How Hearthside’s leadership is rebooting its operational standards

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How Hearthside’s leadership is rebooting its operational standards

18 Mar 2024

Joanie Spencer

Since 2008, Joanie Spencer has covered the retail and wholesale sides of the baking industry.
Serving associations such as the American Society of Baking (ASB) and BEMA, Joanie is also in demand as an industry presenter on bakery operations and trends. She holds a bachelor’s degree in communication from Rockhurst University and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri.

When she’s not running or playing soccer, Joanie spends her time with her husband and 11-year-old son.

DOWNERS GROVE, IL — To say the baking industry has changed would be the understatement of the decade. But for contract manufacturing in particular, the evolution is dramatic. What was once considered a resource based strictly on volume and capacity is now often a centrifuge of innovation for bakery brands of all types and sizes.

For Downers Grove, IL-based Hearthside Food Solutions, serving as a world-class resource for not only production efficiency but also speed to market means innovating on all fronts. Acquisition activity — on both sides — has enabled Hearthside to change how it serves customers and the industry.

“In 2018, an important milestone came together,” said Darlene Nicosia, CEO of Hearthside. “Both Partners Group and Charlesbank came together to acquire Hearthside and create the businesses between Hearthside, at the time, and [refrigerated and frozen producer] Greencore. That really gave us new capabilities in the fresh, refrigerated and frozen side of consumer packaged goods. To build the 34 plants in our infrastructure, it’s really been through thoughtful acquisitions and looking at what categories our customers play in.”

In 2021, Hearthside’s acquisition of Interbake Foods, which held the baking assets of Westin Foods, added six facilities to the portfolio and rounded out its bakery platform, solidifying Hearthside, in terms of square footage, as the largest privately held bakery in the country.

“I think the interesting thing about Hearthside, even in the past five years, is the sheer speed of growth and acquisition,” said Bobbi Jo Raffetto, COO of bakery co-manufacturing for Hearthside. “Our infrastructure, combined with our ability to partner with brands and quickly bring innovation to market, has become the big differentiator.”

Today, Hearthside is rebooting its standards for excellence, in part through the diversity of thought that lives inherently in its leadership. With an executive team that touts roughly 250 years of collective experience, the breadth of their backgrounds — packaging, finance and CPG operations, to name a few — is almost as extensive as the portfolio of product capabilities. It took roughly 14 months to assemble the team, which is led by Nicosia, who took the helm as CEO in 2022.

“When you come with these global-reaching CPG companies, and you start putting it together,” Raffetto said, “the horsepower is unbelievable.”

Nicosia spent nearly three decades at The Coca-Cola Co. before joining Hearthside, followed by Raffetto’s 27-year tenure with Kerry Foods, along with Mike Tuck bringing 25 years with Kimberly-Clark Corp. Tuck joined Hearthside last year as COO of co-packing for frozen and refrigerated. Raffetto and Tuck now collaborate across platforms — Raffetto focused on quality, regulatory and safety, and Tuck engaged with engineering and supply chain — to ensure cohesive operations throughout the network.

While that network is known for its foundational Hearthside Performance System (HPS), the new leadership team added Agile — a continuous improvement approach with roots in the IT industry — to streamline operations throughout its facilities in the US and globally. Ten years ago, methodologies like lean manufacturing and Six Sigma made their way to the baking industry from automotive manufacturing; today, Agile is the new name of the game. Innovation starts with mindset at Hearthside, and incorporating Agile system-wide has fed that across all platforms of the company.

While HPS focuses on lean concepts for process standards, Agile enables the mindset of executing project iterations with speed and precision. In other words, implementing fast — and, when necessary, failing fast — shortens the timeline to successful innovation.

“We’re using Agile not only for value creation projects within the plants but also for business process improvement,” Tuck said. “We’re not moving away from lean; this just adds another layer to it. That means collaboratively, crossfunctionally, we can achieve our goals.”

This story has been adapted from the February | Q1 2024 issue of Commercial Baking. Read the full story in the digital edition here.

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