Made in Iowa, The Manufacturing Podcast
Oct 8, 2026 · 56 min · 17 segments
Country Maid began in a farmhouse basement in West Bend and grew into a national food manufacturer whose products have helped organizations raise more than $380 million. In this episode of Made in…
But we have a great team that cares about what they do and the improvements we've made over the years.
And it's just, yeah, continuously looking for opportunities to keep it like it was.
One of the things that I was most surprised about was the fact that your temperatures in that facility have to be so consistent, and there are so many variables that you have to correct for.
And one by one, we kept identifying, oh, OK, the root of this comes from this area.
How do we work that out? And it wasn't always feasible for us to correct every problem the moment we found it.
But as opportunities would present themselves, we're gonna make a process change or make a building enhancement, we would build in other attributes of the of the process in the building to make to make the better product with each step of the way.
And we'll start kind of the flow that I went through and the new production line that you created three years ago.
We've upgraded it completely in the last three years, but we started installing it nine years ago.
And what you're doing is automating so much of the process that before, not only did it take a lot of human effort, but also there was a lot of room for error.
So the line you're talking about there is this old cake line that's in front of us.
Like any product, when you find yourself with something that's resonating with the consumers out there and more and more people want it, there's usually a scaling problem.
And how do you preserve what you have but yet still be able to deliver in mass quantities? And that particular product is a difficult one to make.
There's quite a few mid-sized bakeries across the United States that'll make those products by hand.
But we have a great team that cares about what they do and the improvements we've made over the years.
And it's just, yeah, continuously looking for opportunities to keep it like it was.
One of the things that I was most surprised about was the fact that your temperatures in that facility have to be so consistent, and there are so many variables that you have to correct for.
And one by one, we kept identifying, oh, OK, the root of this comes from this area.
How do we work that out? And it wasn't always feasible for us to correct every problem the moment we found it.
But as opportunities would present themselves, we're gonna make a process change or make a building enhancement, we would build in other attributes of the of the process in the building to make to make the better product with each step of the way.
And we'll start kind of the flow that I went through and the new production line that you created three years ago.
We've upgraded it completely in the last three years, but we started installing it nine years ago.
And what you're doing is automating so much of the process that before, not only did it take a lot of human effort, but also there was a lot of room for error.
So the line you're talking about there is this old cake line that's in front of us.
Like any product, when you find yourself with something that's resonating with the consumers out there and more and more people want it, there's usually a scaling problem.
And how do you preserve what you have but yet still be able to deliver in mass quantities? And that particular product is a difficult one to make.
There's quite a few mid-sized bakeries across the United States that'll make those products by hand.
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