Blount builds a history of making the right moves

GROWING CAPABILITIES: Todd Blount, center, president of Blount Fine Foods since 2000, has invested heavily in the food manufacturer’s ability to adapt to the fast-changing consumer food marketplace, including by supporting fast product development by the company’s research and development team, including R&D chefs Benjamin Murray, left, and Thomas Gervasi. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
GROWING CAPABILITIES: Todd Blount, center, president of Blount Fine Foods since 2000, has invested heavily in the food manufacturer’s ability to adapt to the fast-changing consumer food marketplace, including by supporting fast product development by the company’s research and development team, including R&D chefs Benjamin Murray, left, and Thomas Gervasi. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

Blount Fine Foods is one of the region’s most recognized family businesses. It has been processing food since 1946, starting with frozen shellfish. The Blount name signifies strength in manufacturing traditions, but its explosive growth also proves that there’s a forward-thinking strategy at play.
The successes in Blount’s recent past and the firm’s optimistic corporate outlook have earned it many recent awards and accolades from sources including the Family Business Association, Ernst & Young, Boston Business Journal and Providence Business News. The company has operations in Warren and Fall River.
Todd Blount, president of the company since 2000 when he took over the reins from his father, Ted, said that there are three major forces behind his company’s continued success. First and foremost, the company has changed its product line to ensure that it stays relevant.
Now, the company makes 350 soups from proprietary recipes, including 75 varieties of clam chowder, premium side dishes and specialty foods. It produces 140 million servings of soup a year. It has been quite a journey.
“When we were making frozen shellfish, there was always the challenge of limited market size and availability,” Blount said. “We’ve figured out how to make more products that are more applicable in the future, with unlimited growth potential.” The company’s soups and custom foods are branded as well as for private labels at restaurants and retail locations.
The commitment to quick and responsive expansion of its offerings is a welcome outcome of this corporate philosophy. Blount says that unlike other companies that have products in gestation internally for long periods, his company turns out new products that are made to the specifications of its customers, supported by its sales-focused research and development department.
“We have a three-to-six month R&D cycle. The cycle in prepared foods is very short, so you have to take a little bit more risk, and put some products out that may or may not be perfect,” Blount said, “But part of what makes us great is being flexible and testing things live and trying not to make too big of a packaging investment so if it doesn’t work, we can discontinue those things.”
Blount credits the company’s consistent investment in its facilities and technology as the second reason for its continued success. Blount hasn’t just paid lip service to keeping up with the times; he’s pumped significant capital into making Blount Fine Foods’ technology and facilities worthy of the manufacturing renaissance of which they are a part. “We’re always investing in equipment and automation,” he said, noting that one exciting innovation Blount has invested in recently was a machine to make single-serve refrigerated cups for soup – something the market had yet to see. “It keeps us competitive by allowing us not only to up capacity, but to be efficient and fast when we get a particular order.”
The increase in capacity that Blount speaks of is the third prong of Blount’s approach to business: “We’re diverse. We sell to restaurants and retailers. Everyone is going to eat. So the question is, where are they going to eat? One of our competencies that has kept us growing is that we have many different categories, so as the consumer moves around, hopefully we meet them wherever we are. We grow with the consumer more than the retailers.”
And that growth is fairly incontrovertible based on net sales figures, the result in no small measure to the significant expansion and investment the company undertook during the Great Recession, when Blount responded not by scaling back, but by pushing forward.
“The stability of our company allowed us to borrow money at low rates, and the contracting and pricing rates were low. Our timing was fast. We took some risk that we felt would pay for itself in the long run, and our distribution diversity gave us the confidence to do that,” he said. “One of our values is making great decisions for the next generation, not for the next year.”
But for Todd Blount and his team, it’s clearly not only about the bottom line. For Blount, investment in his company is also inherently investment in his people – he said the company enjoys very low turnover, allowing for more seamless assessment of strengths and weaknesses from year to year.
Blount also said Vice President of Operations Jonathan Arena, along with his workers, has “put a tremendous amount of focus” on safety, continually striving to make the plant safer while providing increased safety training for the workers. “We have a significant performance philosophy: Food safety and employee safety are No. 1,” said Blount.
Specifically, Blount credited Arena with the creation of the Learning and Development Department, which offers employees opportunities to earn internal certifications. It trains employees to train others as certified trainers for the company. Since the company’s business is described by Blount as “extremely seasonal,” the built-in production slow-downs offer the company a chance to enhance its processes and get its employees excited about the growth still to come.
It’s in Blount’s commitment to his employees – and their clear excitement about working for one of the region’s best-known manufacturers – that he really shows his hand as the scion of a true family operation. According to figures offered by company spokesman Larry Marchese, “the head count at Blount Fine Foods has increased 20 percent in the last three years,” creating manufacturing jobs in not one but two states in the region.
Despite the expenses and challenges presented by operating in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, Blount is committed to remaining an enduring part of the region. “We stay here because we all live here, and we’re a family business. There’s a huge value in our current team, and they live here and their families are here,” he said. •

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