What does small batch mean?

As a premium food product company, we pride ourselves on making items that you'll love, with flavors, textures, and quality that surprise you at every bite.

One of the ways we achieve the flavors and textures that we have is that we make products in small batches.

Small batches of organic spices.

In our case, small batches of spice blends can be made starting at around 600 jars and we don't typically produce more than about that many at at time. All of our small batch organic spice blends are hand-blended and hand-filled.

Of course, we make many more than that each year, but each batch we receive may be that many or even fewer, which ensures freshness.

We source spices from around the globe every year, ensuring that the most recent harvests, the freshest, and best ingredients are arriving to our blending and packing facility.

This also means our spice blends go into your jars with as little time from harvest to bottling as possible.

We don't have massive quantities of spices sitting around for years before they're mixed into blends.

The way we can achieve the fluffy texture of our blends is by hand-mixing, without the use of a machine that would break the pieces up too small. This takes time and care, and is not done in most blends you find on grocery store shelves or even with some other small producers.

Further, in order to get to grocery store shelves, most products need to be made at a much larger scale. This is because in order to supply many stores at once, a lot of product has to be prepared.

Since we only sell directly to our customers from our website or our San Francisco retail store, there are no middle men!

We produce our spice blends and they're delivered to our shipping facility within days, and shipped to you typically within just a few months of being packed.

Small batches of organic snacks.

In our case, small batches of snacks can be made anywhere from around 200 units for larger items or around 1,000 units for smaller items.

Most snack co-packing companies won't even consider orders of items like this for fewer than 10,000 units.

Further, for our granola and nuts, you'll notice that you get large clusters of the items that are much like you'd get with homemade versions.

These large clusters in our products are possible because our snacks don't pass through a hopper, a machine that breaks things up to automatically dump them into bags or other packaging.

Our snack and granola products are made and packed by hand!

This is how you get big clusters of granola and even clusters of some of our nuts in the bags – humans are packing them for you.

Small batches of heat-and-eat meals.

Our meal delivery service is small batch, made each week and is the smallest batch out of everything we create.

While there may be slight overrun from week to week, meaning a meal or two you receive may have been prepared a week ahead of when you ordered it, most are made within days of when they get to you.

Real people are cooking your meals each week, which also accounts for some very slight variations in flavors and textures as well as appearances.

While we work extremely hard to streamline and have consistency across the country (meals are cooked in two different kitchens), again there will be some variation due to the human touch.

Imagine how you cook and prepare meals in your home from week to week. You probably have favorite recipes that you make over and over again, and yet, they have slight variations from time to time.

In any event, our meals are made for you on a rolling basis. As such, if you ever have an experience with one of our meals that seems inconsistent, just let us know! There aren't thousands of meals prepared ahead of time – batches are made each week, so we can always adjust or tweak things as-needed.

I hope you found this article helpful.

If you have any questions, please reach out to our team – hello (at) balancedbites.com and we'll help you out.

For more business behind-the-scenes information, check out these posts:

CEO Corner, March 2021: Changes ahead for the Balanced Bites shop sites.

FAQs About Balanced Bites Spices

FAQs About New Balanced Bites Spice Jars