How Our Shared Innovation Culture Influences Our Mutual Success with QSR Customers

Eric Treon, Group Vice President, Golden State Foods

At Golden State Foods (GSF), persistently innovating every facet of our business is essential to the mutual success of our customers and our company. Whether it’s piloting emerging blockchain and IoT technologies, deploying electric trucks into our last-mile food service delivery fleets, or implementing optical-sorting technology into our food processing operations, GSF’s culture of innovation emphatically encourages our associates and our teams to explore new ideas, develop novel solutions, and rigorously pursue continuous improvement.

As current innovations shape our future and benefit the broader food industry for the better, today’s GSF innovators perpetuate a steadfast tradition of innovation that has helped our customers succeed for more than 75 years. Built upon solid values and relationships, our vision has remained simple and impactful: make the best products and provide the best service. As one of the world’s largest diversified suppliers to the Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) and retail industries, GSF attributes its enduring success to modest yet demanding principles of quality, service, and respect—all of which play critical roles in sustained innovation.

Partners in Innovation, Partners in Success

Innovation continues to pave the way for GSF’s growth, business diversification, and most importantly, customer success. In recent years, GSF seized the opportunity to partner with an iconic QSR customer and another industry supplier, Sealed Air, to successfully launch a new back-of-the-house restaurant operations solution. Key to this initiative, our shared values, and similar innovation cultures enabled the partnership and inspired the collective perseverance required of this long-term undertaking.

GSF first partnered with Sealed Air more than three decades ago on form-fill-seal films for liquid products. Since then, we have developed a relationship founded and nurtured by mutual trust and respect. Through this longstanding partnership, we collaborated to create an innovative, award-winning solution for condiment and sauce dispensing that our customer successfully implemented into its restaurant operations in recent years. 

Previously, our customers used a variety of rigid containers for condiment and sauce dispensing, which were expensive, bulky to store, inefficient to ship, and operationally challenging. The QSR industry requires portion control and efficient use of limited back-of-house space. Not only did our customers’ rigid containers need replacing, but we also saw the opportunity for restaurants across our industry to benefit from our innovation with Sealed Air.

Innovation Evolution

Working closely with Sealed Air, we developed an innovative solution for condiment dispensing. After careful testing, iteration, and vetting, the CRYOVAC® brand FlexPrep® portion-dispensing pouches were born. FlexPrep® pouches provide precise portion-dispensing for condiments, designed to facilitate the fast and easy changeover of food products.

Formed and filled using Sealed Air's unique equipment at GSF’s U.S. facilities, we distribute the final packaged product to customers’ QSR locations across the country. There, back-of-house employees use the pouches, paired with a custom dispensing unit, to provide portion-controlled consistency for each condiment, every time it’s served in a menu item.

Beyond Benefits: Changing the Food Industry

FlexPrep® has not only brought value to our customers; it has also benefitted GSF internally from a manufacturing position. Today, GSF packages more than 250,000 pounds of sauce per day using just three CRYOVAC® brand FlexPrep® portion-dispensing systems, with plans to install additional systems.

Moving from the prior rigid format to FlexPrep® portion-dispensing systems has made GSF more operationally efficient by reducing our maintenance and our labor costs. The decreased equipment footprint created valuable floor space, the single-operator functionality reduced labor requirements, and the pouches’ light weight has also decreased our shipping costs.

The benefits our QSR customers have experienced from FlexPrep® include increased productivity in back-of-house operations, product yield gains, and more efficient restaurant storage capabilities. These three efficiency benefits enable speed, a benefit that’s paramount in the fast-food industry.  

However, speed doesn’t have to compromise safety. GSF has upheld our highest food quality standards through the minimized risk of foreign materials getting into the package, as Sealed Air ‎engineers the FlexPrep® packaging with a unique, frangible seal technology that ‎allows the pouch to open without the need for a ‎sharp object.

From a sustainability standpoint, the benefits of these flexible pouches amount to 85 percent less plastic use than previous containers doing the same amount of work. With sustainability as a guiding principle at GSF, reducing waste in landfills delivers a high-priority benefit to our operation, our communities, and our planet.

"From a sustainability standpoint, the benefits of FlexPrep® flexible pouches amount to 85 percent less plastic use than previous containers doing the same amount of work"

The entire supply chain benefits from this innovative technology, and we seek to make those benefits visible to those beyond GSF, Sealed Air, and our customer that piloted this solution at restaurants throughout the United States. During the 2021 Technical Meeting for the Association for Dressings and Sauces (ADS), FlexPrep® earned recognition with the Package of the Year Award. Additionally, GSF honored its Liquid Products North America team with the company’s prestigious and discerning Innovation Award in 2021.

Awards and honors aside, our enduring culture of innovation will always be part and parcel of GSF’s mutual success with our customers and industry partners like Sealed Air. We hope that today’s innovations serve not only as improvements but also as inspirations for continued ingenuity and collaboration throughout the food service industry.