Many of the brands I’ve interviewed over the years have followed a similar journey. They started making their products at home, typically in their kitchen or basement (as Nat’s Nuts did), then eventually moved up to a commercial kitchen space (or using a local church kitchen as in the cases of Molly Bz Cookies and Teddy’s Tallow). Finally, after growing distribution enough, it was time for a contract manufacturer.
In many cases, this involved hundreds of calls and dozens of meetings, trial and error and dead ends before the right contract manufacturer was found. Fortunately, in today’s digital age even the process of finding the perfect contract manufacturer has been streamlined with platforms like PartnerSlate, which bridges the gap between emerging brands and an extensive network of contract manufacturers and co-packers. And via PartnerSlate’s partnership with RangeMe, brands can leverage this platform for little or no cost.
I sat with Vincent Tseng, the CEO of PartnerSlate, during the recent ECRM Center Store Grocery Sessions in San Diego to discuss how emerging brands can determine when they are ready to take the step to a contract manufacturer, what to consider when choosing one, and how to take advantage of the PartnerSlate/RangeMe collaboration. You can watch our full video interview below.
The Agony of the Traditional Contract Manufacturer Search
Before the advent of specialized digital marketplaces, finding a co-manufacturer was an exercise in extreme persistence and high tolerance for rejection. Founders would spend weeks or months scouring the internet, cross-referencing outdated directories, and blindly dialing production facilities, hoping to encounter someone with the right machinery, available capacity, and a willingness to talk.
Tseng highlighted this painful reality by referencing a famous success story in the CPG space that perfectly encapsulates the struggle: “There’s a great episode of the podcast, How I Built This, where the CEO and founder of Simple Mills talks about her experience trying to find a co-packer,” he says. “She did cold calls to almost 150 different co-packers before she found one that was willing to take her on. And that’s a story that we hear a lot.”
The friction doesn’t just stem from finding a facility that is simply operational; it requires threading an extraordinarily narrow needle. A successful match demands precise alignment across multiple non-negotiable vectors.
“First, you have to find the right co-packer that has the right equipment,” says Tseng. “They’re in the right location. They have to have the capacity. And most importantly, they have to be somebody who actually wants to work with you.”
Furthermore, technical product specifications can introduce complex disqualifiers that early-stage founders rarely anticipate. Specific ingredients, for example, can instantly shrink a brand’s pool of options. For instance, brands utilizing ingredients like beef tallow cannot use kosher-certified co-manufacturing facilities. It is this dense web of equipment specifications, geographic constraints, batch sizing, and certification barriers that makes an unassisted co-packer search so grueling.
A Critical Mindset Shift: Vendor vs. Investor
Perhaps the most profound insight Tseng offered during the interview pertained to how brands perceive their manufacturing partners. It is a common misstep for early-stage founders to view a co-packer as a simple service vendor – a transactional entity where you insert money and extract finished goods.
This transactional mindset is deeply flawed and often leads to rejected proposals and strained business relationships. Tseng urged founders to reframe their mental model entirely. “I think one of the things that can really help you find the right co-packer is if you can put yourself in the shoes of what the co-packer is thinking,” he says. “Instead of thinking of the co-packer as a vendor, it really helps to think of them as an investor because a co-packer is ultimately there to make money.”
To understand why this is true, one must look at the economics of manufacturing. Setting up an industrial production line, even for something as ostensibly simple as a canned beverage, incurs massive operational, capital, and labor costs for the facility. The sanitation routines, equipment calibration, test runs, and sheer downtime required to transition a line from one product to another eat directly into a manufacturer’s profit margins.
“If there’s one thing that you should take away from your co-packer search is that a co-packer only really wants to work with you if they think that you can help them make money over the long term because as an emerging brand, they’re not going to make any money off of you off of their first run,” says Tseng. “Even probably after your sixth run, they probably still haven’t made their first dollar.”
Because initial short runs are effectively loss-leaders for the factory, a co-packer is taking a calculated risk on your brand’s future trajectory, Tseng points out. When you pitch a co-packer, you are not just asking to buy machine time; you are pitching a long-term business case.
If you can clearly communicate your brand’s growth proposition and demonstrate how you will eventually scale together, you become infinitely more attractive to quality manufacturers. “It’s more like a marriage because once you pick a co-packer, you’re kind of stuck with them,” says Tseng. “You can have a breakup, but it’s expensive and it’s messy.”
Commercial Kitchens vs. Co-Manufacturers: When Are You Ready?
One of the most frequent mistakes emerging brands make is attempting to jump into contract manufacturing too early. The allure of outsourcing physical production is strong – especially when founders are exhausted from manual labor. However, scaling prematurely can jeopardize a brand’s quality and financial stability.
Tseng drew a clear distinction between operating in a commercial kitchen versus partnering with a contract manufacturer:
- Commercial Kitchens: You rent shared space and general equipment (such as fryers, high-shear mixers, or commercial ovens). You can even bring in small proprietary tooling. Crucially, you retain 100% direct control over product inputs, process control, and final quality.
- Co-Manufacturers: You hand over your exact formula and specs to a third-party facility operating high-speed lines. While you may oversee trial runs, you yield day-to-day operational control to their team.
Because losing direct quality control is a major milestone, Tseng advises founders to stay in a commercial kitchen as long as humanly possible. “We actually recommend that you stay in your commercial kitchen, in your home facility as long as you can,” he says. “Even if it’s painful, even if you think, ‘Gosh, if I have to go and fry for 12 hours one more day in the commercial kitchen, it’s going to send me over the edge.’ That’s important to build up your business from all of the other angles. You have direct control over things like quality, you have direct control over inputs.”
