The Company
A sauce operation that scaled faster than its systems
When Paul Guglielmo purchased his manufacturing facility in April 2020, Craft Cannery was a single-brand sauce operation. Within a year, production had doubled. The company had evolved into a full-service contract manufacturer — co-packing sauces, dressings, and condiments for multiple brands, selling through 500+ distribution stores, and managing 50 base recipes across hundreds of SKUs.
The growth was the good kind of problem. The systems — or lack of them — were not.
The Challenge
Pen, paper, and a prayer before every audit
Before FlexiBake, Craft Cannery ran on pen and paper. Customer quotes were calculated manually, which meant costs got missed — labour, packaging, raw materials that should have been in the price but weren’t.
Every missed input was margin walking out the door.
Lot tracking didn’t exist in any structured way. Recall preparation was stressful and time-consuming. And production planning — figuring out which raw materials to order for upcoming runs — took hours of manual calculation every cycle.
The company was a multi-million-dollar operation. But most ERPs on the market were built for hundred-million-dollar manufacturers, bringing cost and complexity Craft Cannery didn’t need.
“As soon as we started to scale up, we realized we needed a system. It became way too much to do by hand, and FlexiBake had everything we needed.”
— Paul Guglielmo, Owner, Craft Cannery
The Solution
The right size of system for a growing manufacturer
FlexiBake fit because it was built for exactly this kind of operation: complex enough to need real software, not so large that an enterprise ERP made sense. Craft Cannery implemented production planning, recipe management, inventory, lot tracking, nutritional analysis, and costing in one system.
Implementation was done in stages. Training was broken into sections that matched the team’s pace. Recipes, data, and structure were built gradually while production continued to run. Paul compared the process to learning a new language — demanding, but manageable with the right guide.
The dedicated FlexiBake trainer stayed involved throughout, and support was hands-on whenever questions came up.
“Our trainer was knowledgeable, incredibly patient, and kind. This experience was consistent with every interaction I’ve had with FlexiBake.”
— Paul Guglielmo, Owner, Craft Cannery
The Results
From scrambling to audit-ready in five seconds
The numbers changed fast. Lot tracking went from nonexistent to complete — every ingredient traceable to source. Mock recalls that used to cause days of anxiety now take five seconds. Production planning that ate four hours per cycle now runs from a single raw material report in FlexiBake.
But the result Paul didn’t expect was the margin visibility. Customer quotes had been missing costs for years. Once every input — labour, packaging, raw materials — was built into the costing system, every quote came out accurate. No more margin leaking out through missed line items.
- 5-second recalls — Automated lot tracking with audit-ready records, replacing hours of manual scrambling
- 4 hours saved — Per production planning cycle, using a single raw material report instead of manual calculation
- 100% correct costing — On customer quotes, with all inputs (labour, packaging, raw materials) built in
- 100% traceability — Every ingredient tracked to source, enabling full regulatory compliance