Hello! I hope this weekend was great for you all and that the start of the week has been productive. Happy Monday! I’ve compiled 5 questions that I hear a lot from my clients and that you might benefit from too! If you have more add them to the comments and I will get them answered. 🌟 1. “How do I know if I need to register with the FDA?” The short answer is: if you're manufacturing, processing, packing, or holding food for consumption in the United States, you most likely need to register with the FDA. This applies to both domestic and foreign facilities. However…there are some exemptions: farms that only grow and harvest raw agricultural commodities, and businesses that fall under the "very small business" threshold for certain rules may have modified requirements. The bigger trigger most small CPG brands hit is the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). Under FSMA, if your annual food sales exceed $1,000 in a given year and you sell to someone other than the final consumer (meaning you sell to a store, distributor, or farmers market reseller), you are likely required to register and comply with Preventive Controls regulations. Even if you sell directly to consumers at a farmers market, once you start scaling into retail or e-commerce, that registration clock starts ticking. Registration is done through the FDA's Bioterrorism Act portal (you can find it at FDA.gov), it's free, and it must be renewed every two years during the October–December window of even-numbered years. Don't wait until a retailer asks for it. Get registered early because buyers, co-packers, and distributors will almost always ask for your FDA registration number before they'll work with you. 🌟 2. “Our inspector said we needed an SDS binder for our chemical area...what is that?” SDS stands for Safety Data Sheet (previously called MSDS — Material Safety Data Sheet). An SDS binder is simply a physical or digital collection of safety documents for every chemical product used in your facility—sanitizers, degreasers, lubricants, pest control chemicals, cleaning agents, and food-grade detergents.

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!