ReefFrenzy

Thanks everyone! Joe it's been an insane ride that's for sure and I don't think anyone, myself included could have predicted where we would end up. I've met a lot of great folks along the way and have had one hell of an education on nutrition and business. We're looking forward to seeing what the next few years bring!

Awesome! Glad to hear things are going well. 

Still remember you starting this crazy journey. Looks great. Can’t help but think of the juice that flows through all those freezers if they all kick on at the same time. Lol. 

It's been a while since I've posted, but to be honest we've had so many "work from sun up to sun down" days over the past year that I haven't been able to post on many club forums. Our LRS Foods Facebook page and my personal page, as well as Instagram are where we are posting daily updates. While our own brand of food continues to rise in popularity with retailers, public aquaria and aquaculture markets have opened up for us and been a huge and steady stream of orders. Our Fertility Frenzy food continues to be a favorite of places line Biota and facilities in Florida and Hawaii. We had many requests from retailers to pick up complimentary products to "bundle" with our foods to make getting premium foods easier and delivered frozen solid.
So we now have seven food brands under our distribution umbrella with the most recent addition being the line of Hikari Frozen foods. These are the brands we distribute to local fish stores...

Naturally adding all this food to our line up of product offerings required more freezers and storage space. So last May we broke ground on the "LRS Annex" and had a Grand Opening party on October 20th. The first floor consists of a shipping station with scales, freezers, refrigerators, foam coolers, dry food racks, and more. The second floor has a "LRS Lounge" for entertaining industry guests (which we get a lot of) and an office space which I will be moving into soon. This new structure is across the driveway from our production kitchen which now has doubled in size since the shipping supplies have been moved out. So a lot has been going on here for the past 6-12 months and we are now staffed with 7 employees. My daughter managing the front of the house operations with customer service and order processing and my son managing the back end with inventory and shipping. I've delegated 90% of my responsibilities, both as a failsafe to make sure the business can operate without me while I am still lurking in the background, but also to let my adult kids grow into their respective roles.
Here are a few pics to give you an idea of what we've been up to...

 
New freezers in the shipping center for pulling orders quickly to pack and ship out.

A wall of New Life Spectrum pellets and flakes.

Unpacking a 55 case shipment of Hikari USA frozen foods.

A pallet of PE Mysis being offloaded into our walk-in freezer.

 
My son and I on a typical shipping day.

My soon to be office upstairs.

Orders about to have dry ice added to the top before sealing and shipping.

This is what the shipping station looks like before the mayhem starts.

Lastly, this is my daily sidekick, my grandson who comes to work every day, steals the fruit out of my salad at lunch and pretty much hangs in my office or the shipping station.

If you have read this far I appreciate it and thank you very much for your support!

Thanks for the update!  Looks like things are really rolling for you, great to hear!

Looks good Larry.  Glad to hear things are rolling for you.  

Hey Gang sorry to have been AWOL but we have had a LOT going on the past year. We built a 2800 square food distribution center and I now distribute SEVEN brands of food to 500+ retailers in the US and abroad. I hate to hear that some folks are having difficulty sourcing our foods. We do everything we can to make sure our dealers have the easiest way to re-order and run promotions to help off set the shipping costs from time to time. Someone mentioned a group buy but unfortunately our accounting and inventory system doesn't even have retail pricing in it, nor are we registered to collect sales tax or file same. I'll make a post in a minute about our latest developments and I hope local accessibility improves. We are shipping over 100 boxes every week to all parts of the US and we get two Fed Ex pick ups now.

It was great seeing everyone at the Expo! I've been slammed since returning home but I plan on bringing everyone up to speed with what's been happening at LRS HQ. It's all good stuff I promise. More exports, more product lines under our roof and next week we break ground on a new building to house more freezers and dry goods. 
In the meantime....
At LRS Foods we strive to be on the leading edge of innovation when it comes to aquarium nutrition. We process premium, human-grade, FDA certified seafood ingredients, then add costly supplements such as live blackworms, fresh fish eggs, PE Mysis®, Astaxanthin, betacarotene and more to create the highest quality foods possible. In 2013 we began adding active cultures of probiotic bacteria to our foods in order to offer the benefits which have worked in aquaculture of fish for human consumption for decades. Initially people were skeptical about this change to our foods since at the time we were the only frozen food on the market with "active bacteria." 

