Herr’s Foods: 24 to 130 Trading Partners

Snack Food Manufacturing • Nottingham, Pennsylvania • Family-owned since 1946

Herr’s is one of the largest privately owned snack food companies in the United States, producing over 300 products — potato chips, pretzels, popcorn, and cheese snacks — distributed across the US and Canada. Founded by Jim Herr in 1946, the company has grown for nearly eight decades on a simple operating principle: relentless efficiency. EDI was no exception.

The Challenge: 24 Partners Was the Ceiling

Herr’s had built an on-premise EDI translator integrated with their custom ERP. Like most in-house EDI operations, it carried two recurring costs: maintaining transaction maps, and keeping pace with trading partner requirements that never stop shifting.

Those costs set a hard ceiling. Adding a new trading partner meant new maps, new testing, and new ongoing maintenance — overhead that couldn’t be justified for anything but the largest relationships. EDI stayed limited to 24 high-volume partners, right when a growing distribution footprint needed the opposite.

The hidden cost wasn’t the translator. It was every partner connection the business declined to make.

The Solution: Migrating Without Disruption

Herr’s moved their 24 existing trading partner relationships to Foundational’s Managed EDI Service. Migrations like this follow a deliberate sequence: document the existing maps and partner requirements, rebuild and certify each connection on Foundational’s platform, run parallel testing against live document flows, and cut over partner by partner — so order processing never skips a day.

From that point forward, Foundational operated as Herr’s EDI department. Map development, partner onboarding, compliance monitoring, and ongoing maintenance all moved to our team, with no in-house EDI staff or software required. Most importantly, the cost model changed the economics of growth: connecting partner number 25 became a flat setup fee quoted upfront, instead of an internal mapping project with open-ended maintenance.

The Results: 24 Becomes 130

Herr’s trading partner network has grown from 24 to 130 active EDI connections — more than five times the original footprint, supporting 300+ products across an expanding customer base. That growth would not have been feasible under the on-premise model; the maintenance overhead alone would have scaled past justification long before partner 130.

The managed service scaled alongside the business instead. New customers with EDI mandates are onboarded by Foundational’s team — a flat implementation quoted upfront each time, with operations rolling into the fixed monthly rate — compliance requirements are monitored proactively, and Herr’s internal teams stay focused on making and moving snacks rather than maintaining maps.

Why It Worked

The on-premise model priced every new connection as a project. The managed model priced the operation as a whole. For a growth company, that single difference converts EDI from a constraint into infrastructure — something that simply works as the partner list grows.

If your partner network is bigger than your EDI footprint, the gap is costing you efficiency on every order. Learn more about EDI for manufacturing and distribution, browse our customer case studies, or talk to an EDI specialist.