Sensient’s Customer-First On-Time Delivery Commitment

Shrinking Project Lifecycles Stress Importance of On-Time Ingredient Delivery

The food and beverage industry is constantly evolving to meet customer demands and keep up with the changing marketplace. Grocery shopping today, consumers are consistently seeing new trends and concepts in store that can attract attention – successfully. Across Europe, independent on whether it is in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, or Poland, consumers love to explore new flavors and try limited editions: a minimum of 3 out of 4 consumers are open to those new suggestions, as a Mintel 2018 study on attitudes towards flavors demonstrates.

Companies are thus innovating faster to stay ahead. Product development time is often under pressure to be able to capitalize quickly on current trends or food fads. As project lifecycles shrink, on-time delivery of ingredient samples and orders is critical. To meet formulation deadlines quicker, food scientists will require tighter turnaround times on ingredient solutions; the same goes for final orders for scale-up production. Ingredient suppliers will need to emphasize agility, quality, and consistency to cater to food manufacturers focusing on faster innovation. In order to best support, Sensient’s focus is to get the right high-performing solution out the door as quickly as possible.

Vertical Integration’s Impact on On-Time Delivery

Unlike colour suppliers who mainly buy and resell premade products, Sensient manufactures over 90% of the colour solutions at a Sensient facility. Similar to a food manufacturer, we know how detrimental a late ingredient component can be to a scheduled production process.

Our Global Agronomy Program enables us to add value via an integrated supply chain on many plant-based colours. This minimizes some of the challenges like supply disruption and price inflation that can be associated with horizontal supply chains.

Sensient’s Commitment to Meet Customer Expectations

Our entire business is customer-focused. We measure ourselves on late delivery to customer request, rather than dictating to our customers what their delivery date should be and forcing them to follow our structure. We are constantly evolving to better serve our customers. There is no “perfect” in our eyes, as our program is always improving. Our two major focus areas are:

Delivering on-time to customer expectations

Offering competitive solutions that meet our customers’ needs

To cater to diverse delivery needs, we offer a variety of sample options from immediate, ready-to-ship colour solutions to more custom, made-to-order samples. Our minimum on-time delivery expectation is 95%, and we challenge ourselves to meet this threshold to alleviate inventory and shipping costs for food manufacturers.

If Sensient ever falls below the 95% level, it’s flagged in our system and tracked for immediate improvement.

Internally, we call our on-time delivery and customer satisfaction strategy “Running the Trains on Time”; it is a metaphor for operating business smoothly and effectively to best service food manufacturers.

We choose a commitment to service. In doing so, Sensient always offers full transparency on this topic, and if you are a current customer and interested in seeing your on-time delivery report, we are happy to provide our records.

If you have any questions about Sensient’s delivery or sampling policies, please feel free to reach out here.