Herr Foods

Herr Foods is a snack food manufacturer headquartered in Nottingham, Pennsylvania, with approximately 1,600 employees. Senior Vice President of Manufacturing and Supply Chain Jere Thomas and his leadership team set a multi-year goal to maximize bottom-line contributions and strengthen cash positioning over a three- to five-year horizon. To get there, Herr Foods wanted to establish a formal Continuous Improvement culture that reached beyond isolated projects and became part of how both the Manufacturing and Supply Chain teams operated every day.

While Herr’s team had strong operational experience, the company needed a structured way to identify and eliminate waste at scale. Leadership saw three specific gaps. First, they needed a shared vocabulary and toolkit for Lean and Continuous Improvement that could be applied consistently by 30 to 45 operators, supervisors, and staff across manufacturing. Second, they needed a foundational understanding of modern supply chain best practices for the procurement and planning team, so that demand planning, supplier management, and inventory decisions could be tightened. Third, and most important, they needed stronger alignment between Manufacturing and Supply Chain so that procurement decisions and plant-floor activity moved in the same direction toward bottom-line improvement.

Herr Foods needed a partner who could train both groups, certify a core set of internal change agents, and coach projects through to measurable results.

DVIRC partnered with Herr Foods on a phased Integrated Process Improvement engagement delivered over roughly nine months in 2024, led by Alan Shell, DVIRC’s Senior Advanced Manufacturing Specialist and Six Sigma Master Black Belt, and Nico de Sousa Serro, DVIRC’s Lean/Continuous Improvement Content Expert.

The program ran in five phases:

1. Kickoff and message development. DVIRC worked with Herr leadership to shape the overarching message delivered to associates, ensuring alignment with current and future business goals before any training began.
2. Principles of Lean. Roughly 30 to 45 members of the Manufacturing team and 8 members of the Supply Chain team completed four days of foundational Lean training, broken into half-day sessions to keep the floor staffed throughout.
3. Project Selection and Change Agent Development. DVIRC worked with Herr leadership to identify high-impact target projects and prepare the internal change agents who would lead them.
4. Certification and Supply Chain 101. Eight Manufacturing team members completed the seven-day Lean Tools and Essentials Certification, covering A3 Thinking, Value Stream Mapping, Root Cause Analysis, Single Minute Exchange of Dies, 5S, and a final project report-out. In parallel, eight Supply Chain members completed a four-part Supply Chain 101 series covering SCM principles, demand planning, supplier management, sales and operations planning, and KPI development, followed by Kaizen facilitation.
5. Sustainability Coaching. Six days of follow-on coaching, evenly split between Manufacturing and Supply Chain, supported second-round project selection and carried the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle through to completion.

In the post-project NIST MEP impact survey, Jere Thomas reported measurable outcomes across sales, cost, employment, and investment categories:

• $500,000 in new sales
• $500,000 in retained sales
• $250,000 in cost savings
• $500,000 in costs avoided
• 5 jobs retained
• $1.025 million reinvested into the business, including $500,000 in information systems, $250,000 in plant and equipment, $250,000 in new products and processes, and $25,000 in workforce practices

Thomas credited DVIRC specifically with helping Herr Foods pursue growth opportunities, reduce costs, and advance sustainability goals. He gave the engagement a Net Promoter Score of 10 out of 10, citing DVIRC’s staff expertise and deep knowledge of Continuous Improvement as the reasons he chose to work with the team.