We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sam Henselijn a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Sam, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of the toughest parts of scaling a business is maintaining quality as you grow. How have you managed to maintain quality? Any stories or advice?
Growth always comes with hurdles that you need to overcome. In our industry in order to grow you need to ensure you have the best manufacturing and food safety practices, high quality products, streamlined and efficient operations in order to meet large customer demand and deadlines. In order to supply significant volumes to large retailers you will need to be third party food safety certified, which is a very expensive and lengthy process, but it is part of growing your company and to ensure the products that leave our facility go through the proper food safety methods. We have added metal detectors, software automation, assembly line automation and other control points to ensure highest food safety.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My name is Sam, born and raised in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At the age of 16 I moved to Texas to play D1 college tennis. After receiving my MBA from Texas A&M I worked for 5 years in the oil fields. After my oil field career I decided to bring back to passion and business that my family has been involved in since 1934. Delicious foods, sweets and nuts! L’Orenta nuts is located in San Antonio, Texas in a state-of-the-art facility that is completely climate controlled and includes multiple automated assembly lines and packaging lines. We provide over 1,000+ different nuts, chocolates, dried fruits, snack mixes, nut mixes, candies, gift sets and more. We provide small customers to the largest retailers nation wide with snacking solutions in retail or bulk packaging. As a family owned and operated business we take great pride in our quality, attention to detail and above all our customer service. The customer is who makes us and we do everything in our power to ensure 100% satisfaction. For almost 90 years, our belief has always been that the customer defines our success.
Since 1934, our family has placed significant value on quality, and L’Orenta is no exception.
We have sought out local farms that provide us with only the freshest ingredients to work with. From there, we infuse them with unique European flavors that will arouse and excite your senses. When you visit L’Orenta, you will be enveloped in warm aromas and exquisite tastes. Like our great grandfather did so many years ago, we invite you into our home.
Have you ever had to pivot?
As a company that only started 5 years ago, it is hard enough to survive in this highly competitive and brutal industry. It is hard enough to start a business and survive period. Around 2020 we started getting some momentum and then COVID-19 hit. The momentum that we created was completely washed away because of COVID-19 and we had to significantly shift our business strategy and model in order to survive. In short, we were never really set up for mass online business, yes we had a website but that wasn’t our main source of income. Our website sales sky rocketed and every other aspect of our company took a big hit (because majority of our bulk/business customers were shut down). Overnight we started to implement new processes and automation for mass online sales. Completely pivoting the way we were running our business. Now a few years later I am grateful to say that during these tough times, our team really worked together to make things happen and weather the storm.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
Customer service, customer service and customer service. Besides customer service our attention to detail, fast delivery times, quick turnaround times for orders, high quality products, the high food safety standards and certificates we have. It’s the overall way of how we conduct ourselves and the high standards that we set for ourselves as a company. Everything that we do has to be perfect, has to taste amazing, look fantastic and be done in a quick time frame. 
Contact Info:
- Website: www.lorentanuts.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/lorentanuts
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/lorentanuts
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/lorentanuts
- Youtube: lorentanuts