Little Big Farm Foods Expands and Automates

Little Big Farm Foods COO Gus Bybee, left, and CEO Ferns Phillips. (Scott Merrill)

Little Big Farm Foods is a small business with big plans, which prompted the manufacturer of specialty bake-at-home mixes to move its operations fromPortsmouth to a larger and more automated plant in Newmarket.

The company sells its mixes nationwide, including in Walmart and Trader Joe’s. In 2021, Little Big Farm Foods, which employs 13 people, recognized it needed a larger, more efficient facility for its growing business, says CEO Ferns Phillips, who lives in Maine on a farm called Little Big Farm. She had an extensive marketing career before leading Little Big Farms Food. She worked as a marketing consultant for Time-Life Money Brand and also owned a company called Womanswork, a line of work and gardening gloves. She also served as marketing director for Cover Girl Makeup at Procter & Gamble/Noxell Corporation and as an advertising executive, with accounts that included Nestle and Gillette. 

She and Little Big Farm Foods COO Gus Bybee realized that the acute labor shortage required automating the company’s mixing and filling equipment. At the beginning of the year, the company relocated to its new production facility, warehouse and corporate office in Newmarket.  

“Finding it harder and harder to maintain the work force we needed to meet demand for our products, we knew we had to find a way to automate our equipment” Phillips says. “We were fortunate to work with the Chain-Vey [Tubular Drag System] team to design the perfect mixing and packaging system to meet our specifications. This is a win for us and for our customers.” 

That system, which consists of a series of tubes with cylinders connected by chains that push ingredients along and then packages each batch, has resulted in a more efficient and cleaner way to manufacture the dry mixes that Little Big Farms ships around the country.  

Bybee adds, “We realized that to better serve our customers and their markets we needed more flexibility and agility on the production floor. The clean-in-place design allows faster changeovers between products. Our new facility is the answer to our current and future manufacturing needs.” 

Those needs will be ramping up this month because demand increases in June and July. “The biggest challenge is finding people,” he says, explaining that when COVID hit the company did away with double shifts and has increased wages by 30% in the last two years. “We’re making savings in other places such as having one person operating machines instead of two, and the chain-based system also helps.” For more information, visit littlebigfarmfoods.com.