The Starfish and the Spider
This book is about the power of decentralized organizations; I decided to read it after seeing the co-author, Rod Beckstrom, at the annual Inc 500 conference.

Readers are asked to consider why, for example, Al Qaida is so powerful. How were they able to inflict such damage and emotional terror on Americans?  (As a frequent traveler, this is something I unfortunately think about every time I pass through security. The size limit on liquid and gel containers particularly impacts me since I can no longer travel with 12-ounce bottles of chocolate syrup samples for customers.  Since the gel ban, I think I have become one of UPS’s best customers.  And the last time I packed bottles in my checked baggage, all my syrups were confiscated.  In their place was a note from the TSA saying my bag had been examined. The business appointment that afternoon didn’t go so well!)

So the book looks at how decentralized, leaderless organizations with a strong sense of community can produce outsized, amazing results.  One of the examples is Wikipedia.  No real hierarchy, just people who want to contribute articles about myriad subjects and a self-policing community that ensures the articles are accurate.  One of the comments Beckstrom made in his talk was that, as organizations give up control, they have to increase their trust. When graphed, it looks like this:

As he spoke I kept nodding my head in agreement,; I realized how this applies to Mont Blanc’s business model. Because we use a number of regional production plants, our trust in the plants’ quality operations goes up and some of our control goes down. Giving up some control allows us to greatly expand our production capabilities.  But in the end, we still make and deliver on our promises.

Our unique business model has been key to keeping down costs and maintaining the same level of quality as we weather the current economic storm.

Maybe we are a starfish organization after all.

During SIAL, I had a conversation with a coffee professional whose opinion I thought I could trust. I had confided to him that I was having a hard time finding a decent cup of coffee in the city and he made a face. “Le café  dans les cafes a Paris, c’est un catastrophe!” (Loosely translated, he said the coffee served in cafes is a catastrophe and shouldn’t be inflicted upon anyone. And according to his expression, animals either.) But he suggested that I visit Café Soluna, since he felt it was one of the few places that I could find a cup of coffee that I would enjoy.

Café Soluna is tucked into a small space on the rue de l’hotel de Ville. This small street parallels the Seine on the right bank.  Getting there was a short walk from the Latin Quarter, walking past Notre Dame and the tiny Saint Chappelle, which has the most remarkable stained glass windows I have ever seen.

The narrow space is divided into two rooms. The front has a several small tables, a retail counter behind which are about a dozen acrylic bins containing freshly roasted coffee beans, and in the corner is a small 2-kilogram roaster that had beans cooling in the tray when my party of four entered.

The back room contains an espresso bar with stools for sitting and some comfortable chairs and tables for lounging and enjoying drinks. The coffee is fresh-roasted daily, and all of the beans come from individual plantations. I asked if it was possible to get several different press pots to try.

In France, press pots are called café au piston. I was told that the pots were large and held eight cups of coffee. This was disappointing because I hoped to sample different coffees from different regions around the world, but the large cafes au piston would be too much coffee for the four of us.

I explained to Lola, the woman behind the counter, that I was simply interested in trying several different coffees. She laughed and told me that nobody had ever come in before asking to drink so many different coffees! She disappeared into the back room and reappeared shortly holding four small Bodum presses. “I think we can make this work,” she said. “Which would you like to try?”  I asked for her advice, and in the end we settled on a Guatemalan Coban, an Ethiopian Limu, a Rwandan, and a Monsooned Malabar from India.

Lola portioned out the beans and ground them into a small basket. The grounds were added to the small Bodums and filled with water and allowed to steep. She placed them on our table with small demitasse cups, and after several minutes we pressed the plunger down. I poured one cup of each one to taste. They were all very good, and it was fun comparing the very different origins against one another.

In order of preference, the Rwandan was my favorite. It was well-balanced and bright, with some citrus notes. The Guatemalan was good too, with chocolaty notes to it. I am usually a huge fan of Ethiopian coffee. This Limu had a very bright, consistent flavor with hints of lemon. The Malabar was interesting because it is not a coffee that one usually gets to taste in a retail setting.  The Malabar was good, but it had a thick and heavy flavor, particularly after the Rwanda.  I enjoyed trying it, but was glad that there were four of us so I didn’t have to drink it all.

The experience served as a delightful interlude and restored my faith in Parisian café society.  I left the store pleased that I had finally discovered good coffee in Paris.  It hadn’t been easy, but it was well worth the effort.

My favorites were the fruit drinks from West Africa. Unusual flavors, such as baobab, soursop and tamarind, are interesting to try. I got some samples to bring home to the lab to see how we might use them in some drinks. I’m thinking about a white chocolate hibiscus drink. I wonder how it will taste … ?

It is the first time in 15 years that something has been stolen stolen from our exhibit. I filed a police report, and the insurance director told me of three other reports of thefts during the five-day show. I’m one of the lucky ones; another exhibitor just down the aisle is using two of the same blenders in his booth.  Neither one was touched.

It’s a good thing that this is the last day of the show since many visitors were interested in our frozen drink mixes. Yesterday, we even set up an appointment for the director of a large Italian coffee company to come to our stand to try a frozen cappuccino. When he gets here, all I can do is serve him a mocha.

I hope he’s not disappointed.  I know that I am.

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.

By American standards the drinks are small. My cappuccino was about 10 ounces, served in a china cup.  With the exception of the dozen or so Starbucks in Paris, American style coffee drinks have not caught on here.  The very idea of a take-out drink seems to be anathema to the French; the size of drinks that Americans regularly consume is astonishing to locals. I tried explaining the different drink sizes to the man who installed the espresso machine that I am using at the Salon International de l’Alimentation (SIAL) trade show and his eyes got big as I translated 12-, 16-, and 24-ounce size drinks into metric. Where a standard unit of measure is a liter (about a quart), the idea of drinking three-fourths of a liter as a 24-ounce drink (700 ml here) caused his eyes to get big and his jaw to drop.  I could see he was thinking, “Crazy Americans!”

Tonight I am going to a café after dinner. I hope that my drink is better than the last few that I have had.  It’s Paris after all, home to thousands of cafés. I should be able to get a good drink in one of them.

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.

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.

At Mont Blanc Gourmet, we are experiencing the same thing. Our lab is developing more and more private label products for our customers, and those products represent the fastest growing part of our sales.

We create private label products for well-known, well-established consumer brands, enabling these national entities to effectively extend their brand identity into more aspects of their operations.

One customer offers to consumers a private label retail bottle of chocolate syrup that is the same product they use for making their mochas.  Another client supplies its franchise partners with proprietary products to ensure consistency in drinks served in stores that they don’t operate.

CoffeeTalk, a major specialty coffee trade journal, published a private label article in its September issue entitled “Build Your Own Brand through Private Labeling.”

With both the foodservice and retail packages, Mont Blanc has experienced significant sales increases in the past year.  The private label trend is strong and growing.  In tough economic times, it makes sense to act on the strong trends.