How We Sourced 21 Ingredients for Our First Production Run

There are twenty-one ingredients in a bag of our Tapas, and I had to find every single one of them myself. Here is what that actually looks like, because nobody hands you a vendor list when you start a food brand.

The first real decision

The first thing you figure out is whether your co-manufacturer sources the ingredients or you do. I chose to source everything myself, so I could own the cost and quality of every single component. In the industry that is called toll manufacturing, where you bring the ingredients and the facility turns them into product. It is more work up front, and it is the only way I could stand behind every bite.

Validate the costs before you lock the recipe

Before you finalize a formula, you need real supplier quotes, not estimates, because your margins have to hold. Every ingredient gets priced. Minimum order quantities get confirmed. Lead times get mapped. It is unglamorous and it is the whole game, because a recipe you cannot afford to make is just a nice idea.

The mistake nobody warns you about

Then I calculated all my quantities for the first production run. And I got them wrong. Not because of supplier minimums, just because I did the math wrong. So I had to place every order twice, once to get started and once to buy the difference. That is the part nobody tells you about, the quiet tax on doing something for the first time. I lost my glasses and drank too little water and got it done anyway.

Vetting, not just buying

Here is the other thing. You cannot just find a good price online and call it done. Every supplier has to be vetted, with a Certificate of Analysis, a spec sheet, an allergen declaration, lot traceability, and food safety certification. If you ever want to sell in brick-and-mortar retail, your co-manufacturer will not accept an ingredient without that paperwork, and neither will a buyer. The price is the easy part. The documentation is the real work.

What came out of it

What came out of all of it was a system. A price book, a procurement tracker, a set of RFQ templates, the kind of thing you only build by doing it wrong first and then doing it right. You build your vendor list yourself, one supplier at a time, and then you build the system around it so you only ever have to figure it out once. All of it in service of the roasted chickpeas, nuts, seeds, and spices that make it into the bag.

If you are building something of your own, I hope this saves you an order placed twice. And if you just like knowing that a real person stood behind every ingredient in your snack, that is the whole idea.

Taste all twenty-one ingredients doing their job together.

Keep reading: What Actually Goes Into a $6.99 Bag, Chickpea-Based Snacks, and Why We Started WildBoard.

From our board to yours, Amy.