Finding the sweet spot for a frozen bakery running dry

How we helped

• Restaurants, Hospitality, Travel, and Leisure
• Operations & Supply Chain
• Revenue & Growth
• Technology
• Sourcing and Procurement Transformation

The multi-million-dollar carveout of a frozen foods bakery came right at the beginning of the pandemic. The new company immediately faced cost inflation, raw materials scarcity, a diminished labor force, and changes to the leadership team. By 2023, the company was running low on cash and needed help to reset their cost structure, improve pricing, and enhance their customer relationships.

This needed to be done before they burned through the $50 million EBITDA budget.

Getting some air back inside the operation

After the CEO called AlixPartners, we put together a team of restaurant, hospitality, consumer product, and digital experts. The crew identified over $80 million in in annual run rate EBITDA improvements that could give the business a much-needed cash infusion. This would provide the business leeway to execute a transformation program and stabilize the business. Even better? We exceeded the goal.

As the engagement progressed, efforts generated a run rate EBITDA improvement of almost $100 million, which set the company up to increase its EBITDA by 7x on the previous year. The team did it through tangible efforts at creating a more transparent pricing function.

The executive team were able to surgically drive pricing actions across the customer base improving EBITDA by $20 million in 2024 and $10 million in 2023. Going forward, we helped the company set up a replicable process to assess and shift customer and product actions more frequently.

To do so, we called on our digital experts to build an automated, detailed customer product profitability model for foodservice (a very complex channel) with dashboards and reporting to better illuminate the factors driving profitability. The tool would also help with generating the basis for future P&L pro forma processes. The analyses that once took our team weeks to complete could now be accomplished within a day.

Heating up the company’s commercial capabilities

We built a commercial capabilities survey tool which enabled us to quickly deliver key insights on capability gaps and plot a strategic course forward. In addition, the commercial efforts generated path to an incremental $200 million in sales through a set of aligned building blocks for growth.

These outsized improvements have added $1 billion in enterprise value and positioned the company to make capital and people investments in the business, and drive meaningful growth.