Procurement & Inventory Management Processes Fight Supply Chain Challenges

Our procurement and inventory team has the daunting responsibility of securing and tracking all the needed ingredients for every entrée, side dish, snack and breakfast CKC Good Food provides at nearly 180 client sites. It is a process that begins long before our menus are created for every client.

Projecting and Planning

We begin planning food purchases for our fall menus the previous spring, about 6 weeks prior to the opening of commodity orders. Commodity foods are central to our school lunch menus because maximizing the use of these ingredients helps ensure our client partners' food service budgets are healthy. We know from experience which commodity foods will be useful even before our menus are created. We also know the most popular menus items will return and which entrees will be replaced by new entrees approved in our spring taste tests. Based on this information and the current year's meal counts, we can project how much of which commodity foods to order on behalf of our client partners.

After our menu template is finalized about 8 weeks ahead of service, we discuss the products and quantities needed for each recipe and menu day with our distributors and place tentative orders. After meal counts have been locked on our website, we finalize orders with distributors.

Shopping and Ordering

About a week in advance of when a menu will be served, Procurement Manager Shawn Mueller pulls the cumulative lunch meal counts for our client partners served out of the main commissary. He plugs those numbers into each recipe to convert the servings to pounds and case counts of each ingredient. He then starts shopping with various distributors based on current inventory, quantity needed and pricing. Procurement and Offsite Manager Wolfgang Mayr does the same for all the offsite kitchens CKC Good Food manages for clients. Procurement/Warehouse team member Steve Michalski procures items for salad bars.

CKC Good Food sources most frozen and non-perishable food items from our primary distributor, Upper Lakes Foods. As of Sept. 30, Upper Lakes Foods had delivered 70,000 cases of food to our Eagan commissary. In addition to “Fee For Service” items, Upper Lakes Foods provides commodity foods for use in our menus. Additionally, multiple specialty distributors provide milk, fresh produce, unique ethnic foods and baked goods to complete the menus.

Procurement/Warehouse team member Steve Michalski handles ordering of all paper products and non-food items, which are sourced from other suppliers. Wolfgang procures breakfast foods from distributors as well as directly from companies such as Bake Crafters.

It could be a logistical stew with the multiple trucks backing up to our docks daily if it weren’t for the processes and inventory system the procurement and warehouse teams use.

Inventory Tracking and Analysis

Before each truck unloads into our warehouse or at an offsite kitchen CKC Good Food manages, Inventory Analyst Steve Fleming knows what is supposed to be on those trucks. He cross checks every packing slip against the purchase orders and uploads data on all the products received into the inventory management system.

While products are in inventory, Steve studies the cost trends for regularly ordered items and overall costs for each individual meal on CKC Good Food’s menus to identify potential cost savings with alternate ingredients. He works with the warehouse team to complete a physical inventory audit each month.

The inventory on hand is constantly changing, of course. Some products turn quickly, like fresh produce. Frozen foods could be in cold storage for several weeks before being prepped for service. Some products are delivered in bulk to client sites, the transfer of which Steve captures in the inventory management system. He generally knows how much of any given product is on hand and where it’s stored based on information in the inventory management system.

Steve Michalski ships out paper products, salad bar ingredients and inventory to offsite schools regularly. The kitchen pulls product to prep the following day’s meals. The breakfast team churns through thousands of juices boxes and individually wrapped food items daily. It’s all tracked in the inventory management system. Based on the daily meal counts and recipes, the team knows how much of each product was removed from inventory.  

Substitutions

The procurement and inventory tracking processes continue to be refined as our volume grows. It must as there are occasions when a product cannot be procured in the quantity needed from a single distributor or manufacturers change their product availability. Shawn generally knows shortly after placing an order that a product is in short supply. The distributors do their best to substitute a like product and deliver a complete order. At times, it can't be done.

That’s when the procurement and menu development teams start analyzing possible substitutions. Depending on whether the shorted item is a protein versus a vegetable, substituting an ingredient that meets USDA nutritional guidelines could be simple or quite involved. The menu development team must confirm that the menu week remains in compliance with the substituted item or continue looking for an alternate substitution that satisfies compliance.

With the launch of Free School Meals in September, the supply chain is particularly stressed. Producers and manufacturers didn’t have historical data to inform projected quantities needed at the beginning of the school year. Once manufacturers depleted their inventories, catching up to demand is nearly impossible.

We never want to make substitutions to our menus. We understand kids look forward to items on the daily menu and they and their parents choose school lunch that day because of what's on the menu. To help minimize future substitutions, the procurement team is ordering our most-used, frozen and shelf stable food products further in advance and keeping them in cold storage. This increases our offsite storage costs but results in fewer disruptions to our client partners’ daily menus in the future. We aren't able to do this with fresh produce, of course. Those substitutions are typically outside our control. We try to provide clients at least one day's notice in case they want to alert families to the change.