Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker

Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker

Company Overview

• Scharffen Berger was founded in 1996 by Robert Steinberg and John Scharffenberger.
• The chocolate maker in US market competing for $1.2 billion premium quality chocolate segment.
• Company had 60 employees and operated from a 27,000 sqft facility with 20,000 sqft production area, office space of 5,000 sqft and retail space of 2,000 sqft
• Facing high market demand which is outstripping production. High growth in demand is expected for its premium chocolate products and hence planning capacity expansion,

Production Process At Scharffen Berger

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Current Capacity and Expansion

• Monthly production capacity of 40,000 kgs
• Expansion options being considered

• Purchasing more of same machines aredy being used
• Adding a new ball mill at $ 300,000 ( assuming quality remains same). Expected time reduction to 15hr from avg.60 hrs of choncing.
• When ball mill is installed, Mixer will be next bottleneck. Additional mixer could be purchased & refurbished at $ 50,000.
• Outsourcing the tempering and molding process to co-packers and remove duplication, However, transporting liquid chocolate was risky and expensive proposition.

Conclusion

1. In the current situation, conches are the clear bottleneck. The proposed ball mill will reduce the average Conche time from 60hrs to 15hrs and increase the production capacity by around 10%. I will proceed with the implementation.
2. Accompanied by the increasing shifts of Temper, Cleaner and Roaster, the production capacity can further be increased up to almost 150%.
3. Further capacity can only be increased by adding additional Mixer and operation at 3 shifts.