Customer behavior can be impacted by a myriad of external factors that may come on gradually or manifest overnight. When demand changes due to shifting customer behavior, Garvey can help you update your line to meet your customers’ needs now.
Inflation’s Impact on Demand and, Consequently, Processing Lines
Inflation is forcing customers to pay more for everyday goods and services, but its impact varies. While grocery store prices climbed only 2.1% for the year, restaurant menu prices increased by 5.4%, likely driving people to prepare more meals at home to stabilize their food budgets.
Even if prices aren’t climbing as high in the grocery store, shoppers feeling the overall inflation crunch are looking for ways to save where they can. This move toward frugality impacts the types of products customers seek when they plan their grocery shopping lists.
According to a Deloitte survey, 4 in 10 consumers were trying to reduce their food waste. Analysts said they were accomplishing this by buying more frozen and canned goods with longer shelf lives and limiting fresh food purchases to pre-planned meals.
Growing demand for packaged food means manufacturers may need to ramp up production or shift priorities to reflect customer behavior, and this is where we can support your efforts. Garvey specializes in designing and redesigning production lines to increase throughput and eliminate inefficiencies on the line.
While we have worked on various projects over the years to help CPG manufacturers maximize production or transform their lines to accommodate new products, 2020 set the bar for immediate changes in customer demand that required fast and effective action.
How We Helped Clients Meet Customer Demand During the Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented challenges to the CPG manufacturing industry. Demand for packaged food skyrocketed as restaurants closed and people were afraid to leave their homes.
As a result, manufacturing companies needed help keeping up with demand and modifying their operations to protect their workers from exposure to the virus. Some companies even transformed their production lines to make critical products.
We were able to help many of our clients augment their line design to facilitate these necessary modifications at the time. We also worked on several line transformation projects to support clients tackling new challenges:
- Garvey helped a vodka manufacturer transform their line to produce hand sanitizer
- Garvey helped an applesauce producer increase throughput to meet heightened consumer demand
The pandemic created urgent needs and shifted the demand for many products exponentially overnight. Still, we were able to offer our expertise and assistance to help our clients ramp up production or transform their lines quickly to meet customer demand.
How Can Garvey Help You Address Customer Needs?
If you need to make significant changes to increase production or process new products, our team can help upgrade or transform your line to accommodate your evolving objectives.
Whether you require accumulation to reduce downtime or a redesigned distribution system to manage product flow better, our engineers are up to the challenge.
We can ensure your line can handle products of different dimensions, new packaging materials, and updated processes and priorities.
Schedule a line analysis today to discuss improving your throughput or modifying your processing capabilities.