GIANTS Snacks

The Company: About GIANTS Snacks

GIANTS Snacks has been around for almost 30 years, and their success is well-established in the sunflower seed game and beyond. The Schuler family, founders of GIANTS Snacks, have a proven record of innovation and entrepreneurship going all the way back to the late 1950’s. Pioneers in the sunflower agriculture movement, their early concepts and harvests grew into a vertically integrated international operation that puts healthy salty, sweet, roasted snacks at the fingertips of grocery shoppers, road-trippers, and ballpark revelers worldwide.

The Situation: Inventory Management

But the story of success doesn’t end there. The Schulers know how to elevate their game, and they knew that improving their inventory management would move them up to the big leagues. So in 2021, Tom Schuler started shopping around for an ERP solution.

The Solution: Wherefour ERP

Reliable Inventory Tracking for Expansion

Kristen Mumm, Production Manager at GIANTS Snacks, has been with the Schulers since 2000 and she witnessed the search process. ​“Tom was comparing platforms and chose Wherefour based on its ease of use and its bang for buck,” says Mumm. ​“Before, we were tracking everything manually using pen and paper. Wherefour has improved every aspect of our business. It’s so easy to use, it’s worth every penny we spend on it, and it has given us a new layer of confidence in the data.”
 

GIANTS has been experiencing continual growth since its beginning and using Wherefour coincided with a huge growth spurt. Last year GIANTS embarked on a major building expansion wherein they more than doubled their footprint. Mumm recounts, ​“We wouldn’t have been able to tackle our expansion project without an inventory tracking system that we could trust. Warehouse and production facility construction is a major undertaking. Ingredients, supplies, and finished goods are all in a necessary state of upheaval, and I couldn’t imagine having done it without a cloud-based platform that I could trust. Our old methods of pen and paper left me needing to see and touch items to trust that they were there. With Wherefour, I have full confidence that if quantities are in the system, then I know that they’re on the shelf… wherever that shelf is,” she says.

The Results: Wherfour ERP Implementation Benefits

Meeting Demand From Shops to Stadiums

GIANTS is committed to safety and quality, and Wherefour’s streamlined traceability function aligns with that commitment. Mumm says that their freshness pledge has them turning over their entire warehouse inventory every week. In this fast-paced facility, Wherefour’s cloud-based accessibility is priceless. ​“With our primary product lines – sunflower seeds, cashews, pistachios, corn, and pumpkin seeds – moving through at high-volume bulk runs, we are thrilled to have a system that can keep up with us. Inventory management is central to any operation, especially one like ours that has so much loss due to seed casings and shells running through machinery.”

As a producer of individual snack-sized bags and being the official partner of MLB teams such as the Minnesota Twins, the Colorado Rockies, and the San Francisco Giants, GIANTS sees a large variance in its production runs. Sometimes order fulfillment is small for mom and pop retailers, and sometimes it’s big enough to feed a 50,000 capacity arena. ​“Wherefour gives us the confidence to process and track big and small orders with ultimate confidence every time,” says Mumm. ​“And we’re so excited about what the future holds. Now that our facility is bigger and Wherefour is part of our team, I have no doubt that we’ll be able to tackle every opportunity that comes our way.”