A mother pushes her grocery cart down the store aisles. She scans the shelves and displays, plucking the items that she needs, the items she wants to try, and the items she doesn’t particularly need but wants anyway. With each turn and push of the cart — down the bread aisle, past the dairy case, weaving through the produce department — she’s not thinking about whether the products stacking up in her basket are still good to eat, full of taste, unspoiled and not stale. Without really realizing it, she puts trust in the conglomeration of people producing the product. She assumes the product is still good for consumption and puts her trust in the system.

And that trust is a tricky thing, because if broken once, with one off or slightly off product, it’s highly unlikely that trust could be fully secured again. To regain the trust would not be easy, and most likely entail a lengthy uphill trek for all parties involved — a trek in the snow, uphill, both ways, in bare feet.

When it comes to contract manufacturing, maintaining the shelf life of products is an issue that all brand owners and manufacturers face, no matter what is on the shelf, in the dairy case or on an end-cap display. For dairy manufacturers, for example, products have a shelf life of a month or slightly longer, a significant hurdle compared to products such as chocolate or snack foods, which can be good for up to a year for the former, and up to about 150 days for the latter.

“Shelf life tends to be a self-limiting kind of thing,” says Mark Pearson, president of the Quality Assurance Association, a non-profit organization made up of wholesalers, retailers, manufacturers, laboratory and government professionals, suppliers and others that provides information and training related to the quality of private label products.

“If you have a problem with shelf life, it will often take care of itself because people will stop buying your product very quickly,” he says.

Of course, neither brand owners nor manufacturers want that to happen, and both want to keep the grocery-going mom happy. The obvious solution is to stay on top when it comes to managing the quality control that ensures a long and healthy shelf life.

A Very Good Place to Start

The key to keeping shelf life on track is to plan, plan, plan. And when it comes to contract manufacturing, brand owners and contract manufacturers have to come together and agree on the needs and specifications of the product from the very beginning.

“You have to absolutely know where your ingredients are coming from and what is in them,” Pearson says. “You need to know what is in your packaging materials, and you need to have adequately tested your products in that package to know what your shelf life is to be able to protect it in the best way.”

By talking through a variety of issues and concerns, contract manufacturers and brand owners can siphon out what will work best for a particular product.

“Step one,” says Bob Renaut, chief executive officer of Oberweis Dairy, North Aurora, Ill., “is to define quality upfront.” For Oberweis, this not only includes the specifications of ingredients and packaging, but also entails visiting the manufacturer’s plants, inspecting the plants, understanding the quality process that is in place, and reviewing records in terms of the manufacturer’s delivery track record.

“We want to see how well they conform to the requirements that have been set for the product,” Renaut says. “We believe that that is probably the most important step — to be proactive, inspect the plant and clearly define what the requirements are.”

Manufacturers know best what their ingredients and materials can and can’t do, and setting standards prior to production to ensure the shelf life of the end result means being able to lay it out for the brand owners as to what would work best with their timelines and distribution channels.

“We know that our standard packaging material will more than give 70 days [of shelf life],” says Jim Wiegmann, senior vice president of Snack Alliance Inc., Vancouver, British Columbia. “We know that cottonseed oil is more stable than canola oil. Those are standard metrics. We do shelf-tests or accelerated shelf-tests on new rollstock to determine what that rollstock will give us for shelf life.”

Taking into account things such as experience with substrates, what store conditions best serve the products, and the like, Wiegmann and Snack Alliance can give clients a chart that shows the integrity of the product from start to finish.

“They can make their choices inside that product’s integrity,” Wiegmann says.

Moving further down the line, Renaut notes that random sampling of products is the next step in ensuring quality control for shelf life and evaluating partners in terms of whether or not the specifications live up to what was agreed on when the contract was established.

The process of ensuring the quality of the shelf life would not be complete, however, without feedback.

“How are we doing? How are they doing? When we look at the product, it’s not only the quality of the product, but the quality of the delivery,” Renaut says. “It’s measuring that and reporting back to them. And then it’s sitting down and figuring out a plan to fix it or make it better, if necessary.”

Whose Responsibility Is It?

“Virtually everything has an effect on shelf life,” the Quality Assurance Association’s Pearson says. “The ingredients you use, the packaging materials you specify, the process, the way that you score the product and the way you distribute it. All of those things are going to have an impact on your shelf life.”

It’s a simple fact in the manufacturing and packaging world, yet one that cannot be and is not taken lightly.

Though when it comes to contract manufacturing, where does the responsibility for overseeing the shelf-life quality fall — to the brand owner or to the manufacturer? In contract manufacturing, there are two sides to the quality-control coin of a product’s shelf life. To keep products up to expectations, both brand owners and contract manufacturers must keep a vigilant eye on the quality control of the shelf life of products.

“It’s a shared responsibility, but [manufacturers] have the most impact in terms of delivering on engineering the process upfront,” Renaut says. “But we have the responsibility to ensure that they are delivering on their promises. Our job is to handle it properly after we get it. I’ve got to maintain the temperature when I deliver it to my consumers. So I do share some responsibility in the ultimate shelf life of the product.”

“It is certainly a partnership,” notes Paul Pruett, chief executive officer of Bloomsberry & Co., Salem, Mass., makers of specialty chocolate, “but we try to assist the manufacturer to give them projections at least 90 days in advance. That allows them to plan their purchasing of the raw ingredients. Although most of the ingredients [for our products] have a pretty long shelf life, just so I can have the freshest ingredients possible within my chocolate, I want them to order no more than what’s needed over the next 45 days.”

While both parties have their share of quality-control responsibility, there is one chink in the armor. However, it comes after the product is out of the brand owner’s or contract manufacturer’s hands.

“I can control the climate of my warehouse and my distribution centers,” Pruett explains. “I have a relationship with my co-manufacturer to ensure that they, too, are working within a controlled environment. What we cannot control with 100 percent assurance is either in the retail environment and where it is actually merchandised or sold, and/or sometimes in the actual freight carrier.”

Snack Alliance’s Wiegmann adds that 90 percent of the product his company makes goes into grocery warehouses. “And at that point,” Wiegmann explains, “you’ve lost all control over the product. You know approximately what temperature they’ve got in the warehouses, but you don’t know what the rotation is, and you don’t know how they’re handling the product. They could leave it in a trailer in the parking lot in the heat, and that would degrade the product. So as a manufacturer, or even as a brand owner, you don’t have a lot of control after you deliver the product.”

That’s why, explains Oberweis’ Renaut, so much effort is put into the initial stages of the product development and production. “In contract manufacturing, whether it’s shelf life or the final quality of the product, the key is all in the preventive stage of defining the program and requirements, measurements, seeing how they conform with [the manufacturer’s] existing systems upfront,” he says.

Contract manufacturers also agree that to discourage any lapse in quality a product might face at the hands of grocery warehouses, the quality control has to start upfront.

“We always counsel brand owners to not sacrifice quality under any circumstances,” Wiegmann says, “whether it’s ingredients, packaging material or trying to play with a code life, because it always comes back and gets them in the end.”

And in the end, if the quality isn’t there, neither will that grocery-going mom.