All the Right INGREDIENTS

Dairy Field, Nov 2004 by Dudlicek, James

Passion of its people helps make Leprino Foods a winning company.

Who wouldn't enjoy their job in a place like this, surrounded by freshly baked pizzas at every turn?

And while it's true that a huge number of the pizzas sold in the United States are covered with mozzarella perfected in the labs at Denver-based Leprino Foods Co., the company which spends about $10 million annually on research and technical development - means much more to the dairy industry. Leprino continues to explore the functional potential of cheese as well as the rapidly growing arena for whey products.

It's obvious that Leprino - with the world's largest mozzarella factory and annual sales in excess of $2 billion - is doing something right. And the credit for getting it right, according to the company's senior management, goes to the collective workforce of Leprino Foods.

"We want people in this organization who are excited to come to work excited about the opportunity, excited about the job they do, excited about the contribution they can make, energized and passionate about doing the right things right the first time," says president Larry Jensen. "By and large, that's the kind of people we have, that's the kind of people who are successful here, and that's the kind of energy that propels our success."

Those are the kind of people Jensen and his management team say should be most honored by Leprino's selection as Dairy Field's 2004 Processor of the Year.

Leprino Quality

The company believes in a results-oriented culture fostered by principled leadership, strong management disciplines, superior technology and passionate commitment to the concept of Leprino Quality. It's a multifaceted corporate ethos that preaches continuous improvement and doing things right in the areas of product quality, customer service, innovation, people, ethics and citizenship.

"I've worked for Leprino for 30 years, and if you don't have the quality, the R&D doesn't matter," says Richard Barz, senior vice president of quality assurance, research and development. "We start and end every day with where we stand on satisfying quality."

And there's little doubt Leprino's food scientists are laboring tirelessly, in test kitchens at the plant level as well as the mam corporate R&D facility, to deliver customers exactly what they need.

"The end result of our success is, for the customer's finished product whether it's pizza or a nutrition bar how our product performs and what value does it bring to that finished product," Barz says. "It's really necessary for us to have a close relationship with customers to allow us to work with their final food product. We're evaluating a specific need they may have and doing it under their cooking conditions. You have to have a close relationship with a customer to do that."

Part of that relationship is truly listening to customers, which include many national foodservice venues including the top pizzeria chains, along with other major food companies. "We understand what our customers are telling us about the unique challenges they have. We try to be very proactive when it comes to understanding product application in our customer's environment," Jensen says. "It's a very important part of our success - filling our customers' needs and going beyond their expectations."

That relentless pursuit of perfection gives Leprino a great edge in a highly competitive marketplace against peers like Land O'Lakes, Foremost, Saputo and Alto. "Certainly at the point-of-sale level, we think our products are of the highest quality," says Bob Boynton, senior vice president of marketing and sales. "Our products are engineered to address unique functionalities of the end viser."

To that end, the R&D folks seek to enhance an end user's understanding of how all the ingredients work together to create the finished product that possesses the attributes they seek, Barz says. "We work very hard to broaden the perspective that a product development effort is more than sending out a sample to be evaluated," he says. "You can't look at the individual components by themselves. Once we get over that hurdle, then it becomes a technical challenge. But a good R&D guy will say there's nothing you can't solve."

Furthermore, the great strides Leprino has made in technology and plant efficiency have led to advantageous economies of scale that allow competitive pricing, Boynton says. "In the longer-term sense, we are going to be bringing forth the new, better, more innovative cheese products over the years to a much greater extent than our competitors," he says. "Part of that is because of our singular focus on Italian cheese and whey and looking for all the niches where those products can perform. Our emphasis on research and development, continuous improvement in our factories and offering customers new generations of products that are more functional than their predecessors - often at lower cost than their predecessors - is why customers ought to buy from us and stay with us in the long term."