5 minute read
Premium Pastries: A Family Affair
Premium Pastries: A Family Affair
Dutchland foods brings out the best in both.
By April Pearson
When the Van Wyhe family founded Dutchland Foods in 1992, little did they know their success would be measured in terms of excellent employees, a supportive community and a family legacy going into its fourth generation.
Family Recipe for Success
Susan and Pete Van Wyhe started Dutchland Foods with Pete’s parents, Jennie and Wayne, using family recipes and the best ingredients available to create quality pastries. Over the past 32 years, it’s grown into a world-class production facility, located in the Northwest Iowa town of Lester, housing sophisticated equipment and employing 100 people — including Susan and Pete’s sons Malachi, Monty and Mychal, and numerous grandkids.
Dutchland Foods creates delicious frozen pastries for four markets: private label, wholesale, retail and fundraising.
Private-label clients choose off-the-shelf Dutchland Foods products — or create custom pastries with the Dutchland Foods research and development team (R&D) — to sell under their brand name. “A new product starts in our R&D department with samples that we create and send to the client,” says Monty, sales and operations manager. “They test the samples and give us feedback. The R&D process goes back and forth until we lock in a final product.”
Wholesale clients are restaurants, grocery stores, coffee shops and other businesses that cater to the end customer. Dutchland Foods offers various frozen, ready-tobake pastries for these businesses, from rich and tender Danish pastries to soft and golden French croissants. For retail customers, Dutchland Foods offers a light and flaky pie crust.
Fundraising clients are dealers and distributors that help school groups, daycares, youth dance teams and youth sports organizations raise funds for uniforms, equipment and trips. Dutchland Foods offers two products — Pastry Puffins and Butter Hearts — exclusively through fundraising channels. “Our Pastry Puffins have different fruit fillings, and everyone loves them; then our Butter Hearts are like palmier pastries, and those are really popular too,” says Savannah Meikamp, marketing manager.
Withholding these popular pastries from the public leads to greater fundraising success. “The scarcity creates demand,” says Mychal, finance and fundraising manager. “If they can't get it at the grocery store, they look for it year after year when the fundraiser comes around.”
Made With Love. And Innovation.
Dutchland Foods runs a high-tech operation, but it wasn’t always that way. “When we started, we were doing everything by hand,” says Susan, cofounder and advisor.
As the business grew, they added machines to improve efficiency. Dutchland Foods has its own CNC mill machine, which can create custom parts for the equipment. “Instead of waiting for a three-month lead time on a certain part, we’re getting stuff made in a couple of days,” says Malachi, sales manager. “That’s really helped us stay innovative and nimble in the manufacturing space.”
Dutchland Foods is implementing enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to help with production, planning and inventory to run a smoother operation. Two years ago, they took a major plunge and invested in cutting-edge industrial baking equipment from the Netherlands and Italy.
All these advancements help streamline production, but do they come at the expense of quality?
“Once the product goes into production, we implement rigorous quality standards and tests throughout the day to ensure it’s meeting our specs,” says Monty. “We strive for high-quality performance from our machines and use highquality ingredients. That helps to make a premium pastry.”
Dutchland Foods’ quality doesn’t start and stop with production. It’s present from the concept phase of a new product through safety and cleanup.
“We have quite a few employees on our food safety team,” says Pete, CEO, “and we’ve gotten an AA rating from the BRC (British Retail Consortium Global Standard) for food safety four years in a row.” The BRC assesses suppliers across a stringent set of criteria, including hygiene, safety and traceability of ingredients. AA is virtually the highest rating a business can earn. The only way to receive an AA+ is to earn an AA during an unannounced audit, which is exactly what Dutchland Foods did on the last inspection.
“We’ve gotten comments from inspectors, like, ‘Wow, this is the cleanest facility I've ever been in!’ We take pride in keeping our facilities clean and up to date,” says Malachi.
Iowa’s Small Towns and Big Values
Dutchland Foods also takes pride in being a major employer in a small town. Lester’s population is 300, and most of the business’s employees are from the area. Those who become Dutchland Food employees have remained part of the operation for decades.
“We don't like to take too much credit,” says Pete. “We want to give the credit to the Lord, where it belongs, and to our wonderful employees.”
“We can’t say enough about our local employees,” says Susan. “We couldn’t do it without them.”
Monty adds, “It’s great to provide jobs for so many people, where they can make a good living and not have to commute to big cities.”
“We just really appreciate the people who’ve helped the business,” Pete concludes. “We truly believe we should treat people how we’d like to be treated — treating our family, employees and customers like gold while remaining honest and forthright. Those are the values we try to model.”
Pound for Pound, the Best Around.
Dutchland Foods goes through the following Midwest-sourced ingredients per year:
1,960,200 pounds of flour
345,000 pounds of sugar
725,000 pounds of butter
115,000 pounds of eggs
