Introducing your copacking instructor, Ken Caldaro!

Copacking is a challenging industry to navigate, whether you’re a copacker striving to

provide service to your customers in the most efficient ways possible, or a business owner

searching for the perfect copacker to help you expand your offerings and reach new

customers. If you’re in either one of these situations, you’ve got a lot to learn, and limited

spare time in which to learn it all.

This is where I hope I can be of service to you. I’m Ken Caldaro, and I’ve dedicated nearly three decades of my life to learning everything I possibly could about copacking operations, along with the best practices of the food and beverage industry. 

 Over the next several months and years, I’ll be using this space to share helpful stories and advice with you based on my experiences building and running one of the best copacking companies in the United States — Carolina CoPacking. 

 You may be wondering why you should trust me as a reliable source to help guide you toward a thorough understanding of copacking from the perspective of both the copacker and a potential customer. I don’t blame you. There are thousands of alleged experts online who lead unwary people down the wrong path. 

 This is why I’m going to share with you the reasons why you can place your trust in me as an expert who can steer you past the many pitfalls of the copacking industry. So without further ado, here are the six reasons you can trust me to help you make the correct copacking decisions for your company.

I love copacking (… and so does my team)

One of the foremost reasons I founded Carolina CoPacking is quite simply the fact that I love food. On top of that, I love the mechanical aspect of creating food, I love people, and I love my team members and partners. My foremost goal was to build a copacking brand that would attract the right sort of people who would share in my vision, and who would share my same loyalty to the brand that we were building.

 Whether I’m present at our copacking facilities or not, I know with confidence that my crew has the same love, care, and control of quality that is essential to my vision. One of our slogans is “We bottle extraordinary.” In order for that to happen, everyone has to share that vision. I’m thrilled to say that I assembled a team that shares my love for copacking and everything that it entails.

I believe copacking should be customer-focused

Finding the right copacker that is a perfect fit for your company to serve as a potential partner is a huge learning curve. Sometimes you have to provide information to customers that they might not understand, or that they may not want to hear. Regardless, this is what should be happening when a copacker is vetting the viability of a potential customer’s business, because it takes more than basic copacking to build a brand, get it to market, and keep it in growth mode. 

 When onboarding a new customer and getting details about their product and their expectations, a helpful copacker will offer helpful feedback, and then see what can be done to nurture the product so that sales will grow. That’s a very exciting part of the process to me, because seeing someone’s passion reminds me of why I got into this industry in the first place. Seeing the pride they have in their product when they slide the jar over to me and ask me to try it is an amazing experience. The point is, you want a copacker that is excited about your product, and not just your money.

I have the experience 

I’ve spent almost 30 years studying every component of copacking. In the earliest stages of my career, I learned a lot about certified welding, including the stainless and the alloys and the electrical demands that are required to run some of the large machinery. After learning everything about factory design, I expanded my knowledge to include people management, and then added the knowledge of food formulations, right down to the most complicated aspects. 

The point is, my desire to understand everything there is to know about copacking heightened my knowledge of everything that transpires within a copacking operation. This means I not only have an innate understanding of the roles of all of the people who work in the copacking business, but I also have sophisticated knowledge of how each product is produced. This is why you can trust me when I offer you advice about how to maintain success in every facet of copacking.

I have the education

I’ve always been a believer in continual learning and continual improvement, and when I think there are gaps in my knowledge that need to be filled, I take immediate steps to fill them. When I felt like I needed to learn specifically about food science in order to become a better copacker, I went so far as to take microbiology courses. Learning about food quality helped me to learn how to maintain the highest of standards during every part of the process so that my customers’ food quality would never be diminished. 

Still, despite everything I’ve learned about copacking over the last 30 years, I’m continuously learning to this day. The food industry changes very often, and you have to evaluate where the industry is going as a whole, identify what’s necessary to stay ahead of the curve, and continue to do what’s necessary to retain your value to your customers. One of the reasons I’m so passionate about helping you develop your knowledge of copacking is because I constantly strive to maintain my own knowledge base at a high standard.

I have a moral compass

It’s important for potential copacking customers to be cognizant of the fact that copacking is a business, and all copackers are considering the potential profitability of every partnership they become involved in. Because of this, plenty of copackers make decisions that are entirely motivated by saving money, and that can tempt them to cut corners in ways that result in them not necessarily producing to the utmost level of quality for their customers. 

I object to business owners whose foremost priority is to fulfill a market need at a certain volume even if it means compromising on quality. This is one of the factors that motivated me to build by own copacking enterprise from the ground up. This also means is that when I offer you guidance, I’m providing it from the standpoint of someone with integrity who refuses to sacrifice quality for the sake of saving a few dollars. You can believe me when I say that I’m offering advice with your best potential outcomes in mind.

And now I’m here to help you!

Whenever you reach a critical juncture in your progression through the copacking industry, I hope you’ll seek me out as a voice of wisdom that is backed by decades of copacking experience and copacking education, along with a tireless devotion to customer satisfaction.

I’ll continue to share my insights with you so that you can reap the benefits of what I’ve learned from both successes and failures. I promise that if you follow my copacking advice, you’ll drastically reduce your failures, and enjoy many more successes.