Amy's Kitchen

The seeds that would grow into Amy’s Kitchen were sown in 1987 with a batch of vegetable pot pies, made fresh in Andy and Rachel Berliner’s kitchen in Petaluma, California. The community’s response to the Berliners’ pies was immediate and overwhelming. People who loved the pies but suffered from food allergies wrote in to request for gluten- and dairy-free options. Others asked for more variety such as soups and pizzas.

And just like that, what had started as a fun family activity quickly blossomed into a thriving business. Amy’s Kitchen embarked on a new mission.

Defined by the three Fs of family, farm and food, Amy’s Kitchen combines the time-honored values of community, sustainability and dignity with the latest trends in food production. The company is also a pioneer in organic food production, having been around even before there was an industry.

Amy’s Kitchen is privately owned by the Berliner family till this day. Not beholden to shareholders, the company continues to provide wholesome, nutritious food to the world in a way that respects and protects its customers, employees and the environment.

Amy’s Kitchen is a major player in the food manufacturing industry with over 250 products sold in 30 countries and over 1 million meals produced each day. It is also the second largest tofu producer in North America, producing over nine metric tons a day.

Amy’s Kitchen now has 2,400 employees (2017) at facilities in California, Oregon and Idaho. It plans to open new facilities in New York and Portugal.

The Berliners, however, haven’t allowed success to change the values that have brought Amy’s Kitchen this far. Cooking is still done by hand, sauces are still made from scratch and, most incredibly, hundreds of recipes are still personally taste-tested by Andy and
Rachel themselves.

It hasn’t been an easy road for Amy’s Kitchen. Quite the opposite, in fact. The Berliners have very strict, self-imposed standards of quality for their food. After all, the brand carries their daughter's name. They also have a reputation among farmers for being too picky. These exacting standards have resulted in supply chain planning challenges that, if left unattended, would be impossible to manage in the long term.

The Berliners' insistence on using fresh produce for their recipes means that as much as 60% of Amy’s Kitchen’s raw materials comes from contracting growers. It can be a tense and risky game, in which sourcing crucial ingredients can be difficult. Sudden changes in weather can destroy as much as half of a contracted crop volume. All these disruptions would profoundly affect any production schedule, never mind one that has to account for 330 suppliers, 1,687 SKUs, 61 processes with 78 ingredients and 37 inventoried WIPs — per single product.

At the time, Amy’s Kitchen was still using Excel spreadsheets, which were becoming more ineffective with each passing day. Response times were too slow to meet changes in demand, and worse, monthly planning cycles could take as long as six weeks to  complete. Amy's Kitchen's systems were simply unable to cope with the rising level of complexity.

If there’s one thing that passionate people with big dreams hate, it’s getting tripped up by the little things that keep them from focusing on the real priorities. Suboptimal planning processes were now actively holding Amy’s Kitchen back from further growth. It needed a better solution, and fast.

The first planning system that Amy’s Kitchen tried to use did not quite measure up. There were problems from the start – implementation was met with many obstacles and the evaluation process was becoming hopeless. If something could go wrong, it did. Recipes were misinterpreted, production days were mixed up and material quantities and dates were often incorrect.

It was a nightmare for the planners who had to constantly check on the system. Simply put, it couldn't get the job done.

However, Amy’s Kitchen couldn’t afford to just sit around. The search was on to find a planning solution that could meet all of its needs. Unfortunately, it was soon apparent that this wasn’t as straightforward as it would have hoped. A number of vendors were consulted, but none of them were up to the task. It was one problem after another. Nobody seemed to have the solution. One by one, they would inevitably concede: “Our software doesn’t do that.”

The situation was starting to look grim. It was then that the DELMIA Quintiq team reached out to Amy’s Kitchen to request for a meeting. Weary from one disappointment after another, but still hopeful, the team from Amy’s Kitchen agreed.

The team arrived at the meeting fully prepared for DELMIA Quintiq’s confidence to shatter upon finding out the true extent of its supply chain planning complexity. Imagine the team’s surprise when this news just made the DELMIA Quintiq team more excited. For the first time, the answer wasn’t “our software doesn’t do that”. Instead, it was: “We’ve heard enough. When can we start?”

As the meeting progressed, the team from Amy’s Kitchen was impressed by DELMIA Quintiq’s ideas and enthusiasm. This was a vendor that not only accepted the challenge, but really seemed to want it. The gloom lifted and it became clear that DELMIA Quintiq fully understood Amy’s Kitchen’s challenges, could model its business processes and could provide an end-to end platform that would scale well into the future. The choice was as easy as homemade, organic, vegetarian pie.

Amy’s Kitchen is very happy with how DELMIA Quintiq has enabled it to meet its planning goals, cut costs, increase visibility and improve its ability to adapt to disruptions.

In addition to business benefits, Amy’s Kitchen employees experience improvements as well. DELMIA Quintiq’s optimized scheduling means that Amy's Kitchen can now improve the work life and happiness of its workers as well as guarantee a stable future for them. For this company, it is not enough to simply produce high-quality food; the quality of the work experience of those producing the food has to match.

Most importantly, Amy's Kitchen now faces far fewer obstacles in its mission to bring nutritious food to the world.

Plans have been made for DELMIA Quintiq to assume full planning responsibilities over Amy’s Kitchen, completely taking over from the company's previous planning system. Additional phases of implementation are also in the works, beginning with a labor scheduling upgrade. With DELMIA Quintiq’s optimized planning solution, the future for Amy’s Kitchen is brighter, fresher and tastier than ever.