Finding Efficiencies One Pouch at a Time

After launching in 2017, Mushili, a Zambian pre-cooked and frozen bean company, experienced immediate success with their products. Mushili won over consumers by reducing cooking time from eight hours to just 20 minutes. With a steady increase in demand from customers, Mushili looked to PFS to help increase efficiencies in production and packaging. Joel Farmer (above), a continuous improvement manager for packaging at Hershey and PFS volunteer, joined the Mushili project with the goal of creating efficiencies one pouch at a time.

“The first thing I asked the Mushili team was how they prepare and eat the product. In response, they sent me a WhatsApp video of a person with scissors cutting the packaging and pouring the contents into a pan. Watching the video, I realized that the only way to open the current Mushili bean packaging was to cut it with scissors and that gave me the idea of creating a serrated cut that would allow a user to tear the packaging at the top.”

Removing the need for scissors to open the Mushili bean product was a huge improvement in its packaging, but, ironically, it wasn’t even the original issue that Mushili needed assistance with.

Mushili’s original packaging resembled a stand-up pouch. Although the packaging looked great and functioned properly, the product would often fall down on the shelf and improperly display the product and become susceptible to damage. “After learning about Mushili’s packaging issue at the retailer, I utilized Hershey’s ‘packaging display vault’ where we keep a large variety of different types of packaging – new and old. This gave me the idea of the ‘pillow pouch’ which is common to many of Hershey’s products. The pillow pouch is more flexible, allowing the product to be stacked on top of one another, reducing breakage and damage, while still looking visually appealing. The pillow pouch also uses about 20% less plastic than the previous packaging, resulting in significant cost savings for Mushili.”

Simultaneously, Mushili was also involved in a process improvement project that would make their product line more efficient. Joel choose to join that project as well to ensure that their process improvements would align with the packaging recommendations he was providing. “Mushili wanted to automate their processing line so we recommended a piece of equipment that was more efficient than their current process. The automated process will produce 150 bags/minute, significantly increasing their production per day. The quicker process will also reduce labor costs.”

Mushili has secured $65,000 worth of investments to fund the optimization line improvements that PFS volunteers recommended. “Our optimization project with PFS enabled us to define the requirements for equipment to optimize automation within our budget,” said Vaezi Chima, managing director of Mushili. “We are currently testing the pillow packaging that PFS volunteers recommended and once the testing is finalized we will send the dielines to our printing vendor. Hopefully this will start in the next couple of weeks.”

Not only is Mushili happy with the new improvements, so are their customers. “We have presented the new proposed packaging to our major retailers and they also believe it is an improved packaging for display. This has enabled us to widen our supplier base and get more competitive offers.” 

**Update (March 2020): The product is in its new packaging is now available in retail (see photo below).