How to start an edible cutlery business?

May 19, 2023

Kartikeya Rana

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The article talks about the manufacturing setup and production line required to setup an edible cutlery business. An AnyLogic model is also created to support the operations management theories used and simulate the manufacturing process.

Plastic cutleries are used by everyone and everywhere, from office to outdoor gathering. People use them in cafés, restaurants, parties, picnics, schools, trekking, and even in homes either to save time or because of absence of alternate solutions. Every day Americans use more than 100 million single use plastic utensils which take more than 1000 years to decompose and release harmful chemicals into the earth. Similar usage trends can also be seen in other countries such as India, China, Southeast Asia, and Japan. In July 2021, EU imposed ban on single use plastic cutlery in the markets in EU member states. The ban will reduce the plastic usage but there should be substitutes available in the market to change the human behavior and decrease the dependency on plastic cutlery.

Edible cutlery is an easily replaceable solution of plastic cutlery. The edible cutlery market was at $24.8M in 2018 and is expected to grow to $56.9M by 2026. The cutleries are made from plant-based ingredients such as wheat flour, rice flour, and sorghum flour. Being manufactured from natural ingredients, the cutleries are vegan and environment friendly and can be eaten by the person after the use. If not consumed, the user can dispose the cutleries; thereafter either animals can consume them, or they will degrade within 2–3 days without releasing any harmful chemicals.

According to England government, each person uses 37 single use plastic cutlery every year (BBC, 2021). Ireland government banned use on single use plastic cutlery from July 3, 2021; therefore, plastic spoons and forks cannot be supplied or sold in Irish market, which creates a huge demand for alternative solutions (gov.ie, 2021). According to Drinkware Ireland report, there are 7,193 pubs and 2,406 restaurants, and over 128,000 students in Ireland, which are the potential consumers of edible cutlery. Apart from Ireland and UK, North America is another prominent market due to trend of veganism and rise in consumer awareness about health and fitness.

EatYourCutlery is planning to build a manufacturing plant in Ireland, with monthly manufacturing target of 160,000 edible spoons.

Four raw materials are required to manufacture edible spoons, i.e., sorghum flour, rice flour, wheat flour, and water. Manufacturing process begins with mixing all the raw materials into a dough. The dough is rested for about 6–10 minutes to settle the gluten. Afterward, the dough is converted into thin sheets. The sheets are placed on spoon molds and sent for baking process. After baking, the manufactured spoons are cooled for 5–10 minutes and then packed into a box. There are three machines required for the manufacturing process:

Figure 7 shows different processes involved in setting up the manufacturing plant.

Four factory workers will be required to handle the manufacturing, each responsible for kneading, sheeting, baking, and packaging process. One floor manager will be hired to overlook the whole manufacturing process.

Raw materials Supplier:Three suppliers of each raw material were selected for initial screening (complete list is present in Appendix). Based upon cost and lead time (where cost is most important than lead time), following suppliers are selected for each raw material:

Packaging box suppliers:The edible cutlery is packaged in paper boxes, each box containing 25 spoons. Following are the suppliers available for packaging box:

The required box is out of stock in STP packaging company. PR Packaging and The Cardboard Box Company, both provides delivery within 2 days. Therefore, The Cardboard Box Company is selected as the supplier for the packaging box.

Based upon above calculations, order quantities for sorghum flour, wheat flour, rice flour, and packaging box are 600, 500, 500, 2000 respectively.

Assuming, the initial inventory is three times the order quantity. Two weeks (10 production days) time is used to calculate the safety stock. Table 4 shows the reorder inventory level and reorder point for the next ordering next batch of raw materials, i.e., a new order should be placed when the respective material inventory level depletes to the reorder inventory level.

The manufacturing process is calculated based upon number of sheets produced in a day. Table 5 shows processing time at different workstations to manufacture one sheet. One dough sheet has 25 spoons.

Daily manufacturing target:

According to capacity and bottleneck analysis, Process 5 (baking) has the longest processing time (20 minutes). Therefore, process 5 is the bottleneck in the system.

In process 5, one sheet is put on one baking mold and sent for baking. To remove the bottleneck at process 5, multiple baking molds can be used in parallel to bake the sheets, and it will reduce the processing time at process 5.

Hence, 14 molds are required to bake the sheets. It will reduce the processing time at process 5 from 20 minutes to 1.42 minutes.

Similarly, process 2 (dough rest) and process 6 (sheet cooldown) are the bottlenecks in the system. In both the processes, there is no machine or operator involved. Multiple storage spaces are required to complete the process and they will reduce the processing time.

According to line balancing:

A stage total processing time cannot exceed the cycle time (1.5 minutes). Figure 7 shows the distribution of different processes in six stages.

According to Little's law:

In this manufacturing plant, the interarrival time between raw materials is 1 minute.

It means, there will be 46 items in the manufacturing line in any given hour.

Overall Equipment Effectiveness:

The manufacturing plant will run for 5 days a week, 10 hours a day.

Figure 10 shows the Anylogic model created to simulate the manufacturing process. From the model, it can be confirmed that the required daily target of 320 sheets (8000 spoons) can be manufactured.

The worker utilization of each process is 55% (kneading), 68% (sheeting), 68% (baking), and 78% (packaging). Also, the machines are not fully utilized, therefore, increase in production can be looked at in the future. Table 7 shows the monthly and yearly production cost required for manufacturing edible spoons. The lease of manufacturing plant and co-founder salary are not included in the cost calculation.

According to research on consumer purchase behavior, 66% consumers are willing to pay more for sustainable products (Nielsen, 2015). Due to imposed restrictions and increased environmental awareness amongst the public, edible cutlery can replace single-use plastic cutlery. The edible cutlery is both high in nutritional value and environmentally friendly. It can be manufactured at a plastic spoon rate when produced in high volume. The anylogic model shows that the company can start manufacturing with three machines and four workers and quickly achieve the targets.

BBC, 2021. Government to ban single-use plastic cutlery. [Online] Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-58360064[Accessed 22 April 2022].

gov.ie, 2021. Single-use Plastics. [Online] Available at: https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/ef24a-single-use-plastics/[Accessed 18 April 2022].

Nielsen, 2015. The Sustainability Imperative. [Online] Available at: https://www.nielsen.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/04/Global20Sustainability20Report_October202015.pdf[Accessed 28 April 2022].

Raw Material Supplier:

Congratulations on making it to the end. Hope you enjoyed the article and learned something about operations management and how it is used in designing a manufacturing line.

This was my submission for individual assignment in operations management module (MEEN41100) at University College Dublin. I thank my professor Nikolaos Papakostas for all the guidance and learning he provided during the course work.

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