Enjoy Life Cooks Up Recipe For Double-Digit Growth, Allergy-Free
By Barney Beal, Content Director
Food allergy sufferers – and their loved ones – know how incompatible the words safe and delicious are when it comes to options for them. But instead of accepting that rule, over the past 15 plus years, Chicago-based Enjoy Life Foods has built a line of ingredients and snacks that bucks everything traditionally associated with “allergy-free foods” from the 14 most common allergens (think peanuts, tree nuts, etc.). True to its namesake, Enjoy Life has changed the lives of those who enjoy them.
Enjoy Life launched in 2002 in Chicago with 12 bakery options, and nearly every year after that, achieved a significant growth milestone – expanding to Canada, becoming the first company to receive the independent gluten-free certification from the Gluten-Free Certification Organization (GFCO), opening its own production facility, landing a spot on Inc.’s Fastest Growing Private Companies list for four years in a row, and much more. As evidence of that trajectory, after Nestle/Tollhouse, Ghirardelli and Hershey, Enjoy Life Foods holds the fourth spot in terms of chocolate chip brands.
It’s really not all that surprising then, that by 2015, Enjoy Life’s story attracted the attention of Mondelez International, purveyor of brands like Oreo, Nabisco and Cadbury. The company paid some $81 million to acquire Enjoy Life, planning to continue to operate it as a wholly owned subsidiary.
With $40 million in revenue at the time and SKUs approaching 100, QuickBooks and Fishbowl couldn’t handle the volume and complexity of transactions, which continued to climb. QuickBooks crashed frequently and Fishbowl failed to make crucial inventory information visible in real-time -- everything from expiration dates, to the ability to compare and analyze information related to production.
Read how NetSuite helped them with a solution.
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