Securing Customer Confidence in Juice Bottling Operations

Background:

A juice bottling company responsible for supplying a high-volume food and beverage chain faced escalating risks to its operations and customer relationships.

The facility handled the entire value chain including ingredient procurement, mixing, refrigeration, blow molding, bottling, labeling, and distribution. Yet systemic inefficiencies in production scheduling, equipment reliability, and inventory management left the operation unable to consistently meet shipment deadlines. The customer threatened to re-source the business to safeguard demand, creating a contract-at-risk situation.

Critical Issues:

• Ingredient metering and mixing variances leading to yield losses and spoilage
• Refrigeration system instability and poor inventory management of perishable inputs
• Blow molding tooling failures causing inconsistency in bottle quality and supply bottlenecks
• Misalignment between blow molding and filling schedules, resulting in downtime and missed shipments
• Cleaning and maintenance gaps creating risk of cross-contamination between runs
• Financial strain from spoilage, excess labor, and working capital tied up in unstable processes

Our Approach:

Crossover Solutions deployed a cross-functional technical and operations team to stabilize processes from end to end.

Key Actions:

• Improved blow mold tooling and processing, ensuring bottle consistency and availability to align with filling schedules
• Stabilized refrigeration and created a more reliable inventory management process to eliminate spoilage and ingredient shortages
• Designed a scheduling and ordering system that synchronized ingredient procurement, blow molding, mixing, and filling operations
• Enhanced dispensing and labeling operations to prevent overfill conditions caused by inconsistent bottles
• Developed and implemented Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for cleaning and maintenance to eliminate cross-contamination risk and improve overall reliability

Results:

• Yield improvement across dispensing and labeling operations
• Stabilized bottle supply to match production demand, eliminating downtime from waiting on blow-molded containers
• Refrigeration and inventory control improvements eliminated spoilage and reduced working capital waste
• Contract secured and extended with the key customer, removing the risk of re-sourcing
• Improved cash-to-cash cycle speed, strengthening the company’s financial health
• Sustainable maintenance and cleaning system embedded, ensuring long-term product safety and compliance