However, it didn't take long for the results to speak for themselves. Soon prominent researchers were reporting healthier broodstock, better egg quality, and more robust larvae. There are over a dozen captive breeding projects listed on our website where LRS foods were credited with assisting captive breeding efforts. Some of them you may have heard about such as the blue hippo tang, yellow tang, flathead perch, Gramma dejongi and others. Some of the rarest fish in the hobby have been captive bred on LRS Foods with probiotics.

The details are listed here: http://www.larrysreefservices.com/testimonials.html

Earlier this week researchers at the MOTE Marine Laboratory in FL published an article with their peer reviewed findings regarding their experience with probiotics and marine fish. The article is very informative and confirms that probiotics in aquarium feeds can offer real benefits. It is worth a look and it is very exciting that probiotics are now being given the proper credit that we knew they had all along.

Thanks for the feedback and thanks for posting the link. I forgot to insert it before finishing the post. It reads a lot better now. lol
 

Heading to the airport soon and I just tossed a couple of these in my bag. Let's see who the lucky ones will be who sit in for my presentation and walk away with some LRS swag?! See you guys soon!

Heading to the airport soon and I just tossed a couple of these in my bag. Let's see who the lucky ones will be who sit in for my presentation and walk away with some LRS swag?! See you guys soon!

Looking forward to this weekend!
 

Looking forward to this weekend!
 

Oh man, you're putting the pressure on me to do a great presentation. 

I'me sure we will be able to bring some goodies to the swap. It should be a lot of fun!

I'me sure we will be able to bring some goodies to the swap. It should be a lot of fun!

I wanted to start by saying I am super humbled to be invited to speak at the club event! I did a presentation at an event in Utah a few months ago and it was very well received.
I typically start off with a brief intro and backstory of how I went from a hobbyist to launching a business with products sold in about nine countries. (A lot of folks say this part of the presentation was really entertaining and inspiring.) Moving on, we'll touch base about some differences between various foods and how you can make informed purchasing choices. Topics such as safe handling and storage tips for frozen food, interpreting nutritional information, Innovations in foods such as probiotics and pigmentation enhancers will be mentioned as will supplements such as garlic and ginger. Some of the material does reference the various captive breeding projects we have been involved with and how proper nutrition is important for broodstock. I haven't had anyone throw tomatoes yet and nearly everyone gives feedback that they learned a few new things from the presentation. I'm looking forward to the trip and meeting some new friends! Thank you all again for the invite and interest.

I wanted to start by saying I am super humbled to be invited to speak at the club event! I did a presentation at an event in Utah a few months ago and it was very well received.
I typically start off with a brief intro and backstory of how I went from a hobbyist to launching a business with products sold in about nine countries. (A lot of folks say this part of the presentation was really entertaining and inspiring.) Moving on, we'll touch base about some differences between various foods and how you can make informed purchasing choices. Topics such as safe handling and storage tips for frozen food, interpreting nutritional information, Innovations in foods such as probiotics and pigmentation enhancers will be mentioned as will supplements such as garlic and ginger. Some of the material does reference the various captive breeding projects we have been involved with and how proper nutrition is important for broodstock. I haven't had anyone throw tomatoes yet and nearly everyone gives feedback that they learned a few new things from the presentation. I'm looking forward to the trip and meeting some new friends! Thank you all again for the invite and interest.

I wanted to start by saying I am super humbled to be invited to speak at the club event! I did a presentation at an event in Utah a few months ago and it was very well received.
I typically start off with a brief intro and backstory of how I went from a hobbyist to launching a business with products sold in about nine countries. (A lot of folks say this part of the presentation was really entertaining and inspiring.) Moving on, we'll touch base about some differences between various foods and how you can make informed purchasing choices. Topics such as safe handling and storage tips for frozen food, interpreting nutritional information, Innovations in foods such as probiotics and pigmentation enhancers will be mentioned as will supplements such as garlic and ginger. Some of the material does reference the various captive breeding projects we have been involved with and how proper nutrition is important for broodstock. I haven't had anyone throw tomatoes yet and nearly everyone gives feedback that they learned a few new things from the presentation. I'm looking forward to the trip and meeting some new friends! Thank you all again for the invite and interest.

