What to Look for in a Food Repacking Partner
August 15, 2022

Food items that cannot be sold through normal channels are often thrown away. This escalates costs for food manufacturers, distributors, and retail outlets and creates wasted food. The United States discards more food than any other country: nearly 40 million tons — 80 billion pounds — every year. Working with a food repacking partner can help food manufacturers save money, protect their brand, and prevent food waste when a private label or other food cannot be sold through normal channels. Repacking is the process of safely removing wholesome food items from one package or creating individual packages from bulk overstock items and placing them into a private label package for sale.

However, selecting a qualified food repackaging partner is crucial to guarantee quality and compliance. Natural Choice Foods is one of the few FDA and USDA-certified food repacking companies in the United States and has made significant investments to ensure your items are repackaged safely, labeled for resale, and sold through approved channels to provide ultimate protection of your brands and your bottom line.

FDA and USDA Certified Repack Facility

FDA and USDA certification ensures the food repacking partner you are working with maintains a safe, sanitary facility and uses proper labels and packaging. Due to growing customer demands, Natural Choice Foods invested in a new repacking facility, employee training, and meeting compliance requirements to achieve FDA and USDA certified repack facility status in 2019. Natural Choice Foods is also SQF certified, fully understands HACCP compliance, and have metal detection in place at our repack facility. Natural Choice guarantees safe and quality food.

Traceability

What happens in the event of a recall or audit after the repackaging process? Natural Choice Foods provides lot numbers and tracking on all repackaged food products, ensuring you can follow where any item went at any time. You’ll be equipped to stick to your food recall or audit plan and minimize any issues.

Food Packaging Capabilities

Your food repackaging partner needs to have the capacity and ability to prepare large quantities for resale quickly for you to maximize your dollar.

With the capacity to repack over 1 million pounds of food per month, Natural Choice Foods’ state-of-the-art facility includes a 155,000 square-foot distribution center, temperature-controlled loading docks, a 50,000 square-foot freezer, and a sample test kitchen.

 

We also offer a wide range of food packaging options to help you capture the most value from your products, including:

  • Individual packages for resale or consumer packaging
  • bags for foodservice
  • Larger family-sized packages for food warehouses and stores
  • Packages into our house brands or your private labels

Go to Market Strategy

Repackaging the food is the first step, but your repackaging partner should have a downstream network that allows fast resale of the food items. Natural Choice Foods sells to stores all over the country, including some of our own, as well as correctional and mass feeding programs. Whether you need items delivered to your stores or your distribution centers, our logistics team gets it done.

Repacking is the Solution

Repackaging food items is a win-win for food manufacturers and distributors. Not only does it maximize budgets while protecting brand integrity, but it’s also sustainable and environmentally friendly.

Due to the demand for food repackaging solutions, Natural Choice Foods is already building a second repacking facility five times the size of the current facility. Natural Choice Foods CEO Shayne Eisenga said, “This repack capability gives us an advantage regarding our relationships with food manufacturers and retailers. We’ve been offering this service to our long-time customers and need the additional capacity from the new facility. It’s exciting to be able to market a service that so few can offer.”

Contact Natural Choice Foods today to learn about food repackaging solutions or purchasing food items.