A Blind RFP That Surfaced About $10M in Potential Savings

The client's leadership and board believed its current manufacturing facility was too expensive. They wanted to know what the market would offer before making any move.

The board had flagged COGS as the heaviest driver of the client's P&L. The RFP was designed as a benchmarking exercise with no decision to move production attached. Its job was to show where the client sat on cost, formula by formula, to compare contract manufacturers against each other as well as against the client, and to show how much of any gap came from capacity utilization rather than efficiency. Any move would be made SKU by SKU, on the numbers.

Our Approach

Izba ran the RFP under its own name and never identified the client. We worked from very little information, built the request around what suppliers needed to quote, and compared the responses on equal terms.

The brief was thin and suppliers could not ask who the client was, so the work took judgment at every step.

Izba contacted five contract manufacturers in mid-June 2026. Four responded and three took part. Quotes arrived at each manufacturer's own pace as specs and NDAs cleared, from late June through late September, and some manufacturers dropped out rather than estimate from spec sheets alone. The blind format limited how far any of them could quote, which was the intent.

We read the results through three comparisons, each testing a different cost driver. In the first, the manufacturer sourced everything, which gave the cleanest comparison to the client's fully loaded cost. In the second, the manufacturer combined its own conversion cost with the client's specialty ingredient, bought through the client's supplier, to test whether that input limited the savings. In the third, the manufacturer priced a standard alternative to the specialty ingredient, and that pricing was still pending. Izba cross-checked the quotes against the client's bills of materials in its ERP, breaking each formula down to ingredient, labor, and packaging cost.

A savings headline can read as a threat to a plant, so Izba framed the findings around opportunities and kept the focus on what the data said about the client's own operation. Reviewing the cost data also showed that the client's labor and overhead allocation needed to be rebuilt. Finance leads that work, and Izba's role is to specify the requirements and request the data.

Recommended next steps were to bring R&D into a review of the two lead formulas, request pricing for the non-fermented alternative, model unit cost at higher plant utilization (including volume from a larger sister company), explore having an existing bulk manufacturer complete encapsulation before delivery, scope joint purchasing with the sister company, and re-baseline every quote against the new formulas before any commitment. The team asked for approval to disclose the client's identity to one manufacturer only, with no broader disclosure and no SKU moves. Identity disclosure to finalists, site visits, and selection were scheduled for October and November 2026.

The Outcome

• About $10M a year in gross potential savings from two manufacturers' full quotes ($7.3M and $2.7M), or about $10.3M with a third. That is roughly 27% of portfolio COGS across 68 unique SKUs.
• Savings concentrated in a few formulas. Two formulas accounted for about $6.6M, around 70% of the total. Many SKUs showed savings under $50K, which would likely not justify the cost of moving them.
• A clearer read on the client's own plant. Bottling cost already matched the market, and encapsulation labor, about 60% of unit cost on the two lead formulas, was the real gap.
• New leverage with suppliers. Manufacturer pricing varied more between manufacturers than against the client, and when a manufacturer used the client's own ingredient prices its advantage disappeared.
• A confidential process, with no supplier told who the client was.
• A tighter manufacturing base. Across the client's work, the number of active co-manufacturers fell from nine to two.
• Real market numbers for the board. Whether to move any SKU is the client's decision.