How we work with partner facilities

Color of Vietnam does not run its own production line. Products across our four brands are made at partner facilities in the Thach That – Quoc Oai industrial park near Hanoi. Our way of working with them comes down to four things: clear roles, a specification sheet that both sides treat as the standard, trial batches with a request form and a written record, and a QA file (quality assurance file) that travels with every production batch. This piece describes those four things so that a new partner can picture the rhythm and a candidate can see what the daily work looks like.

Who owns what

The first job with any new facility is agreeing who owns which task. Not because of distrust, but because most problems later on start with both sides assuming the other one had it covered.

• We own: recipes, specifications, brands, packaging design, the product plan, and the final decision to approve or reject.
• The partner owns: the line, the people running it, quality control on the floor, production records, and hygiene conditions under the certifications they hold, which include ISO 22000:2018, Halal and US FDA food facility registration.
• Shared: sourcing of key ingredients, trials, incident handling, and the tracking sheet.

The specification is the shared standard

The specification sheet is the most important document between us and a partner. Every product has one. It lists ingredients and ratios, the process parameters that must be held, appearance, size and weight tolerances, moisture targets, packaging, carton packing and shelf life. It carries a version number. Any change, even a switch of wrapping film, produces a new version that both sides sign off.

The reason for that strictness is simple. When a batch goes wrong, both sides need one document to check against rather than two memories.

Trials: a request form and a record

Every change to a recipe or a process goes through a trial first, in keeping with our value Small Trials. A trial at our end has two pieces of paper:

• The request form, written by our R&D specialist before the trial: the goal, what changes compared with last time, what stays fixed, the quantity needed, and how the result will be judged.
• The trial record, kept by the partner during the run: actual parameters, anything unusual, photos, and the operator's comments.

The two meet in the shared tracking sheet. Without a request form, a trial drifts into trying things to see what happens. Without a record, even a good result cannot be repeated, because nobody knows what settings the line ran at that day.

The QA file for every production batch

Once a product is in production, every batch comes with a file that we receive before the goods leave the partner's warehouse. It holds the batch record, weight and seal integrity checks, the metal detection log, certificates of analysis for the main ingredients, and confirmation that retained samples have been stored.

We do not read this file to catch the partner out. We read it to know that the batch matches the specification, and so that when an importer asks about a specific batch, the answer is ready within half a day.

An example: the first Maize Ball batch after a lid change

Recently the Let's PLAY Maize Ball jar moved to a new lid for a tighter close. It sounds minor, but a new lid means the capping machine needs a different torque setting, and the specification goes up a version in its packaging section. We wrote a request form for a short trial, changing only the lid and nothing else, and asked the partner to record the actual torque and the number of jars with a misaligned cap.

The record came back with photos of the lid at three torque settings. The first left a slight gap, the second was right, the third cracked the rim on a few jars. The tracking sheet marked the second setting as the standard, the specification took that figure, and the first production batch with the new lid carried one extra line in its QA file: actual capping torque. All of it happened over email, one short call and an afternoon at the facility.

We do not hold many meetings with partners. Contact follows the batch: a request form or production plan before it, photos and messages during it if anything looks off, the record and the file after it, plus one fixed call to go through open items.

The system is not perfect, but it keeps a small team in Hanoi and a facility in Thach That – Quoc Oai looking at the same sheet, quoting the same version number, and seeing every batch through.

If writing request forms and reading batch records sounds like work you would enjoy, have a look at our open Fresher Product R&D role. If you are a manufacturer or a buyer who wants to understand more about how we control quality, reach us through the Contact page.