A clever concoction

Finished product—palletized and packaged into bottles, gabled packaging or Tetra Paks—usually starts to arrive back at the warehouse on Tuesdays, depending on how quickly a truckload is filled at the plant.

The finished goods are stored in the refrigerated area of the warehouse until customer orders come in. But they don’t sit around for long—on average, the company keeps about 1.2 weeks of finished product in stock.

“We pay a lot of attention to inventory,” Korva explains. “There’s a lot of money tied up in inventory, and that just flies out the door if you don’t manage it properly.”

The warehouse staff conducts inventory checks once a month for raw materials and once a week for finished goods. There are barcodes on the product’s packaging, for use in the retail chain, but the company uses no internal barcoding in the warehouse. Counts are done manually and then fed into an inventory management system called Trax.

It’s a fairly low-tech process, but thanks to systematic double-checking by multiple individuals, it is on average 99.75 percent accurate. That means of the tens of thousands of cases of finished product on hand, Korva’s inventory counts are seldom off by more than five cases in a week.

Shipping out

Finished product leaves the warehouse by truck for delivery to grocers and retail customers.

Initially, Happy Planet’s size made it hard for it to secure outbound transport, as its volumes were considered by many carriers to be too small to bother with. Early on, it managed this by partnering with companies like Liberté to share loads.

As the company’s shipment volumes grew, finding space on trailers became less of a problem. It now regularly books full trailer loads, and, thanks to its co-operative ethos, is saving money doing so.

When it is unable to fill a trailer with its own shipments, Korva will ask the customer she’s shipping to who else it orders from in BC. If the customer is willing to share the details, she will contact those suppliers and offer the spare space in the trailer at cost.

“For us, it’s great, because we fill that space. For the other shipper, it’s great, because we give it to them at cost, which they could never get otherwise.”

It’s a friendly—and mutually beneficial —gesture intended to help Happy Planet’s peers avoid a common small-shipper dilemma.

“I know what it’s like trying to get space for two pallets to Toronto,” Korva shares. “It can be a nightmare.”