IRVINE, Calif – During its annual Partners’ Meeting in late February, Golden State Foods (GSF), one of the largest diversified suppliers to the foodservice and retail industries, recognized its Liquid Products North America team with the company’s prestigious Innovation Award for its development and implementation of a transformative sauce portion-dispensing solution. Piloted in partnership with GSF customer McDonald’s and its packaging supplier Sealed Air, the innovative back-of-house restaurant solution also earned the Association for Dressings and Sauces (ADS) 2021 Package of the Year Award for the portion-dispensing pouches that reduce primary packaging by up to 85 percent, among other efficiencies, savings, and sustainability benefits.
“We’re so thrilled to bring this exciting solution to life, as we’ve innovated together with McDonald’s, our customer partner of more than 65 years, around a shared vision for the future of sauce-dispensing technology,” said Eric Treon, group vice president, global McDonald’s business unit . “Our trusted, values-driven partnership with McDonald’s and longstanding, collaborative relationship with Sealed Air enabled GSF to successfully pioneer this innovative solution in our customer’s U.S. restaurants and prove its potential as a revolutionary innovation for the global quick service restaurant industry.”
Pairing hermetically sealed, food-safe condiment pouches with a custom dispensing unit, the award-winning system consistently allots precisely portioned sauce onto every sandwich served. Its many benefits for QSRs include higher product yields, cost savings, equipment simplification, freight efficiencies, decreasing storage footprints, optimizing back-of-house operations, reducing waste to landfill, and rendering reused squeeze bottles and corrugated packaging obsolete.
Leading up to the solution’s 2021 nationwide rollout to all U.S. McDonald’s restaurants, GSF persevered through 15 years of iterations, supplier partners, and rounds of field testing to achieve the optimal portion-dispensing system. Focused on maintaining the highest standards of food safety, quality, and operational excellence to support the customer’s success, the GSF team meticulously cultivated and validated a solution with applications above and beyond its initial implementation.
“What began and was proven in the U.S. to improve efficiencies, reduce waste, heighten sustainability, and ultimately reduce cost has steadily gained confidence throughout the McDonald’s system as the desired solution that will benefit owner/operators around the globe,” said Hope Bentley, senior director, strategic sourcing, McDonald’s USA.
Poised for international expansion into Canada and Asia Pacific this year, the portion-dispensing solution will soon serve up reliably rationed sauce in QSR meals on multiple continents. With the capability to support a variety of pouch sizes and condiment viscosities, the acclaimed sauce server offers enhanced flexibility and seamless interchangeability for QSR’s limited-time product promotions.
“I’m so proud of our innovative GSF teams and their effective collaborations with our customer to provide ground-breaking solutions, such as the revolutionary sauce-dispensing solution,” said Mark Wetterau, GSF chairman and chief executive officer. “This novel advancement and the other elite innovations that earned recognition throughout the past seven decades have directly resulted from the synergistic alignment of values between GSF, our outstanding QSR customers, and our industry collaborators. GSF’s steadfast culture of innovation encourages our teams to actively pursue continuous improvement, take strategic risks, persevere through setbacks, and drive the innovation process forward for the mutual success of all partners engaged in these ambitious initiatives.”
To celebrate the company’s thriving tradition of innovation, GSF instituted its Innovation Award in 2000 as an esteemed commendation for teams that demonstrates creativity and ingenuity to move the company and its customers forward. Awarded exclusively when innovative achievements warrant special recognition, past Innovation Award honorees have included:
· The Liquid Products North America team, which earned the 2016 award for innovating a new ketchup-processing methodology.
· The GSF Australia team, which received the honor in 2008 for being the first to implement the latest generation of optical-sorting technology, leading the way in defect elimination.
· The Quality Custom Distribution (QCD) team, which won in 2007 for creating and establishing GSF’s growing custom logistics subsidiary that services foodservice distribution customers.
· The GSF Protein Products team, which achieved the Innovation Award twice in 2000 and 2002 for their hamburger patty manufacturing advancements.
Reinforcing its continued commitment to innovation, GSF established a strategically located network of 10 global Innovation Centers, with future plans to expand into new international locations. Serving as food innovation hubs, GSF Innovation Centers replicate full-scale food processing production systems for efficient commercialization to support customers worldwide.
Fostering future innovation, the GSF University (the company’s continuous learning program) will launch an “Inspiring Innovation” course to further engage worldwide associates in GSF’s innovation culture. In addition to the award-winning sauce-dispensing solution, the forward-looking course spotlights ongoing GSF innovations like leveraging blockchain technology, which garnered acclaim from the Financial Times and earned a 2020 Innovator of the Year Award from the Orange County Business Journal. Encouraging GSF associates to innovate in all areas of influence, the course also features inspiring community support initiatives like the pandemic-prompted bottled milk donation initiative that won a 2020 Best in Biz Award for Most Innovative Company of the Year.
About Golden State Foods
Golden State Foods (GSF), one of the largest diversified suppliers to the foodservice and retail industries, feeds 1 billion people every day! Headquartered in Irvine, California, the multi-national company is values-based with proven performance in superior quality, innovation, and customer service. Established in 1947, GSF and its family of companies currently service 100+ leading brands (125,000+ restaurants/stores in more than 50 countries) from its 50+ locations on five continents. Its core businesses include: manufacturing of liquid products, protein, produce, dairy/aseptic, and provides custom distribution services. The company employs approximately 6,000 associates and is 100 percent management-owned and run. Golden State Foods also operates a national non-profit organization, the GSF Foundation.
