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» NomNomNow opens production kitchen in Nashville
NomNomNow opens production kitchen in Nashville
The expansion will support business growth and help meet demand on the East Coast.
Inside the kitchen
The new 67,000-sq.-ft. facility is seven-times larger than the company's other production kitchen in Pittsburg, California. It employs 30 people, but NomNomNow expects more than 100 to be employed there by the end of 2019. The expansion comes as NomNomNow grows in both size and scope. The company recently acquired $13 million in venture funding and extended its made-to-order nutrition to include cats.
Careful selection
“We conducted a very extensive search and evaluated a half dozen different states before selecting Nashville for our second home,” said Zach Phillips, co-founder and chief operating officer, NomNomNow. “We selected Nashville because of its central location, it’s equal distance from Texas, Florida and New York. We also looked for an area that we would want to visit, one that was booming, offered us a good chance of finding qualified people as well as an available facility that met our needs.”
A fresh philosophy
NomNomNow’s main priority is freshness, which is why it schedules just-in-time ingredient delivery and sources from local vendors whenever possible. “We are able to work with some of our existing suppliers but for ingredients like fresh produce we have had to find new suppliers locally to match the freshness we require,” Phillips said. “It’s an exciting process to see the impact that we’re having not only for generating jobs for our employees but also for suppliers that we work closely with.”
Making pet food personal
NomNomNow offers personalized diets for dogs and cats, catering to their individual nutritional needs. Veterinary-formulated products are combined with an algorithm that tracks data points specific to weight, age, activity level, health related issues and other criteria to formulate and portion every meal with each pet in mind.
Just what the owner ordered
Lynn Hubbard has been hired on as general manager of the new Nashville facility, having previously worked in human-food production as the operations manager at General Mills. He said he is excited by the level of personalization and the capacity of orders NomNomNow is able to produce with high accuracy and little waste. “What’s really exciting is that we are currently producing product in a way that we believe is very scalable,” Hubbard said. “It definitely makes our process more complicated to manage but it also ties all of our operations much closer to the customer experience, which is really unique when you’re coming from a world of retail where you’re quite a few steps removed from the end user.”
Capitalizing on consumer data
NomNomNow relies on direct connection with consumers to determine individual nutritional needs of its consumers' pets. Each order is carefully designed using data, which is why each order helps the company pinpoint more specific nutritional diets. “As we sign up more customers, we are leveraging the data we collect and with our algorithm we are able to constantly improve based on feedback that we get from customers,” Phillips said. “Our technical co-founder was at Google for nine years, so he lives and breathes data. We’re very excited to take the best practices of what other companies have done with data and apply that to the pet world.”
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