The Financial Benchmarks for Scaling
PartnerSlate has analyzed thousands of co-packer searches to determine the exact financial benchmarks correlating with a successful manufacturing transition:
- The Target Volume: An annualized revenue of $250,000 in sales is the ideal sweet spot to begin searching for a co-manufacturer.
- The Minimum Threshold: Brands generating $100,000 annually ($8,000–$10,000 per month) can sometimes make it work, provided they have the necessary capital backed up.
- The Capital Rule: If you haven’t reached $100,000 in annual sales yet, you must be capitalized enough to pay out of pocket.
“A good rule of thumb that we like to use is if you don’t have $100,000 in sales, you should be ready to spend $100,000 in the first few months on your first few production runs,” says Tseng. “If you’re trying to really bootstrap it and you’re hoping that a co-manufacturer is going to front you the money or the lag time, you’re in for a little bit of a reality check.”
Supply Chain Shocks: Preparing for Backup Manufacturers
Operational scaling challenges don’t disappear once a brand lands its first co-packer. In fact, rapid growth, such as landing a huge retail deal, or if your product goes viral on TikTok, creates brand-new logistical headaches. When demand explodes overnight, a brand’s primary co-packer may lack the immediate line capacity to absorb the volume spike. This necessitates securing a secondary (backup) manufacturer. However, securing backup capacity introduces a delicate chicken-and-egg dilemma:
Co-packers want to see active, guaranteed purchase orders before committing facility resources, whereas brands want facility guarantees before agreeing to retail expansion.
To navigate this awkward dynamic, Tseng advises brands to have honest capacity discussions with their primary manufacturer early on to map out maximum volume limits. Concurrently, founders should initiate early relationship-building conversations with secondary suppliers so that when the time comes the groundwork is already laid.
How PartnerSlate Revolutionizes the Matchmaking Process
To eliminate the chaos of cold-calling 150 facilities, PartnerSlate built a centralized digital ecosystem that acts as a curated matchmaking engine for CPG brands and contract manufacturers.
PartnerSlate boasts an impressive operational network:
- 8,000+ Co-Manufacturers: Covering categories across food, beverage, dietary supplements, pet food, and health & beauty.
- 1,000–1,500 Active Browsers: Facilities actively looking to fill line capacity at any given time.
- 5,000+ Connections Made: Over the past five years, PartnerSlate has matched thousands of brands with production partners.
- Full Industry Spectrum: Serving early-stage startups all the way to enterprise food giants like Kraft Heinz, Mars, and Conagra.
The Step-by-Step Matchmaking Workflow
Here’s how the matching process works on the PartnerSlate platform:
- Project Listing: The brand submits detailed specifications, including ingredients, packaging parameters, specialized equipment requirements, and geographic preferences.
- Matching Advisor Review: A PartnerSlate Matching Advisor conducts a review call with the brand. They translate the brand’s culinary specs into operational language that factory plant managers want to see.
- AI-Driven Matching: PartnerSlate does not mass-blast your project to 8,000 facilities. Using proprietary AI algorithms, the platform curates a targeted list of 3 to 5 manufacturers that perfectly fit your production profile.
- Double-Blind Anonymity: Facilities review anonymous project profiles. If interested, they submit a connection request detailing why they are qualified. The brand maintains total control to accept or decline the connection request before revealing their identity.
- Seamless NDA Integration: Once accepted, an integrated, digital NDA workflow protects the brand’s proprietary formulations prior to technical discussions.
- Ongoing Advisory Support: PartnerSlate provides hands-off guidance during technical reviews to help founders weigh trade-offs between larger versus smaller facilities.
This structured approach delivers extraordinary speed. Initial manufacturer outreach typically begins within 48 hours, and brands routinely secure 3 to 7 highly qualified connection requests within a single week. “In many ways, we’re kind of like a dating website,” says Tseng. “We’re there to get you to those ideal first dates with some really great candidates. But ultimately you have to make the decision of who you want to move in with and who you want to get married to.”
The RangeMe & PartnerSlate Partnership: Unlocking Premium Benefits
To further lower barriers for scaling brands, PartnerSlate has partnered directly with RangeMe. Pro & Premium Subscribers receive unlimited free listings (Reg. $199 value per listing), and Starter subscribers received discounted rates.
For brands utilizing RangeMe to secure retail placement, this partnership creates an end-to-end bridge between retail expansion and manufacturing supply chain setup.
How to Access the Integration
Getting started takes just a few clicks:
- Log into your RangeMe Account.
- Navigate to the top navigation bar and select Tools.
- Click “Find a Co-Manufacturer” to automatically jump to PartnerSlate.
- Your RangeMe tier discounts will apply automatically to your project setup.
Final Takeaways for Emerging Brands
Scaling a CPG brand from batch production to industrial manufacturing will always be one of the most critical junctures in a company’s lifecycle. However, founders no longer need to suffer through 150 cold calls or blind web searches to find a factory floor.
By approaching manufacturers with an investor mindset, ensuring your sales volume and capital reserves are ready, and taking advantage of AI-curated matching platforms like PartnerSlate, you can build a resilient, scalable supply chain built for long-term retail success.
Editor’s note: For in-person meetings with contract manufacturers, brands can also participate in ECRM’s Contract Manufacturing Sessions. In addition, you might want to check out this RangeMe column: From Pitch to Shelf: How to Scale Your Supply Chain After Your First Big Retail Win