Session Spotlight: Start-up to Scale - Building Personalized Success in Snack Bar Packaging at Every Stage
Hi, everyone. I'm Josh Becker, and I am the bakery and confection segment manager at Harpak-ULMA Packaging. I'm currently in my 28th year working in the food manufacturing industry with a focus on packaging machinery. My goal at Harpak-ULMA has been to grow our presence in the baking and confectionery industry by working with our sales and technical teams to develop the best solutions for our customers. We at Harpack have a wide range of packaging, machinery, solutions, and automation capabilities, so it is important to determine which solution is best. Being a past operations, maintenance and engineering leader with various CPG companies, I really rely on that experience to help our customers succeed. What topic trend does this session cover and why is it important? In my presentation, Startup to scale building personalized success in snack bar packaging at every stage. I'm going to go in to share some insights that the US snack bar market is set to see over 21% retail growth in 2025. With consumers citing convenience, indulgence, flavor, variety, and price as significant drivers in popularity. With these increased growths come increased brand presence, with numerous new snack bar brands emerging at major retailers essentially every month. While the companies and products may be varied, most all of the emerging brands share a single common theme, often relying on third party private label manufacturers to execute and control their entire packaging process. Why is that? Well, brands seek speed to market to outpace and outlast competitors, but they lack the manufacturing knowledge, facilities, and investment capital to arrange and oversee those production environments. So what do attendees hope to learn from this session? Well, I hope to hit on the key considerations and solutions for building snack bar packaging operations at every level of expansion. I'll explore some various step by step processes and even a few system layouts required for optimal process control, focusing on critical production components such as some product volumes, equipment capabilities, product throughput, spatial requirements, etc. By attending, you're, you're going to gain some valuable insight and practical guidance into leveraging your own packaging equipment to improve product quality, process control, and profit margins and allow for a seamless integration of advanced technology such as automation and or maybe even dual lane packaging applications. most looking forward to at IBIE 2025. Well, for me it's a chance to connect with the industry. Being the bakery segment manager for Harpak, any show attendees coming to our booth is someone that I'm going to want to talk to. It's an opportunity to connect with those attendees to educate them about who we are and what we are capable of supplying to the industry. It's a chance to turn these attendees into potential customers and partners. Our goal is helping them become more efficient in their operations. It always starts with a conversation, and that is what IBIE is all about starting that conversation. IBIE also gives me a chance to meet up with our allied suppliers who work in the adjacent spaces to us. Although we have a wide range of packaging solutions for the industry, we don't always have all the solutions, so IBIE is a great place for me to learn about the companies supplying solutions on the front end of the baking line. It's all about growing your network and leaning on others to help customers be as successful as they can, and when that happens, we all win.