The Rise Baking Co. portfolio — New French Bakery, Best Maid Cookies, Hudson Baking Co., and South Coast Baking — combines to offer one-stop convenience for foodservice and in-store bakery customers across the country.
South Coast’s national presence in the in-store bakery sector fit well with Best Maid and Hudson Baking, which produce finished cookies and crispy bars primarily for the foodservice channel, according to Mr. Schultz. Pairing Best Maid with South Coast synergistically welds together gaps that both independent companies were trying to fill, not the least of which being market reach and distribution.
With Best Maid and Hudson Baking covering foodservice and South Coast serving the in-stores, bringing these companies together offers both channels the option for frozen or finished product depending on specific needs. “That’s what makes these three such a great complement,” Mr. Schultz explained. “Much of our customer base is starting to want a combination of baked and frozen product. Now we can fire up and bake the same formula in River Falls.”
And as retail outlets morph into myriad formats with sizes that run the gamut, Rise Baking is poised to serve not only a new crop of customers, but it also serves South Coast’s existing customers in all new ways. “Retail chains that have gone to the smaller-store format and don’t have full bakeries want to offer the same end product as their larger locations,” Mr. Ahlgren said.
Community sizes are changing, prompting more retailers to open smaller formats in urban areas. And as traditional retailers face scarcity in skilled workers, finished cookies become an attractive product for the in-store bakery. “Based on what a retailer is doing in its perimeter, being able to offer a full breadth of product is very important,” Mr. Ahlgren said. “Baking means cost, and when you have a smaller footprint, you can’t generate the mass and revenue in the bakery, so a fully baked product can serve that need.” It becomes a nation-wide one-stop shop.
For customers that have a variety of formats, the Rise Baking solution becomes quite attractive. It is also appealing to customers that place a heavy emphasis on sustainability. “Integrating these brands is helpful when going to national customers because they know who we are,” Mr. Schultz said. “Customers who are focused on sustainability don’t want you shipping from California to New York. Now, we are a national player, and we can service customers from multiple facilities and production lines.”
Read on to learn how South Coast marries quantity and quality.
