From raw material to finished product

True Gum started with an idea that grew between the two friends Peter and Morten. One afternoon they sat and got to talking about what chewing gum actually contains. They quickly found out that regular chewing gum contains plastic, which is also found in car tires and glue. The idea developed into an idea to produce plastic-free chewing gum, and quickly the two became four; including friends Zabrina and Jacob.

Today the chewing gum is a well-known brand and can now be found in most supermarkets. In the beginning, the company used a simple excel sheet to keep track of the orders, but they soon found out that it was too unmanageable to manage production with.

According to Tobias Bo Jensen, COO and operations manager at True Gum, the company's main criteria for a production management system were a competitive price and integration to e-conomic. We have to say that Tracelink was the perfect match. In 2018, True Gum started using the system to get:

• Efficient production.
• A more accessible traceability.
• A better overview of their orders.

The four founders discovered that it is possible to replace the plastic part of the chewing gum with a sap from South American trees. The friends set out to spend hours experimenting at home in the kitchen in Copenhagen and after almost 500 attempts, they found the right recipe. For the first 16 months, the chewing gum was cut out by hand, but the small kitchen soon became too small. However, none of the four friends had any experience in food production.

In May 2017, the friends participated in Düsseldorf's machine fair, which gave them much of the knowledge they needed to find production equipment and get a handle on the processes the chewing gum must go through. Most of the machines at the fair, on the other hand, were huge and far beyond the friends' budget. Instead, the green entrepreneurs contacted a few second-hand dealers around Europe, and soon True Gum acquired its first production equipment. The decommissioned machines were refurbished and breathed new life into the production of the plastic-free chewing gum. The friends got help from Danish machine manufacturers to implement the machines and adjust them along the way, and slowly True Gum built a factory from scratch.

As the company grew and received more orders, the simple Excel Sheet True Gum used to keep track of production became too unmanageable to handle both orders and inventory. Therefore, the company started looking for a better alternative that was within their budget as a startup company. Fortunately, they quickly found Tracelink, which helped implement the system in True Gum's food production.

Managing stock, traceability and quality assurance

"When we started with Tracelink, we only had a few raw materials and a few finished products", says Tobias. In the beginning, they produced around 20 kg of chewing gum per day, but now "we can produce up to 1000 kg per day," says Tobias.

Today, the company produces several different products, all of which need high quality assurance and full traceability. To ensure that there is control over traceability in production, True Gum uses Tracelinks Warehouse management with batch. This ensures that they can easily track which raw materials have been used for which productions. In this way, the finished products can always be traced back to the exact batch from which the raw materials used originate from.

Out in production, the orders are entered into Tracelink using Order templates and the raw materials are linked from the warehouse so that the ingredients can be traced on the order. When the finished goods are ready to be sent, they are picked via Tracelink's app, and at the same time the production employees make sure that the accurate goods are picked from the physical warehouse. With Integration to e-conomic, the company has complete control over invoices and accounts, which are linked directly to the orders in Tracelink.

When working with food, there are certain quality standards that must be meet. That is why True Gum has complete control of their quality control of the raw materials: "When we receive our raw materials, we quality-assure the receipt before the raw materials are entered into Tracelink," says Tobias. With Tracelink's features for Quality control, this process has become much easier for employees to handle.

There is no doubt that True Gum, as a rapidly growing startup company, sooner or later had needed an IT solution to manage the production and traceability of their food. That they found Tracelink so early in the process, we can only say, is luck for both parties. With Tracelink's order and inventory management, it has become much easier and faster for True Gum to keep track of order quantities, traceability of raw materials and quality assurance of the finished goods.

April 2022