5:00 AM — The Receiving Dock
Production days at our co-packer start before sunrise. The receiving dock opens at 5am to accept the day's ingredients. By the time the production team arrives at 6am, the bison protein concentrate, tallow, date paste, and secondary ingredients have been logged in and placed in the staging area adjacent to the production floor.
Every incoming lot is scanned against the purchase order and verified against the certificate of analysis from the supplier. Anything that doesn't match goes back on the truck. We've had two rejections in the past 18 months—one for a hemp seed lot with higher-than-spec moisture, one for a date paste lot where the sugar density was out of range.
6:30 AM — Ingredient Conditioning
Tallow arrives solid. It needs to be brought to the right temperature (around 90°F) to flow into the mixing system. The conditioning tanks are heated jacketed vessels that bring the tallow to temperature gradually, without scorching.
Date paste is weighed out from refrigerated storage and allowed to come to room temperature. Cold date paste doesn't flow correctly through the depositing system.
8:00 AM — Mix Start
The mixing system combines the dry ingredients (protein concentrate, hemp seeds, tapioca starch, cocoa powder for the dark chocolate variants) with the liquid ingredients (tallow, date paste) in a specific sequence. Liquid ingredients go in first, dry ingredients are added with progressive mixing speed.
Total mix time for a batch: 22 minutes. Under-mixing produces a crumbly bar. Over-mixing produces a bar that's too dense. The team runs a grab sample at 18 minutes and another at 22 minutes to verify consistency.
9:30 AM — Depositing and Forming
The mixed batter is deposited into bar-shaped molds via a semi-automated depositing line. Each mold holds 12 bars. The deposited bars go through a cooling tunnel (set to 45°F) for 8 minutes to set the tallow before demolding.
Quality control here: weight check on every 10th bar. Weight tolerance is ±3g. Anything outside that range triggers a line stop and equipment check.
11:00 AM — Wrapping
Bars run through a flow-wrapping machine that seals each bar in an oxygen-barrier film. The machine runs at approximately 80 bars per minute. An operator monitors the seal integrity on random samples every 20 minutes.
After wrapping, the bars move to the secondary packaging line where they're loaded into branded cartons (12 bars per box, 6 boxes per case).
1:00 PM — Metal Detection and Case Packing
Every bar passes through a metal detector calibrated to the standard GFSI specification. Any triggered bar is quarantined and manually inspected. We have had zero confirmed metal contamination events in our production history.
Cases are packed, taped, labeled with the production lot number and best-by date, and placed on pallets.
3:00 PM — Finished Goods
By mid-afternoon, the day's production is palletized, shrink-wrapped, and staged in the finished goods area. The production record—including all lot numbers, QC results, and weights—is filed in the quality management system.
The pallet will ship to our fulfillment center within 48 hours. From there, it's your bar.