The Smoodies Case
Company Brief
Smoodies is a healthy beverage startup, founded in 2016. Headquartered in Bengaluru, which houses its ISO-22000 manufacturing facility, Smoodies is built on the ethos of all-natural products. The brand houses two product ranges: fruit smoothies and juices. Its fruit smoothies range contains an Essentials range, which has flavours such as mango, guava, and berries, and the Plus range, which comprises jamun, litchi-aloe vera, and orange-peach. Its juices range includes a sugarcane juice, watermelon juice, aam ka panna (green mango juice), and a shikanji (lemonade). Besides on its own website, Smoodies is available across supermarkets, e-commerce platforms such as BigBasket, Swiggy, and Zomato, in offices, at restaurants, and in leisure and sports centres. Apart from Bengaluru, Smoodies has business operations in Mumbai and Delhi as well.
Challenges
When the founders started scaling their business, they realized that they could keep the ethos of their brand only if they built their own plant which would help them keep control over their processes. Also on their mind was to build a plant that would meet the requirements of global standards of food safety, namely ISO 22000 certification so that they could align their processes to the standard and get themselves certified.
Solutioning
Infrastructure is key to any Food Safety Management System (FSMS certification). So the engagement started with the identification of the site. Multiple sites were evaluated to ensure that there was adequate space to be allocated for various activities which include receiving, pre-prep, processing, packaging, storage, sample retention and lab. All the requirements of hygiene and zoning were incorporated right from the beginning. Processes were already defined by the time the plant was commissioned after which it was only a matter of monitoring the systems for its stability. Once there was adequate data, auditing and certification were just the final steps to achieve certification.
Siddhartha Deb, Co-founder & COO
We connected with Food Safety Works right at the time of product inception to understand the regulatory guidelines. Once the product received market traction, we worked with them to choose the right location for the plant, come up with a design that met the requirements of the standards. They helped our team put together the right systems and processes to achieve a certification. Their experience has helped us execute faster and also reduce re-work.
Value Proposition
Applying an integrated approach to the food safety management system helped reduce the cost of implementation as well as reduce the time to certification. This ensured that the plant was meeting the standards from day 1 when it went live.
