SIAL, Salon International de l’Alimentation, is the second largest food show in the world and is held biennually in Paris.  The exposition takes place in seven halls at Parc des Expositions, about a 45-minute Metro ride from Paris.  This year there are 5,500 exhibitors and 145,000 visitors are expected.

It is hard to imagine all of the different types of food and drink that are grown, produced, processed and sold in the world, and the thousands of exhibitors at SIAL will cheerfully tell you what they make and why you should try it and buy it. The products range from raw materials such as fruits, vegetables, grains and sugar to their finished counterparts such as potato chips, cookies, desserts and drinks.

Some companies exhibit by themselves in the halls while others are a part of an international pavilion. We are part of the United States pavilion, which has about 125 exhibiting companies.  Mont Blanc is surrounded by American companies showcasing such diverse products as chocolate, olives, pistachios, mints, iced tea, vitamin water, and cheese. I feel sorry for the cheese guy, because I remember  a quote by famous French general and statesman Charles De Gaulle: “How can anyone govern a nation which has 246 different kinds of cheese?”  I have to think it’s something of an uphill battle promoting cheese to the French!

I have always enjoyed visiting the international food shows because I believe it illustrates the remarkable interconnectedness in the world. Walking the aisles of this show is an experience in globalization. Yesterday I walked around the hall and saw some of the international Pavilions surrounding USA. They are randomly chosen and include Mexico, Thailand, Italy, Morocco, Syria, Greece and Iran.

All of these countries have dozens of companies featuring similar products.  Walking by Greece you see booth after booth of feta cheese and olives; Italy is chock full of red wine, prosciutto and coffee; Korea has kimchee and seafood.  One of the interesting aspects of the show is watching people sitting in booths negotiating with vendors from other countries to purchase products. Food transcends national boundaries and helps break down political, religious and social barriers.

In the American pavilion, we have people from all over the world asking about our products.

Mont Blanc Gourmet’s goal for this show is to increase the international distribution of our products.  Interesting conversations yesterday included distributors from Greece, the Middle East, Turkey and Germany. When we get back, the follow up begins. But it looks like we will return home well on the way to having met our goal.

We don’t get rush orders that often. When we do, our desire is for our clients to feel confident they will get our trademark quality products – on time.

All rush orders require special handling, but a client call in early August brought Mont Blanc a unique set of challenges. What seemed impossible is now completed and when I look back at the teamwork and dedication of the Mont Blanc team, I am proud of our combined efforts. We have an enviable staff  and have built a supply chain that – in this case – proved critical to delivering the order on time.

The Rush Order
Our Director of Sales called the office from Canada, having just met with a customer that owns a chain of fast-food restaurants.  “They have decided to add more flavored drinks to their fall menu and they need the White Chocolate.”

In five weeks.

The Challenge
“Five weeks?” asked our Project Manager. “A new product that we have never made for them before? Our time frame is constrained by the fact that we have to order new ingredients, develop and print new labels, and audit the production plant.”

The customer had approved the 18th variation of a specially formulated white chocolate we sent them for testing. The good news was they liked it enough they wanted to include it as a new drink on their fall menu. The challenging part was getting this to them within such a narrow production window. They told our sales director the white chocolate drink had already been included in a media launch for its fall drink lineup.

Bringing the Order to Life
Mont Blanc’s Project Manager is tasked with making sure we can deliver for our clients and is the coordinator between all departments. With this call, she wasted no time convening a meeting to include staff from Research and Development, Quality Assurance/Quality Control, and manufacturing. The sales director was teleconferenced in from Toronto.

Her checklist was comprehensive.

• The production plant. Our primary production plant for this company’s other products is on the East Coast since we usually supply this customer through their Eastern Canadian distribution centers.  However, the White Chocolate will be introduced on the West Coast. Mont Blanc works with nine production facilities across the country and utilizes them for economy, and, in this case, to cut down on transport time. We teleconferenced with our plant in San Francisco and determined they could make the syrup for us within our time frame.  But the customer would need to inspect and approve a different facility before any production took place. Our Director of Quality Control coordinated his schedule with the customer so the two of them could audit and approve the California plant.
• The ingredients. Mont Blanc prides itself on creating truly unique syrups for its clients. And for the White Chocolate, our R&D team had sourced an unusual vanilla. The supplier was saying it would take almost three weeks to get the product made, shipped, and delivered to the plant. Our team made a few more calls to the supplier and, eventually, worked out a plan to have our supplier produce and ship their product in the necessary time frame.
• The testing phase. Before authorizing full-scale production on any new product, R&D conducts a test run at the production plant and tastes a pilot plant sample. More telephone calls were made to the production plant. Fortunately, we had enough ingredients on hand for the test batch and the plant manager agreed to squeeze a run into the plant’s already tight schedule.
• The packaging. Although the product fits within our existing syrup packaging, new labels needed to be designed and printed.  Normally, this is a straightforward process. But the Canadian market requires bilingual labels as it caters to English and French-speaking consumers. I took charge of overseeing the translation.

The meeting adjourned after every point on the project list had been discussed. And while the team was confident we could meet their deadline, we all knew that one glitch somewhere along a very extended supply chain would throw the entire schedule off.

Delivered and Selling Out
Bringing together all of these disparate, external suppliers and coordinating within such a compressed time frame posed a real challenge. But production went off last month without a hitch and the product was delivered on time and on target.

For our client, the White Chocolate fits nicely into fall’s flavor trends and already has proven a top seller. The customer is seeing quickly the benefits of adding new menu options and is looking at a second shipment.

For us, the experience tested our supply chain and resources and – in the end – unified the team with an accomplishment that other companies would not have been able to deliver.

We have been fielding requests from several of our large customers asking about the provenance of the milk that we use in our Caramel and White Chocolate syrups.  The melamine scare in China has all food manufacturers on edge. And rightly so, because some food companies look for the least-expensive ingredients they can find.

Mont Blanc sources a lot of ingredients and raw materials from all over the world and we are constantly faced with verifying and auditing everything that we purchase.  Our Director of Quality Assurance is continually working to ensure that every ingredient we source comes from trusted, reliable suppliers.  We do not purchase any milk products from China.

A top-notch supply chain is critical to Mont Blanc’s success. Rest assured we would never compromise the quality of our syrups with lower-grade ingredients. And we pledge to maintain our current QA level, which many consider to be above the industry standard.