Let's just say that providing the food which helped make the whole process happen gets you a big discount on the babies.
 

LRS has been proud to sponsor Brandon Rutherford's classroom reef project for a few years now. These third grade students are doing amazing things!  In this podcast we learned about how the kids captive bred 500 clownfish in their classroom and sold them to a prominent wholesaler! They grew the live feeds and everything, which is so awesome.   To listen go here: http://reeffrenzyradio.com/podcasts/ (You can also download the LRS app in iTunes and the podcast in GooglePlay)   If you would like to visit his website to learn more or DONATE used or new equipment you may have lying around here is the link:  http://mrrutherfordisawesome.weebly.com/reef-system.html   It is really inspiring to see the dedication and hard work Brandon has put in to keep this project going and growing!

Thank you! I am working on my next couple guests right now.

Also they run a tad large and are loose fitting. I wear an XL in everything however in these shirts a Large fits perfect. We are sold out of XXL and XXXL at the moment and it might be a little while before we get more of those sizes. 

I should specify that while we have a great track record with finicky fish nothing works 100% of the time with all fish. This is still a very difficult species for the majority of hobbyists to have success with long term. With that being said we've had several success stories over the years with CBB.

Hello Buckeye Reef!
I'll admit to being AWOL for a while and I apologize. All my time is consumed by social media marketing and logistical tasks to keep LRS running smoothly. The last six months have been a 100MPH train ride and we've had a lot of great things happening. I spoke to Jesse earlier and he said you all had a great swap and we were happy to donate food to the raffles.  Here are a few highlights from the past few months:
We now have 12 podcasts uploaded to the ReefFrenzyRadio.com website and the most recent one was with Nuri Fisher the president of Piscine Energetics, which produces the PE Mysis shrimp products.  We launched a new website which offers HD printed shirts featuring our mandarin, as well as caps with the LRS logo. All the proceeds from sales help fund the numerous classroom reef projects we sponsor across the US. You can see the items at LRSswag.com. We filmed a behind the scenes video with Mr. Saltwater Tank TV and it was so much fun. The video can be viewed here: http://www.larrysreefservices.com/media-gallery.html LRS continues to supply food for cutting edge aquaculture facilities and public aquariums. We now have a dozen captive breeding testimonials on our website where LRS foods were mentioned as having made a significant impact on broodstock conditioning and egg production. They can be found here:  http://www.larrysreefservices.com/testimonials.html LRS continues to grow and we now distribute FOUR other premium brands to our network of 500+ retailers around the globe. Retail fish stores can now order PE Mysis (Frozen and pellet), Reef Nutrition, Coral Frenzy, and Masstick foods when they order LRS foods. We literally have become a "one-stop-fish-food-shop" for premium aquarium foods.  In September of 2017 our daughter joined the LRS team full time and now she runs the entire front office for LRS. She handles everything from answering the phones, processing payments, invoicing, ordering supplies, payroll, etc. I have essentially been replaced....lol. In addition to our daughter becoming a stakeholder in the family business, she was able to avoid putting our grandson in daycare. (The wife and I love having this little dude here every day!) As seen in the video above with Mark from Mr. Saltwater Tank TV my wife is in charge of all food production. Her team has grown and they do an amazing job producing more food than most can imagine to fill the daily orders.  I'll leave you with a couple pics to go with what was posted above. I appreciate all of the support from our fans in Ohio and from the sales volume our dealers experience I know your fish are enjoying LRS foods!
Please follow us on FB at Larry's Reef Services or friend me as Larry DuPont. Day to day tasks often make it difficult to check all the forums but I am very active on social media. Find me on IG and Twitter as #reeffrenzy.
 
Thanks again everyone!
Larry DuPont
Owner/Founder LRS Foods, LLC.
Erica in her home office at LRS HQ.

Typical shipping day every Mon, Tues, Wed.

Unpacking part of a weekly Reef Nutrition order of Tigger-Pods

Mandarin shirts have a wrap around design so the tail is on the back.