Best Harvest Utilizes Financial Opportunities to Restructure Manufacturing Operations

What are the biggest challenges you face as a business?

As a commercial bakery, we bake hamburger buns at the rate of about 3,000 dozen an hour and produce products for some of the biggest franchises in the world. With high product volumes and customers with constantly changing needs, machinery plays a critical role in us being able to stay competitive in a niche space centered around a commodity. It is also essential to attracting and retaining talent. Skilled workers in our industry are looking to gain experience with new systems and evolve their skills.

How did Enterprise help solve these challenges?

We began by separating the bakery from the land we were operating on. Enterprise was able to offer amortizations that matched the true life of our fixed assets and patient capital through participation in the New Market Tax Credit financing program. These adjustments provided very competitive interest rates and boosted our overall cash position. We also increased our equipment line of credit, ultimately improving our cash flow and giving us the ability to acquire new equipment. When we first engaged Enterprise, they toured our facility and worked to understand our 90-minute flour-to-bun process. They not only understood our short-term needs based our financial statements, but embraced our long-term aspirations and the capital needs to achieve them.

What is the impact on your business?

Due to Enterprise’s understanding of our business and willingness to be flexible, we’ve been able to remain agile even as we grow in size. We restructured our entire organization from a manufacturing point of view. We’re able to maximize our resources and, in turn, have experienced increased efficiencies and greater run speeds. Implementing new equipment has also allowed our employees to focus on higher level activities and stay trained in new processes and technology.