First Day

Ted Beyer is the Director of Technical Services at First Day, a dietary supplement company focused on research-backed nutrition for families. With close to 20 years of experience across quality, manufacturing and commercialization, Ted leads cross-functional efforts in regulatory, compliance and scale-up strategy. He is responsible for ensuring that product quality, label integrity and operational execution remain tightly aligned as the company grows.

The Infrastructure behind Innovation at First Day

When you think about growth in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) space, most people focus on branding, marketing, or innovation. But some of the most meaningful growth comes from what I’d call operational maturity: the systems, rigor and institutional knowledge that turn a great product into a great business. That’s where Technical Services comes in.

Technical Services isn’t just quality assurance or regulatory compliance. It’s the connective tissue that links product development to supply chain, innovation to execution and brand promise to customer experience. At First Day, we’ve deliberately invested in building a strong Technical Services function. Not just to protect our business from risk, but to drive it forward.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Close the Gap between Formulation and Reality

In an early-stage company, formulas often live in a vacuum: they look great on paper but are a nightmare to commercialize. Ingredients clash, vendors change specs and no one owns the gray space between R&D and ops. We built Technical Services to close that gap. Our team ensures that formulations are not only compliant and stable but actually manufacturable—across co-manufacturers, formats and scale.

 We work closely with legal and product to interpret changing standards and align them with our long-term business goals 

This means owning things like ingredient reviews, spec alignment, shelf-life testing and production trial oversight. It also means being the voice in the room asking, "Can we actually make this? Can we make it again? And what happens when something goes wrong?"

Translate Regulatory into Strategy

In CPG, regulatory often gets treated like a speed bump. But in reality, it's a powerful tool, if you know how to use it. Our approach is to stay ahead of the rules, not just follow them. We work closely with legal and product to interpret changing standards and align them with our long-term business goals.

For example, when preparing to launch a product with novel probiotics, we didn’t just ask if it passed a COA. We focused on strain stability. How each probiotic holds up across manufacturing steps like mixing, heating and drying and how it's affected by time, moisture and temperature during storage? By accounting for those variables early, we were able to define a spec and packaging format that kept our CFU counts where they needed to be, from production all the way to expiration.

Build Audit-Readiness into Daily Work

A lot of brands scramble to pass audits. Our philosophy is: if you build your systems right, you’re always ready. We designed our document control, product specs and complaint handling processes not as one-offs, but as part of a living system. This makes third-party audits (like NSF 455-2) smoother, but more importantly, it drives internal clarity and alignment.

Everyone from CX to marketing to our CMO knows where to find the truth: one spec, one label, one set of claims. That consistency is a huge unlock.

Make Technical Services a Cross-Functional Hub

We sit at the intersection of quality, operations, supply chain and product. That makes us uniquely positioned to solve problems no one else sees in full. Whether it’s a labeling update that impacts five systems, a new active ingredient that requires reformulating a flavor, or a change in vendor that introduces a risk to shelf life. We’re often the first to catch it.

Our best work is invisible to the customer. But it's critical to ensuring that what we promise in the brand is what we actually deliver in the bottle.

If you're growing a CPG brand, don't wait until something breaks to build out Technical Services. Build it now, while you're scaling. When done right, it doesn’t slow you down. It gives you the infrastructure and confidence to go faster.