4pManagement Ltd

This year I chose to visit Interzoo, giving up the opportunity to attend Interpack in Düsseldorf.

While Interpack was showcasing the latest developments from OEM process and machine suppliers, Interzoo gave me the chance to spend time walking the halls (15k steps a day!) looking for trends that potential clients are either already adopting or working towards.

It was also great to reconnect with old colleagues. After more than 35 years in the industry, it’s always fascinating to see how people move around the sector.

One thing that really stood out to me was the number of companies building successful brands while relying heavily on third-party manufacturers. Strong sales and marketing execution can absolutely drive growth and create a broad product portfolio. However, in the long term, if you don’t own the IP or manufacturing knowledge behind the product, it becomes difficult to establish yourself as a recognised leader in health and nutrition.

Of course, there is a place for own-label manufacturing, particularly within grocery retail. The companies servicing that market produce safe, nutritional products that meet all industry requirements.

But if you are truly innovating, eventually you need to own the production process.

Most businesses begin with small-scale, “kitchen table” production. As they scale, they often replicate that same manual process across multiple small, labour-intensive lines in an effort to preserve the uniqueness of the product. Eventually, however, the cost of supporting manual production and packing operations becomes prohibitive, margins tighten, and growth slows.

That is the point where automation becomes essential.

Automation is often associated with robots replacing manual tasks, but it can equally mean process automation: taking a unique manual workflow and engineering a scalable process line that consistently delivers the same product.

Take a typical wet pet food line as an example. It consists of five core building blocks:

• Ingredient batching
• Size reduction and mixing/forming
• Cooking or sterilisation
• Primary packaging
• Secondary packaging for distribution

The original kitchen-table process has now been industrialised. Manual labour is reduced, repeatability improves, quality controls are introduced, and production costs can fall significantly when it’s done correctly.

A common criticism of automation is that it reduces flexibility. In reality, that only happens when flexibility is not designed into the process from the beginning.

By keeping flexibility within those five core process areas, manufacturers can adapt cosmetics, nutritional profiles, and functional recipe elements with relatively low capital investment. While filling and sterilisation stages are naturally less flexible, by this stage of business maturity most companies already understand which primary pack formats work best for their customers.

It’s also increasingly common to see flexible processing areas feeding multiple packaging formats that can scale alongside the business.

Where companies often make mistakes is in the scale-up approach. Too many rely on a single OEM supplier for a turnkey solution, a group of strategically aligned suppliers, or an EPCM project house that may know how to build petrochemical plants — but not necessarily pet food facilities.

At 4pM Ltd, we bring more than 35 years of pet food manufacturing experience across the full spectrum of process and packaging technologies. Importantly, we are independent of any OEM.

That means we focus on what is right for your business: designing production lines that reduce operating costs, preserve product integrity, and keep capital investment practical and affordable.

If you’d like to discuss scaling your production the right way, please get in touch — I’d be delighted to help.