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Fresh as the Moment when the Pod went Pop

22 November, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

All companies obsess about something, their USP, their IP, the thing that they can do that nobody else can.

I used to work for Birdseye, the frozen pea people. They used to obsess about getting the peas out of the field and frozen within 2 1/2 hours.

They had a panel of pea tasters who would rigorously taste out “delay” flavours.

They fixated on filling times, making sure that all their lorries were loaded in time to drive back from the field to the factory.

They had an army of fieldsmen who supervised the planting of each field so that the peas didn’t all come to maturity at the same time and flood the factory

I used to think it was impressive until I read an article about a company in the US that couldn’t get all the cabbage they wanted locally, so instead of shipping the cabbage across the states with associated losses of quality and yield, they put the factory in the field and processed their cabbage there.

Picked and frozen in 2 1/2 minutes. Imagine what that would have done for Patsy Kensit.

Sometimes you have to think big.

Photo by Anastasiia Kamil on Unsplash

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: assumptions, continuous improvement, innovation, marketing, revenue generation, video

About the Author

James Lawther
James Lawther

James Lawther is a middle-aged, middle manager.

To reach this highly elevated position he has worked in numerous industries, from supermarket retailing to tax collecting.  He has had several operational roles, including running the night shift in a frozen pea packing factory and carrying out operational research for a credit card company.

As you can see from his C.V. he has either a wealth of experience or is incapable of holding down a job.  If the latter is true this post isn’t worth a minute of your attention.

Unfortunately, the only way to find out is to read it and decide for yourself.

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