Fox Solutions' Noah Fox Highlights Hidden Costs Affecting Packers' Bottom Lines

MCALLEN, TX - Small costs can often add up, turning quickly into sizable losses. With a look at the losses that often go under the radar, Noah Fox, Project Manager at Fox Solutions, recently offered some insight into how hidden costs can affect packers’ bottom lines.

These costs stay hidden because they never show up as a single number: Weigher giveaway is buried in product yield, changeover downtime is buried in labor, and a failed pack gets split across packaging, freight, and customer credits.

"Individually, these costs can look nominal," explains Noah. "It's not until a packer looks at them together that they see the real effect on the bottom line."

And because produce margins are thin, these small losses add up quickly.

"To make the numbers work in this industry, packers have to pack in large quantities," Noah says. "That means every hidden cost has a multiplier, and that multiplier is usually in the thousands."

Weigher giveaway is one of the easiest losses to overlook, Noah tells me.

"On one 40,000-lb truckload, if a packer averages half a pound overweight on 5-lb bags, they're giving away about 4,000 lbs of product per load," he shares. "If the average overweight stays the same but the pack size gets smaller, like a 2 lb bag, the amount of product given away goes up."

Changeovers, when the line switches bag sizes, film or SKUs, can be another steady source of loss.

"There will be changeovers every workday. They're unavoidable," Noah says. "But operating costs don't stop during a changeover. There's zero production, and the packer is still paying for the time to be operational. Depending on how many bags per minute a line runs, that downtime can mean a lot of unpacked bags."

To mitigate these losses, Fox Solutions advises packers to treat the pack line as one system.

"Pack lines operate as one cohesive system. Each component is synced together, and the system has to communicate from beginning to end to run as effectively and efficiently as possible," Noah explains. "You can incorporate components from multiple vendors, but when one vendor is responsible for all of them, that communication from loose commodity to finished good is much more reliable. With the help of our partners, Fox can be that turnkey provider."

From there, packers need to know where the losses are coming from.

"Track three things: giveaway at the weigher, changeover downtime, and reject rates. Then ask why each one is happening," Noah continues. "Packers will see their losses coming from the places where their equipment is bottlenecking and slowing down production. The idea is to make each piece of the line operate as close to capacity as possible. If you have a bagger that can only pack 30 bags per minute, there's no reason to pair it with a weigher that can do 80. The bagger will never go fast enough, and the weigher will constantly be waiting for the signal to send product."

Fox's structure gives its partners a strategic advantage in this area, as Fox Solutions manufactures, distributes, and supports packing equipment, including weighers, baggers and case packers, with single source sales and support for best-in-class brands.

"Fox Packaging and Fox Solutions can uniquely meet a packer's needs for both packaging materials and packing equipment," Noah concludes. "That means we can make sure the packaging is designed for the machinery, and the machinery for the packaging. Most issues take longer to resolve because the material supplier says it's the equipment and the equipment supplier says it's the material. With Fox Packaging and Fox Solutions supplying both, there's less time spent assigning fault and more time finding the fix."

With its advantageous structure and in-depth industry expertise, Fox Solutions continues to create cost-saving benefits for its partners.

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