Neco Foods, LLC

Adapting to change┬áKeith Regan learns how Neco Foods is adapting to economic realities, investing in the tools and technologies necessary to maintain the highest quality and safety, and always searching for new taste experiences for its customers.  Neco Foods, LLC serves supermarket customers on the East Coast and club store customers across the US, delivering a line of fresh soups, seafood dips and specialty salads and spreads often sold under supermarket private labels.  In 2008 the former company, which had provided these retail products since 1988, was acquired by its supplier, forming Neco Foods, LLC. The merger did not change the companyÔÇÖs mission of creating high-quality specialty foods, says vice president of sales and marketing John McGeough. The Florida-based company is working hard to diversify its distribution base and its product lineup, says McGeough. Currently, about 90 percent of the companyÔÇÖs sales are through supermarket retail chains (the rest come from club stores), and 50 percent of its sales come from its line of fresh soups. In fact, since 2004 its best-selling product has been its chicken noodle soup. ÔÇ£All the product categories are highly competitive. ItÔÇÖs just good business practice not to have too much of your sales in a single channel or category.ÔÇØ Major supermarket and retail clients include a number of best-in-class supermarkets. Neco supplies soups, spreads, salads and its premium crab cakes to a leading Southeast retailer. It is also capable of supplying foodservice and bulk supply for the central kitchen and deli, as it does for a leading Northeast retailer; and to other specialty retailers the company sells dips and spreads, as well as its compound and finishing butters. ÔÇ£We work very closely in partnership with our customers to develop new products and ideas based on what their customers want,ÔÇØ McGeough adds. Neco devotes significant resources to developing new products, with an extensive research and development kitchen at its 55,000-square-foot plant in Lantana. New product ideas ÔÇ£come from everywhere; they come from the marketplace, from inside the company and from our partners. We seldom go to a meeting where we discuss a few new ideas without walking away with ten more to explore,ÔÇØ McGeough says.┬á Quality assurance is also a mandate for the company, something its customers demand. ÔÇ£Our QA has to be as good as or better than their QA, so weÔÇÖre on the cutting edge of making sure everything we produce is safe and interacting with our retail base on every new product or category we introduce,ÔÇØ says McGeough. Everything the company sells is fresh and made to order in small batches, which enables close monitoring for quality, consistency and taste. It also allows for flexibility on recipes and projects to which many other manufacturers cannot respond.┬á Neco uses a third-party safety inspection program, with Sillker Laboratories issuing a Gold Certificate to the companyÔÇÖs facility for each of the past two years. ÔÇ£WeÔÇÖre fortunate to have that third-party confirmation that weÔÇÖre doing everything we can to make sure things are safe,ÔÇØ McGeough adds. Other initiatives include requiring certificates of analysis from suppliers of its ingredients and a testing sample-holding program that enables the company to quickly analyze the safety of product lots if a problem arises at any time during its shelf life.The company is also certified organic through the USDAÔÇÖs National Organic Program and certified under the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) program. Neco employs its own microbiologist, and all foods have been through four different inspection points before they are shippedÔÇöonce as ingredients are received from suppliers, again just before the ingredients are mixed together, just before packaging, and finally just before shipping. ÔÇ£All you have to do is look at the headlines or watch the news to understand how important quality and food safety is. ItÔÇÖs something we take a lot of pride in doing well,ÔÇØ says McGeough. The merger of the supplier and the distributor has given Neco the financial means to begin growing again. The company is looking to grow its geographic footprint further, something it can do because its manufacturing turnaround time enables it to produce food to order in a matter of days, and thanks to its experience with on-time shipping to even distant parts of the country from its home base in Palm Beach County. It is also exploring options for making the transition to more branded product lines, though McGeough notes that private labels are increasingly seen as offering both value and quality by consumers. For the time being, however, the changing economic climate has created its own challenges. In some ways, the slowing economy has benefited the companyÔÇÖs supermarket customers, by creating more foot traffic in their stores. ÔÇ£People have definitely traded from eating out to cooking and eating at home more, so thatÔÇÖs benefiting stores by bringing more people in and bringing them in more often,ÔÇØ says McGeough. At the same time, consumers are clearly more cost-conscious, and supermarket buyers are responding by searching for even better value from their suppliers. Neco in turn is exploring solutions such as alternative packaging or new recipes that will enable it to make less-expensive product options. ÔÇ£There was a long time when there was a trend of people trading up and buying high-quality products and being willing to pay for organic and natural selections,ÔÇØ notes McGeough. The economy has helped put that trend on pause, and supermarket buyers are trying to make the best decisions on how to react to the economic realities. ÔÇ£We are starting to see some positive changes, where category managers are at least willing to talk about new programs again, which for a long time wasnÔÇÖt the case at all. WeÔÇÖre at least being given the chance to present our ideas and directions, and thatÔÇÖs a step in the right direction. We think that once things pick up again, weÔÇÖll be in a strong position for growth by bringing new customers into the fold and diversifying that product mix even further.ÔÇØ ÔÇô Editorial research by Bobby Meehan┬á