Co-Packer Problems
Most natural food founders are brilliant at brand, product, and sales. Nobody trained them to manage a manufacturing partnership.
The industry tells them the hard part is finding a great co-man. It’s not. The hard part is what happens after the handshake.
This page exists because we’ve managed these problems personally—as brand owners, as plant operators, and as the people called in when both sides stopped trusting each other.
We’re Getting Inconsistent Quality and We Can’t Figure Out Why
You see variation across production runs—texture, taste, shelf life, appearance. You’ve raised it with your co-man. They say it’s within spec. But nobody has ever aligned on what spec actually means, and there’s no quality framework sitting between the two of you that creates real accountability.
Here’s what most founders don’t realize: in many cases, the co-man’s food safety plan and quality program are designed to protect the co-man—not the brand. If your brand hasn’t established its own quality expectations, documented its own specs, and verified that the co-man’s preventive controls actually cover your product’s risk profile, you’re exposed without knowing it.
This problem persists because most founders don’t have the production-floor background to know what questions to ask. The cost isn’t just bad batches. It’s brand risk accumulating silently, run after run.
Our Costs Keep Going Up and We Don’t Understand the Drivers
Co-man invoices are opaque by design. Yield loss is invisible. Ingredient overage charges appear without explanation. You don’t know what questions to ask because you’ve never broken down the anatomy of a co-man invoice.
And in many cases, the cost problem isn’t just in the co-man’s pricing—it’s in the formulation itself. Ingredient specs, overage rates, and process-driven waste quietly erode margin. Reformulation is one of the fastest paths to margin recovery, and most founders don’t even know it’s on the table.
When a founder says “our costs keep going up,” most advisors look at the invoice. We look at the formula, the process, and the invoice. That’s where the real answers are.
We’re Growing and Our Co-Man Can’t Keep Up—But Switching Feels Terrifying
Your brand is scaling. The co-man is at capacity, slow to respond, or unwilling to invest in the relationship. You know something needs to change, but you have no process for evaluating alternatives, managing a transition, or de-risking a move. So you stay. You absorb the pain. You hope it gets better. It usually doesn’t.
The fear is rational. A botched co-man transition can mean months of lost production, retail deauthorizations, and cash flow damage. But staying in a relationship that’s capping your growth has its own cost—it’s just harder to see.
What founders need is someone who’s been through transitions before, who understands how co-mans think about capacity and prioritization, and who can structure a move that doesn’t blow up the business.
We Don’t Have Anyone Who Actually Understands Manufacturing
You’re the de facto operations leader. You’re approving production schedules, signing off on ingredient purchases, and managing the co-man relationship—all while trying to sell, raise capital, and build a brand.
You’re operationally involved but not operationally trained. You know something is off, but you lack the vocabulary, leverage, or experience to diagnose it cleanly and fix it without damaging the relationship.
This is the most common version of the problem, and it’s the one with the highest hidden cost. The brand needs someone who can step in at an operator level and own the manufacturing side of the business.
Our Co-Man Relationship Feels Adversarial and We Don’t Know How to Fix It
Communication has broken down. Finger-pointing has replaced problem-solving. You feel like you’re being deprioritized. The co-man feels like they’re being micromanaged. Both sides are frustrated, and neither has the framework or neutral perspective to reset the relationship.
Adversarial co-man dynamics are almost never about one bad actor. They develop when expectations were never clearly set, when communication cadences don’t exist, and when neither side has a shared quality or operational framework to resolve disputes.
The fix isn’t replacing the co-man. It’s building a relationship structure that actually works—one where both sides are clear, accountable, and aligned on what good looks like.
The Pattern Behind All Five Problems
Every one of these problems stems from the same structural gap: the brand has no one with production-floor experience managing the co-manufacturer relationship.
Most founders don’t have that person. They’re relying on their co-man to self-police, trusting invoices they can’t fully interpret, and assuming the co-man’s food safety program is protecting their brand. Often, it isn’t.
And the margin problem isn’t just in the invoice—it’s in the formulation itself.
What We Do About It
Snackteva works from both sides of the wall. Our team has owned the brand, run the plant, led R&D, and been through dozens of food safety and quality audits. We don’t advise from theory. We advise from the line.
Because we’ve run plants, we can identify systemic process issues from the operator’s side. Because we’ve led R&D and formulation, we can get inside the product itself and find margin that a co-man will never volunteer.
And because we hold PCQI and SQF Practitioner credentials, we can assess whether a co-man’s food safety plan actually protects the brand’s product—or just the co-man’s certification.
Is This the Right Conversation?
If you’re already in production with a co-manufacturer and something feels off—quality, cost, communication, capacity, or the relationship itself—this is what we do. Every day.