To be effective, the food manufacturing company must keep in mind several essential issues. These are world-level supply uncertainty, strict regulatory standards, and increasing customers’ demands for transparency and sustainability. Modern food producers owe it to themselves to ensure that they address a series of challenges such as traceability of ingredients, food safety regulation, cyber-attacks, and pressure for efficiency. They need to implement infrastructure technologies, achieve end-to-end visibility of the manufacturing operations, and achieve agility to cope with unpredictable market conditions at the speed of lightning. This will help them survive in the current age of technology and unpredictability. Companies that have enterprise resource planning systems, automation technologies, and information based on insight emerge as leaders while keeping the highest standard of quality and safety.
Many game-changing leaders have brought a massive facelift to this industry owing to their dedication, innovative practices, and never-give-up attitude. One such noteworthy leader who has taken food manufacturing to the heights of excellence is Todd Pugh, the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of SugarCreek.
Todd started his professional journey as a mainframe Cobol programmer in 1989. There, he worked as a programmer for a few years, progressing in responsibilities. In the late 90’s he switched to client-server programming, again progressing in responsibilities to running projects. He joined SugarCreek in 2000 as a system architect/project manager. Through the years at SugarCreek, he evolved professionally and transitioned into his current role as CTO.
For most of his career, Todd Pugh has been in the manufacturing space, as has most of his family. “Between my father and in-laws, we have discussed manufacturing most of my life, so it made sense to continue in that space,” he states.
Early Initiatives
During his initial tenure in the company, Todd took up many initiatives. These included implementing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to provide real-time visibility across production, procurement, and logistics. He also introduced a cloud-first architecture that gave SugarCreek greater agility and scalability, ensuring seamless collaboration across multiple facilities. Just as importantly, Todd made cybersecurity resilience a cornerstone of his agenda, embedding best-practice frameworks to protect sensitive data and maintain regulatory compliance.
Strengthening the Backbone of Modern Architecture
Todd joined SugarCreek in 2000, bringing with him a career steeped in enterprise IT leadership and operational transformation. By 2016, he assumed the role of CTO, tasked with steering the company’s digital agenda at a time when food manufacturing faced mounting pressures. These challenges included global supply chain disruptions, consumer demand for transparency, and heightened cybersecurity threats.
The Motivational Factor
Todd Pugh has always been able to translate between technical people and businesspeople. He has also excelled at problem-solving and has never been afraid to make decisions and mistakes along the way. These capabilities have always motivated Todd Pughto push boundaries and to proceed towards achieving excellence in services.
SugarCreek and Its Diverse Offerings
SugarCreek’s primary products are bacon and bacon bits. To make those, they buy pork bellies from the market and cure them. As part of the curing process, the bellies are hung on trollies and moved through the process, ending up in a cooler at the end until they get sliced. “The cooler has rail after rail of these trollies, and they are so close together that you cannot walk through the room,” states Todd. He was the leading technical person on a project that allowed them to track the trollies through the process using rf-id. This was a great time saver and also helped solve a safety concern.
Embracing Innovation and Enhancing Food Manufacturing
Todd Pugh believes that technology is not merely confined to infrastructure; it also plays an essential part in strategic enablement. Under his leadership, SugarCreek has embraced automation, IoT, and predictive analytics, tools that reduce downtime, optimize production, and forecast customer demand. These innovations directly support SugarCreek’s reputation as a trusted, high-quality partner for leading retail and foodservice brands.
He has also championed traceability systems that align with growing consumer expectations for food safety and supply chain transparency. By leveraging advanced monitoring and data-driven insights, SugarCreek can track ingredients and processes with precision, building both trust and efficiency.
A Collaborative and Pragmatic Leader
According to Todd, a confident and technically sound team can use technology to attain transformational results. Hence, he invests in employee training and cross-functional engagement. His approach breaks down silos between IT, operations, and business units, creating solutions that are both technically sound and operationally practical.
“Technology only matters if it helps people perform better,” Todd emphasises. This philosophy has guided his emphasis on user-friendly tools and digital literacy across the organization.
The AI Perspective
Todd expresses that AI and ML have gained tremendous popularity, and everyone is considering them as the next adventure. “I agree they will play a large role in what is coming,” he states. In his opinion, the overarching thing for those to be effective is managing and scrubbing the data. “Without a good data source, the automation will allow you to make bad decisions faster,” Todd Pugh shares.
Overcoming Challenges Efficiently
For Todd, the biggest challenges involve dealing with the ebb and flow of the economy. Being a company privately held by a family, the owner re-invests in the company continuously. “Unfortunately for the technical side, he invests in things that produce products better first and sometimes we are left scrambling to make due with what we have. Understanding our role in the company helps with that. Sometimes we have to settle with something that works versus the best product available,” he expresses.
Todd states that the biggest challenge for SugarCreek is making the data available to people who know what to do with it and making it consumable to them in their tool of choice. The company hires smart people, not just in IT. Their role as an IT department is to give them the best tools so that they’re able to do their jobs better. “If we can do that, then the company will continue to grow and we will be able to implement AI and ML in new ways,” opines Todd.
Words of Advice
While advising the emerging generation of entrepreneurs, Todd Pugh states that they must learn the business and be able to converse with business person in ways that they understand. “You then can translate from what you are told from the business side into technical terms that programmers understand,” he shares.
According to him, probably the biggest thing is to hire smart people and let them explore their abilities. “In discussions, check the egos at the door,” he says. “My advice is to make sure people have teams that challenge them and to make sure that they listen to their teams.”
A Leader Leaving a Mark
An erudite and visionary leader, Todd has left a lasting impression on SugarCreek. His emphasis on stronger IT foundations, smarter production, and a culture that embraces change has ensured that the company keeps evolving and becomes stronger than ever. Todd has always voiced that innovation should have its roots in human-centred values. Furthermore, he takes the necessary steps to ensure that SugarCreek remains a resilient, trusted, and forward-thinking force in food manufacturing.
