Stop getting played by manufacturers 🚩(here's how)

Contract manufacturing is chaos... here's how you calm the chaos.

I chatted with S’NOODS founder Lauryn Bodden last week and she said something about how easy it is for first-time or early stage founders to get “lost in the sauce” when it comes to contract manufacturing and MOQs… and her story really got my wheels turning.

(So much so that my “notes” turned into this unofficial guide to making sense of the madness of contract manufacturing.)

When ecommerce brands start scaling—especially fast-growing DTC brands—they often hit a messy middle: demand is up, internal capacity is maxed out, and it’s time to bring in the big guns.

Enter: contract manufacturing (CM).

But this is where things get dicey—because this process? It’s chaos. 🚩

That “sauce” that Lauryn mentioned getting lost in? I think I can break it down to the ingredients. So here’s my take on all the places founders usually get stuck—and how to navigate it so that you can go back to focusing on the other kinds of sauce (special sauce!) that your business needs to win and dazzle your customers.

Too Many Options, Zero Filters

You Google “co-packer for [insert category]” and get buried in a list of 200 names, half of which look like they haven’t updated their websites since 2008. Without centralized data or a matchmaking framework, brands waste weeks just trying to sort signal from noise.

No Visibility Into Capacity, MOQs, or Lead Times

Most manufacturers don’t publicly list:

• Their minimums

• Current line availability

• Ingredient sourcing models

• Fill formats or certifications

So you’re making decisions based on vague PDFs and slow email chains. You can’t compare apples to apples… because you can’t even find the apples. 🫠

Cost Transparency Is a Black Box

Pricing is elusive. Brands are either over-quoted because they seem “green,” or underquoted just to get them in the door.

Without visibility into line efficiency, setup costs, freight implications, and yields, margins get annihilated before the first unit ships.

Even if you find someone who can make your product, that doesn’t mean they should. A manufacturer used to 50k-unit runs is not the right person to babysit your 5k test batch!

Misaligned incentives lead to:

• Missed deadlines

• Inconsistent QC

• Cost creep

• Burned relationships

Overindexing on Certifications

Yes, being USDA Organic and SQF-certified matters, but it’s not the whole story. Some brands get dazzled by credentials and overlook more practical factors:

• Line changeover flexibility

• Forecasting communication

• Ingredient substitution protocols

Devastatingly, fancy badges don’t fix bad workflows!

Okay, So How Do I Hire The Best Fit??

The right CM is big enough to teach you things, but not so big that you’re just another line item.

When you’re looking to scale beyond your kitchen, you have to be careful not to get dazzled by the options—you want someone scrappy who will work with you.

I feel like the right-sized manufacturing partner for an early-scaling CPG brand has some of the right “bullet points on their resume,” but then has these other really important startuppy things.

• They understand startup scrappiness

• Can handle smaller MOQs but are built for scale

• Offer flexible scheduling or short runs for testing

• Are willing to iterate with you

• Are super super* communicative

*DO NOT IGNORE BAD COMMUNICATION FROM A PARTNER, IT WILL NOT GET BETTER. (It’s possible I learned this from experience.)

This is almost like finding the right employees at a startup, too. Like if you look at that list above, it’s exactly the same as someone you’d want working full-time with you in the trenches.

You should probably wish that your CM could actually be a full-time employee of your business! You want to like them and respect them that much.

There’s another piece, which is trade secrets and ways of working.

If you are interviewing a CM and they tell you all their special secrets, and then you go take that to another CM instead, that sucks for them. So there is often a healthy skepticism at the beginning.

But this goes both ways - you don’t want to tell a CM this rad idea you have figured out and then have them just give it to your biggest competitor.

Lastly, you should definitely not think they they are dumb, and you should not feel like you are taking advantage of them or getting such a good deal on something because they don’t notice how good your pricing (that they gave you, lol!) is. 🚩🚩🚩

So what do you think? Is it just me or is this where you, too, are right now or have gotten stuck in days past? Did I miss the mark or did you groan when you remembered that one CM that you have PTSD from? If you tell me your headaches, I’ll tell you mine!