Two Buck Chuck still making waves – Yahoo! News

Wine making is still a very non-level process… those darn grapes only ripen once a year! That’s not what this is about.

Anyway, one item jumped out in this article about a winery that sells cheap (but decent) wines through the Trader Joe’s chain:

Making wine is expensive from the ground up, but Franzia owns a lot of ground — 40,000 acres is the common estimate. He won’t say. His Ceres-based Bronco Wine Co. also owns the crushing and bottling plants and has its own distribution company.

Until now, another company has supplied the bottles. But Franzia is talking about building a glass container plant near his Napa Valley bottling facility.

Still in the preliminary planning stages, Franzia says the plant would reduce greenhouse gases by limiting truck deliveries and through the use of environmentally friendly technology that would cut plant emissions.

He’s a vertically integrated enterprise… from grapes to bottling. Now, Franzia is moving into bottle production…. “near” his bottling facility. Maybe I’m looking for “lean” in places where it doesn’t exist, but the notion of reducing environmental waste by keeping suppliers close by, as opposed to importing cheap bottles from China, seems lean in concept, even if not in name.

Franzia will probably also keep inventory low and find other waste-reducing benefits from such a production set up.

About LeanBlog.org: Mark Graban is a consultant, author, and speaker in the “lean healthcare” methodology, focused on improving quality and patient safety, improving access, reducing costs, and fully engaging healthcare professionals. He is also the Chief Improvement Officer for KaiNexus.

Tagged as: Green