What It's Like to Work with Saphineia
Client Testimonials
Frequently Asked Questions
We are not career consultants. Our team consists of seasoned practitioners from leading food & beverage manufacturers who enjoy sharing industry best practices with middle market producers. In addition, we put skin in the game and pride ourselves on The Saphineia Promise, our guarantee and gain-sharing pricing model.
Saphineia’s team brings manufacturing best practices from leading food & beverage manufacturers such as P&G, Unilever, Tyson, Hearthside, Keurig Dr. Pepper, DuPont Danisco, Mars, Wrigley, Kraft and Michael Foods. Our expertise spans engineering, continuous improvement, lean manufacturing, planning/scheduling, warehouse management, planning, project management, plant management, quality & food safety, oversight of contract manufacturers, corporate development and finance.
No.
The Saphineia Promise aligns Saphineia’s interests with our clients’. Specifically, we put skin in the game by guaranteeing, for implementation projects, a minimum level of performance improvement that delivers a payback measured in months, not years. On top of this guarantee, the Saphineia Promise contains a gain-share element that pays out only if improvements exceed the guarantee after project completion, which ties Saphineia’s compensation to sustained performance improvements.
Saphineia’s Managing Partners bring decades of professional investment experience, as well as senior executive experience at multi-site food & beverage manufacturers. We understand the private equity business and what financial sponsors expect, have significant transaction experience and know the drivers that can create (or destroy) value. Importantly, the combination of our financial and operational experience allows us to tie operational performance to financial results in a way few can.
Saphineia focuses on food & beverage manufacturers in the middle market, generally considered between $100 million and $1 billion. We believe this segment of the market has the most to gain by implementing the best practices we’ve learned during our time at leading food & beverage manufacturers. Of course, we will work with smaller manufacturers (smaller firms become larger!) and larger ones (everyone can use the help!) – but we have tailored our solutions to helping those in the middle.
Saphineia supports private equity firms across the investment lifecycle. Our PE solutions include transactional support (i.e., Operational Diligence, Exit Prep, Capacity Analysis and Planning), as well as our full suite of Solutions for portfolio companies involved in food & beverage manufacturing (i.e., Operational Excellence, Product Costing & SKU Profitability, Supply Chain Optimization and Project Execution).
Saphineia provides underwriting support via our operational diligence offering. We also provide support to borrowers via our full suite of operationally focused services. While lenders are often less involved in the operations, we can also be especially helpful to them (or their borrowers) in challenging situations.
Our engagements include:
- $200mn Frozen Food Manufacturer: Operational Due Diligence
- $250mn Beverage Manufacturer: Lender Due Diligence in connection with potential refinancing, including diligence of the borrower’s greenfield new manufacturing facility project
- $100mn Frozen Food Manufacturer: Manufacturing Productivity Improvements
- $20mn Dairy Producer: Advisory support to help them plan, design and build new facility
- $100mn Coffee Manufacturer: Manufacturing Productivity Improvements
- $250mn Condiments Manufacturer: Product Costing Model Review & SKU Profitability
- $100mn Pizza Manufacturer: SQF Audit Prep
- $300mn Pizza Manufacturer: Shop-floor Documentation & Training
- $60mn Meat Processor: Root cause analysis following multiple Quality incidents
- $200mn Frozen Food Manufacturer: Exit Prep – prepared operational improvement roadmap for potential buyers (with our work product included in Confidential Information Memorandum and data room)
Saphineia staffs each engagement with veteran food & beverage manufacturing professionals and at least one Managing Partner. We do not employ a ‘high leverage’ model where young, inexperienced people do the work supervised by a few highly compensated individuals.
Yes. Saphineia offers a free 1-hour consultation to review a situation that you feel may benefit from third-party support. This consultation allows you and Saphineia to determine whether Saphineia is a good fit.
We believe one of Saphineia’s differentiators is that our team understands how hard manufacturing can be on a day-to-day basis and relates well with shop-floor employees -- because we’ve lived it. But don’t just take our word for it. Here’s an email we received from the VP of Operations at a $200mn food manufacturing client.
“I wanted to thank you again for the level of professionalism you have displayed with the members of our team here as you seek to help us identify our opportunities for improvement and areas in which you can assist us. I know several members of the team were intimidated by the idea of seeking outside help in this way, but your friendly, helpful attitude has set everyone at ease and has made this a comfortable experience.”
Yes. We have entered into referral agreements with others and have a standard agreement already prepared. We’d welcome the opportunity to discuss with you how our program works.
That’s a simple one to answer: client satisfaction.
Our typical performance improvement projects range from a few weeks to a few months depending on the project scope. There is an initial on-boarding, followed by a learning phase, after which the improvements tend to kick-in. It’s hard to generalize given the large variation in project scopes, but we would expect to begin seeing results about 4 weeks after project kick-off.
