful experience because I got to see so many factories, which teaches you to size up a place very quickly. It also led to my next job, which was at Guinness, where I got the opportunity fairly soon afterwards to do project work putting widgets in bottles. This was incredibly exciting and technically challenging, but after a while, a lot of factors combined to make me think I really needed to move on.

There was also a huge amount of change at Guinness. They basically made everyone redundant and asked us to re-apply for our jobs. I was the only person who actually requested redundancy! I had also had an interview for the operations manager role here at Heinz Foodservice in Telford.

When I arrived here in 1999 - four years after Heinz acquired the site - it was an incredibly complex plant and Heinz had already started work on restructuring. Things had just proliferated out of control; it had 2,500 stock keeping units in wet sauces and dry goods like salt and pepper and 400 staff; it was also doing all of this customised stuff for small customers that didn't really make commercial sense.

To cut a long story short, Heinz exited the dry goods business and decided to focus on wet portions: sachets, sticks and jars.The dry goods business was sold off and about 200 of our staff went to a site 10 miles up the road. Since then, we have focused about 90% of the business on single serve sachets. It's mostly Heinz brand, but we do work with foodservice partners on co-branded packaging sometimes.

Obviously, like every food manufacturer, we have faced rising costs, and we've had to pass some of these on, but there are a lot of things you can do before it gets to that. Take for example a customer who is buying boxes of 200 sachets. If he is paying a transportation cost per case, he might be better off taking boxes of 300 or 400.

On an operational front, of course, you've got to have the day-to-day rigour of measuring performance and driving your key performance indicators (KPIs) - you have to reduce costs by a certain percentage every year just to stand still. But savings rarely come from one big idea, it's usually a combination of lots of small things.

As for the every day challenge of running this plant, it's very different to some other factories I've worked in before, where you get massive spikes at Christmas or when the weather changes and the place is Bedlam or there's nothing going on. For us, it's more about grinding out our KPIs: safety, near-miss reporting, quality, conformance to plan, waste, yield, customer service levels and downtime, etc. We've also made great strides on sustainability targets, we've taken out 14-15% of what we used to send to landfill this year - things like the end of roll laminate that's used to make the sachets, which are now shredded and used in packaging and other products.

Benchmark for success

Compared to other Heinz plants, I'd say we are pretty competitive. I certainly am! All the Heinz plants are benchmarked against each other and we are up there with the best of them. On the majority of KPIs, we are probably one or two across Europe. The people on this site are some of the best people I have ever worked with. They are incredibly diligent and they care passionately about what we're trying to do.

As for capital investment, we've spent a fair bit on switching to manufacturing our own mayonnaise on site this year and next year we will start manufacturing our own tomato ketchup as well - both of which used to be sourced from plants on the Continent and just filled and packed here.

It's very risky to make strategic decisions on the basis of something as volatile as the exchange rate, but the sterling/euro exchange rate has suddenly made making things in the UK a lot more competitive. It will be interesting to see if there is more volume movement over to here from Continental Europe. Likewise, you'll see people start sourcing certain raw materials from the UK as buying them from the eurozone becomes more expensive.

As for my career, I was made factory manager here after about four years and was recently given the additional responsibility of managing our Worcester site, which is a small factory making Lea & Perrins Worcester Sauce, which we acquired with HP Foods.

But I'm not one of those people that thinks you have to move to a new company every two years to be seen to be making progress up the career ladder. It depends what your definition of a career is.

I've always been very upfront with employers about my ambitions and interests - I usually leave a company after having a pretty open and robust conversation with my employer about the fact that I'd like to do something different, and they haven't been able to come up with an answer.

I want variety and challenge and stimulus in my career, and if I can do that and stay in one company, that's fine with me.

INTERVIEW BY elaine watson

FACTORY FACTS

Location: Heinz Foodservice, Hortonwood 2, Telford, Shropshire TF1 7XW. Tel: 01952 678414

Annual output: "38t. It doesn't sound like a lot, but we are supplying 5-10g sachets! We make enough sachets a day to go around the M25!"

Products: Primarily sachets/sticks of sauces and condiments such as tomato ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, mint sauce etc, for the foodservice market, plus some large 1-2kg catering tubs

Employees: 108

Stock keeping units: 120

Production lines: 13. Three stick lines, nine sachet lines and one jar (bulk) line

PERSONAL

Name: Andy Henderson

Age: 41

Career highlights: "Probably becoming factory manager of this site - and then going on to be given responsibility for the Worcester Lea & Perrins site as well."

Domestics: Married with two sons

Outside work: "It sounds boring, but I've got two pretty young kids, so there isn't a great deal of time to do all the things that people doing this interview seem to do! I like spending time with my family."