SHOTT Beverages Group started in 2007 with a simple idea – to create real-fruit drinks with no artificial colours, flavours or sweeteners for cafes and supermarkets around the world.
“Our brand was inspired by the healthy homemade drinks our founder grew up with, like fresh-squeezed lemon, ginger and honey,” says SHOTT CFO James Fensom.
“Everyone in the syrup business cooks their products to make them shelf stable, but heat-treating and pasteurising ingredients kills off their true flavours and nutritional benefits. We use only real ingredients and a unique process that retains their natural goodness in long-life products. That’s what makes us different.”
SHOTT’s proprietary cold processed manufacturing technique, developed by the original founders, uses traditional techniques. It has turned into a winning recipe, transforming a boutique New Zealand brand with uncompromising artisanal roots into a global powerhouse.
Today, SHOTT offers a range of 200 syrups, concentrates and beverage products to spruce up everything from traditional coffee and tea to cocktails, smoothies, desserts and salad dressings. All products are manufactured in New Zealand using seasonally sourced natural ingredients – like cranberries from Canada, cocoa from West Africa, mangoes from Queensland, ginger from Fiji, and citrus and pip fruit from New Zealand.
Behind SHOTT’s real flavour value proposition sits a highly complex operation involving customer orders, financial reporting, production planning, recipe management and quality control of thousands of ingredients. After years of relying on a myriad of manual processes and data silos to manage their business, SHOTT chose Abel to streamline and safeguard their operations while providing critical data to optimise performance.
“We picked Abel because we needed a scalable system to grow with us while maintaining visibility, control and efficiency across our global operation,” James says.
“Abel was a brilliant next step for our business. It has grown with us, adapted to our needs in ways we could afford and given us the confidence to keep growing.”
James says Abel’s automation and EDI connectivity have simplified and integrated their processes, significantly reducing manual effort, errors and paperwork while improving overall efficiency across manufacturing, warehousing and administration in New Zealand and overseas.
One example is Abel’s automated batch tracking, which helps food and beverage manufacturers meet strict compliance standards and quickly execute product recalls if anything goes wrong.
“Because we deal with raw fruit and real ingredients, we get a lot of questions about how we can ensure our products are safe and comply with international export requirements,” he says. “We’ve had systems before to do this but they were rudimentary and slow.”
With more products moving through multiple manufacturing stages and into cafes, restaurants and stores around the world, James says end-to-end supply chain visibility became increasingly critical for SHOTT.
“It was a key factor in choosing Abel. In our industry, we need to track every ingredient, every recipe and every variance used in our products from the farmhouse gate to the finished product at point of sale. Abel gives us that level of traceability, control and assurance.”
Consolidated reporting has been another big improvement. With separate manufacturing and distribution companies in New Zealand and operations in Australia, Korea, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States, James says the need for visibility across multiple entities is vitally important.
James says Abel provides a clearer view of performance across the entire group, automatically eliminates internal margins and provides a trusted source of information for strategic decision-making.
SHOTT’s path to success hasn’t always gone to plan. James points out that they’ve stumbled across many opportunities and capitalised on changing consumer habits – like South Korea’s zest for colourful fruit spritzers and younger drinkers’ thirst for cold drinks instead of traditional hot drinks – because they embrace an agile and open-minded approach to expansion.
James says this includes a lean operating model overseas, investing in small teams with local market knowledge and leveraging the power of BI and Abel reporting to aggregate and analyse data to identify trends and improve profitability.
“If our model is going to succeed, we need reliable data and analytics. These Abel and BI reporting tools have been a big game changer for us. I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t drill down into our daily sales numbers. One of our major growth steps will be advancing and fine-tuning these tools so that little differences we didn’t care about in the past now become important when you multiply them over large volumes.”
Another way SHOTT stays smart and lean is by understanding the true cost of every product. With Abel, James and his team can track component costs all the way through to finished goods, including freight, overheads, country-specific pricing, currency costs, retail channels and customer agreements.
“If nothing else, we realise now how much uncertainty was built into our old manual systems. They were never more than best guesses. Now, having accurate factual information at our fingertips at any time, we know exactly how we’re performing.”
About 100 staff now use Abel across the business, a testament to how easy and efficient the system is, James says. “For any business that’s stepped beyond the needs of basic systems, Abel is a great choice. We didn’t want a system that was so big we couldn’t operate, or was too hard for our people to use.”
“Another powerful thing we love about Abel is that you can talk to them and they listen,” he says. “We know the team like family and can always pick up the phone and speak with someone to get answers fast. They take your call, they know their product and they don’t leave you waiting for hours. How many companies do that anymore?”
James says SHOTT continues to work with Abel to find new ways to improve their business.
“Every business has bits of uniqueness and Abel is flexible enough to tweak and change little things that make a big difference to us,” he says. “Abel enables us to have our answer for our system and for our business.”