Expanding business creates flavors for ice cream, soda, energy drinks and more
KALAMAZOO COUNTY, MI –– A Kalamazoo County company’s $15 million expansion is complete, helping the company as it mixes and packages flavors for people’s favorite ice creams, hard seltzers, protein bars, energy drinks and more more.
The company, called FlavorSum, is a “flavor producer” at 3680 Stadium Park Way, west of Kalamazoo. FlavorSum gave MLive/Kalamazoo Gazette a tour inside its new 35,000-square-foot expansion.
The project started with $10 million but ended up costing $15 million. Some costs were higher than expected and the scope of the project also expanded, company officials said.
The warehouse and additional equipment will help “make life a little more ergonomically correct,” said president/CEO Brian Briggs.
“(This) opened up space and allowed us to invest about $4 million in new automation equipment,” Briggs said. “If you think about a KitchenAid mixer at home and you put it on steroids — think about a 1,000-gallon mixer like that — that’s how a lot of the product was made.”
Briggs took over the company in March 2020. Since then, FlavorSum has grown from 40 to 72 employees at the Kalamazoo location, making it the epicenter of business.
There are two other FlavorSum labs, one in Ontario, Canada, and one in New Jersey.
There are only about 200 “flavorists” in North America. Briggs says FlavorSum has nine of them. This allows his team to make prototypes and flavors here.
With the new investment, FlavorSum is able to replicate what the final production of the products will be like.
“A flavorist could do this at your countertop, but by the time you make a protein drink, it can taste very different after it’s been made in a large facility,” Briggs said. “So we’re able to take what was done on the desktop and basically run it on our miniature equipment…it really allows our customer to speed up the process.”
A walk through the new warehouse is an explosion of flavors –– Briggs says all the flavors combine to create a smell that permeates the entire building.
FlavorSum works with small and medium-sized emerging food and beverage companies to help them develop new flavors.
The company doesn’t disclose who its customers are, but FlavorSum has played an important role in finding flavors for many of the new alcoholic and non-alcoholic seltzers on the market, as well as working with regional ice cream makers, among others.
“Our strength is working with companies we essentially become an extension of their organization because we can help them ‘R&D’, we can help them figure out how to do it, and we can give them the information they need,” Briggs said. “We spend a lot of time with the client asking, ‘What are you trying to create?’”
For example, the flavors people crave while exercising are not the same as what someone craves when relaxing before bed.
Historically, the product was made and then placed by hand in one- or five-gallon jugs. But with the new investments, the mixing tanks are now directly connected to a filling machine that fills and caps the product.
There is even a machine that stacks products on a pallet, saving the team from doing heavy work.
The floor team’s main responsibility now is to monitor quality and apply labels. Briggs hopes the new automation equipment will make his job easier.
FlavorSum is a specialist in adapting to the consumer experience. And Briggs is happy to have found a home in Kalamazoo.
“It’s a very good growth story of investment in automation and equipment, but you also need talent,” Briggs said. “The biggest part of our success is the people we have within FlavorSum.”
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