Food production & wholesale · Thomastown VIC 3074
Thomastown food producers can make anything except a traceability report in under a day
Thomastown and Epping together hold over 7,600 businesses employing around 39,000 people, and Whittlesea has become the state's food and beverage engine — more than 1,300 food and beverage businesses producing $3.14 billion in output, adding $1.3 billion in value and supporting over 12,000 jobs. Much of that runs on batch sheets in plastic sleeves.
Talk to us about Thomastown
Tell us what the admin is costing you. We'll come back to you.
What Thomastown actually looks like
Food and beverage activity in the region is concentrated specifically in the Thomastown and Epping industrial precincts — this is not a general manufacturing area that happens to include food, it is the centre of it.
Whittlesea's food and beverage sector accounts for around 36% of the municipality's total exports, so a large share of these businesses are dealing with export documentation on top of domestic compliance.
Alongside food, 842 local manufacturing businesses provide over 9,000 jobs, with machinery and equipment and fabricated metal the next largest sectors — which means the food producers here are surrounded by their own equipment suppliers.
Thomastown's industrial area has a council plan running to 2038, so this is a precinct with a long horizon rather than one being rezoned out from under its tenants.
The recurring problem is not food safety knowledge — it is that the records proving it exist on paper, in one building, in one person's filing system.
The signs you have outgrown the spreadsheet
Specific to food production & wholesale operations. If more than one of these is familiar, the admin is now costing more than the system would.
Batch and production records are completed on paper and filed in folders.
A recall or an audit means physically searching, and the answer takes days you may not have.
Traceability depends on one person knowing where things are written down.
The business carries a compliance risk that walks out the door on annual leave.
Orders come in by phone and get written on a pad before being entered.
Short-dated and perishable lines get promised against stock that has already moved.
Yield and wastage are reviewed at month end, from memory and invoices.
By the time you see the number, the batch that caused it ran six weeks ago.
How we work with Thomastown businesses
- Thomastown is roughly 35 minutes from our Sunshine North base. We work across metropolitan Melbourne rather than from a local site.
- We start with one product's journey — order, batch, pack, despatch, invoice — and the records each step leaves behind.
- Work is priced before it begins.
Questions we get from Thomastown
We pass our audits. Why change anything?
Passing audits and being able to answer quickly are different things. Most Thomastown producers we meet are genuinely compliant and simply slow to prove it — which is fine until a customer or a recall puts a clock on it. The goal is not better compliance, it is the same compliance retrievable in minutes.
Our production floor is wet, cold or gloved. Screens are not practical.
Agreed, and any system that ignores that will be abandoned. The usual answer is to capture at as few points as possible, in a form that survives the environment, and to accept paper where paper genuinely works better — then get it into a searchable record straight after rather than at month end.
We export. Does that make this more complicated?
It raises the stakes rather than the complexity. Export documentation is largely a retrieval problem — the information already exists, it just has to be assembled correctly and repeatedly. That is exactly the kind of thing worth getting out of a person's hands.
Nearby areas we work in
Campbellfield
Transport & logistics
Melbourne's northern freight crossroads — Hume Highway, Ring Road and the airport. Paper runsheets, dockets in the cab, proof of delivery by text.
Cranbourne
Residential & home services
47,590 businesses and 50%+ growth since 2019 — mostly small operators serving households. Demand is not the problem; the admin is.
Start with an audit, not a rebuild
We look at how the work actually moves through your business, name the one artefact costing you the most time, and price the fix before anything starts. ~35 minutes from our Sunshine North base.
Book a business systems audit