I have some questions from my clients as well that I will be sharing and writing answers to, so please share yours if you have any! A few examples of common FAQs: 1. How do I know if I need to register with the FDA? 2. Our inspector said we needed and SDS binder for our chemical area...what is that? 3. What is the best way to track inventory?

Production Managers (Popsicles, Ice Cream, Cold Brew, Candy, Fruit Snacks) General Managers (Frozen Dairy Desserts, Electrolyte Packets, Protein Bars) Director of Operations (Meat Sticks, Chips, Tofu, Dried Pasta, Gelato) CGP Brand Founders (Jam, Nut Butters, Avocado Packets, Allergen Free Cookie Dough, Crackers) Small Vendors/Farmer's Market (Cookies, Pies, Coffee Bar, Breakfast Burritos, Loose Leaf Tea) Do you run a local ice cream shop on Main Street and make ice cream in the back of house with the batch freezers you found on Craisglist? This is here for you. Have you signed up to be a vendor this Summer in the farmer's market and you have your grandma's biscuit recipe that you want to scale and share? This is here for you. Do you have investors breathing down your neck for answers on how to scale into a new production facility and you need to know how much it will cost? This is here for you. We all should be system obsessed. You fall or fail to the level of your systems. I don't care what you're making, eating, scheduling, leading—if you do not have systems for how and why you do what you do, you are leaving the gates open for chaos—or best case, blind success. And then good luck knowing what to lean into or replicate when you need to grow. I have food safety certifications and 10 years of experience in the food manufacturing space. I know systems make a difference. And you need to know the soul of your product. You need to know what the "little-things-are-the-big-things" are. There are a million factors that go into how your production runs and the outputs it creates everyday. I don't want to attempt to account for all of them. However, what I am suggesting is to put some filters in the system that give you data to make the big picture explainable and the tiny details trackable. Remember in Algebra class, when you had one missing portion of the equation but if you knew one thing on one side of the = and another on the other side, that you could figure out the missing piece? That is how you find the missing pieces of your production.

Let me tell you what I've learned after years in food manufacturing. The brands that survive aren't always the ones with the best product. They're the ones who built systems behind it. I learned that firsthand. I grew with an ice cream company from a rented commissary kitchen all the way to SQF certification. We didn't just make great ice cream—we built HACCP plans, scaled our documentation, grew our departments, and built teams that actually cared about each other and the people working alongside them. The product opened doors. The systems kept us standing. When I moved across the country I saw the other side of that story. Brilliant manufacturers. Impactful brands. People working themselves to the bone—with everything living in a Google Sheet and no way to predict next month, train a new hire consistently, or know what their product actually cost to make. That gap—between passion and infrastructure—is exactly what SeeSalt exists to close. I've worked with brands, restaurants, copackers/white label, production managers, CPG founders, and farmers market vendors at every stage of growth. What I've found is that the best systems always come back to the same thing—getting down to the soul of the product and building from there. That's what we do here. Welcome to the community. I would love to hear anyone's story, what they are working on, and where they are trying to go. I am building my first Q&A session so send all your questions this way!