How Many Emails Does It Take to Lock in a Production Run? (We Stopped Counting After Rome)
Turns out, a lot.
Building our supply chain and getting our ingredients together felt like herding cats. We ambitiously thought we could get all our raw materials in a month, however soon realised it would take much, much longer.
Unfortunately, the UK isn’t known for its lemons or ginger production. Sicilian lemons, monk fruit from east Asia and some flavours from Germany meant we were managing DHL tracking links across time zones and learning customs requirements on the fly. 11pm calls became the norm for a few weeks whilst trying to chase down inter-continental shipments.
We use some delicious natural flavours in our drinks, but they do come with their difficulties. The first being that some are made to order. So, when we made our orders, we expected delivery in two weeks. They quoted eight. Panic started to set in. How could we run our production run in a month if one of our key flavours wouldn’t arrive for another two? Luckily for us our supplier was extremely accommodating and given it was a small batch for the trial, managed to get it produced quicker than expected.
The bigger problem was customs. On top of large lead times in manufacturing, some flavours are made with alcohol, so certain couriers will only ship via land. This meant it would take another 10 working days to get to us, rather than the three we needed to make the production date. So, one FedEx account later and we managed to book in an express shipment that could take the flavours via air. What this also meant was that we spent €50 on our flavours, but €300 on shipping. To make matters worse, Rome’s airport customs lost the paperwork. Our lemons sat in customs for almost a week so in the end our “express” shipping took longer than going by land. Lesson learnt in getting flavour production booked in early.
Getting production days booked in is tough. Our co-manufacturer gets booked up months in advance, will only book the date in when all raw materials are on site, and you have to be on-site to sign off the product. We had an initial target date of the start of October 2024, but a month out we didn’t have any ingredients on site and only had a very small window to play with before we’d be back in the UK. Keeping on top of timings was an endless chain of emails with updates on timings, crossing off ingredients checklists as they came in and updates on the dwindling number of production slots available.
Despite the chasing and extra cash spent on express shipping, our lemons getting stuck in Fiumicino Airport meant we missed our production date in October. And the next available production slot? December 2024.
Biggest lessons learnt? Always plan for delays, Roman customs don’t care about your production timetable and never bet against Murphy’s Law.
