Blount Fine Foods Corp.
Family-owned Business | 2019 Manufacturing Awards
Families adapt to change, face challenges together and help others when they can.
A family business started in the 1880s, Blount Fine Foods Corp. does all these things with its family of foods – things that also make good business sense. It’s a philosophy that has served the company well over five generations of the Blount family.
Todd Blount has been CEO since the early 2000s, when he took over the company from his father, Ted, who had taken the reins from his father, F. Nelson Blount. Todd’s cousin Stephen Blount handles business development, focusing on restaurants; his cousin Rachael Blount Girard handles marketing. His sisters, Courtney Blount Hamilton and Lisa Blount White, work in reception and accounting, respectively.
Beginning as an oyster-packing company, Blount Fine Foods has gone through several incarnations to better provide what its customers want for retail stores, restaurants and household kitchens. The company now carries full lines of gourmet soups, side dishes, entrees, sauces and more.
Now based in Fall River, with production facilities in Warren and McKinney, Texas, Blount and its 400 employees know there is value in change. But those changes can come with challenges, which the Blount family addresses head on.
‘Fall River has been very good to us. We feel it’s kind of our duty [to help other businesses].’
TODD BLOUNT, Blount Fine Foods CEO
A challenge Blount addressed recently: improving its supply-chain system. Due to the nature of Blount’s products, that’s a bit trickier than it would be for other companies. Buying power is limited in the world of fresh organic-soup ingredients, which mainly come from small farms and don’t have preservatives to extend shelf life, according to Todd Blount.
“Everything is perishable,” he said. “If demand increases, or if the weather gets colder, we often can’t get more raw material. Organic items are less flexible.”
The company set out to improve supplier relations and ingredient quality, establish supplier continuity plans and save on costs, among other goals. Blount also had to communicate to its vendors that it needs flexibility in ordering.
It established a 90-day inventory report for raw material, for example. “We immediately know if we have too much or too little with the 90-day report and are able to update vendors of that number for the next 90 days [so the company can say], ‘Get us more or be ready to sell us more,’ ” Blount said.
Finding backup vendors and going farther to find suppliers also helped. If a vendor can provide only 80 percent of an order, a second vendor can make up the other 20 percent. Instead of getting all of its cranberries from farms on Cape Cod, Blount might buy some from Wisconsin farms now, if needed.
These and other new practices reduced expired raw-material waste by 50 percent last year, according to the company.
Supply-chain improvements are just one part of the company’s continuous investment in speed, safety, efficiency and quality. It upgrades production and chilling technology regularly, ensuring that soup textures and ingredients are maintained. A new safety program reduced the company’s equipment-related incidents by 12 percent in the past year.
At the same time, revenue has been on the rise, climbing $22.5 million in 2018 to $361 million.
As the Blount family works to maximize the company’s effectiveness in getting its customer base what it wants in the most efficient way possible, it also contributes to the community.
Todd Blount leads a monthly forum for other businesses in the Fall River Industrial Park, helping to create a “rising-tide effect,” he said. A Greater Fall River Development Corp. executive committee member, he works on Bristol County, Mass., job-growth strategies and sits on a regional manufacturing CEO forum.
This year, the company and Bristol Community College are awarding collaborative workplace grants for lean-manufacturing training.
“Fall River has been very good to us. We feel it’s kind of our duty” to help others advance their companies and skills as well, Blount said.
