Once Again Aims To ‘Remain Competitive’ With Big Tree Acquisition

Employee-owned nut butter business Once Again has added manufacturing muscle and additional ingredients to its portfolio with its latest acquisition, which CEO Bob Gelser believes will help the company remain competitive both as a B2B supplier and standalone CPG brand.

Once Again, which announced its acquisition of California-based Big Tree Organics earlier this month, currently produces its five varieties of nut and seed butters at its facility in Western New York. That facility is more than 2,700 miles away from where the majority of almonds are grown in California’s Central Valley, so rather than shipping the input across the country, and oftentimes back again for distribution on the West Coast, Once Again established a secondary home base.

“This is an example where proximity to the commodity that we use is going to be very important to remain competitive in certain situations,” explained Gelser. “Our western New York facility is in a good location relative to our distribution on the East Coast, but as we grow, we’re going to have to be strategic about where we locate manufacturing.”

According to Gelser, almond butter is one of the brand’s highest volume products. Aside from nut butters, Once Again also produces a variety of gluten-free snacks including graham crackers and nut butter-filled cracker cookie sandwiches. Those products are co-packed in Boulder, Colo., with Once Again providing all of the necessary inputs and the raw nut butter ingredients.

“We’ve gotten to a point with shipping and everything that everyone has to watch their costs much more closely,” said Gelser. “All of a sudden, if our almond butter is not competitive [on price], there’s other opportunities that our [ingredient] customers would have to be able to shop the product around.”

That would spell trouble for Once Again, which in addition to ingredients and branded products, also has a strong private label business. That “three-legged stool” model, as Gelser calls it, sees fairly equal sales contributions from each leg, but if sales in one segment fall short, the entire business, and balance sheet, may tilt.

Once Again is also bulking up its ingredients portfolio with the acquisition, adding organic diced, sliced and slivered almonds as well as almond flour. Gelser emphasized that as an employee-owned company without corporate investment, balancing growth and curating a diverse portfolio is essential.

“We make up for that [lack of investment] with the diversity of customer bases, and it’s worked out very well because we’ve been able to support our own brand, but we’ve also been able to provide a service in the ingredient business,” Gelser said. “In reality, our nut butters are on the retail shelf in many different categories based on our industrial and foodservice sales. So [this structure] allows us to be more diverse than what we may appear, but it’s a strength of our company that we can support all those customer bases.”

The company, which recently celebrated 50 years as an employee-owned organization, will welcome all current Big Tree Organic team members which includes approximately five full-time employees as well as a handful of temporary employees. That brings Once Again’s workforce to about 90 employees.

Growing Once Again’s branded products will be a priority moving forward, as expansion in snacks – like with the recent addition of gluten-free graham crackers – will help the company further utilize its base products and draw in a wider customer base, Gelser said.

“We don’t necessarily compete with the JIFs and Skippys – our product is premium, and we recognize that,” said Gelser. “But by the same token, we have to understand the retail price, and we have to be able to offer products, especially in the economy like we’re in now, that give people good, healthy, organic, gluten-free options that are affordable to a larger population.”