Automation software increases blending efficiency for flour processor.
When Washington Quality Foods purchased the building, management installed all new equipment, including 25 silos for storing ingredients. Six of these silos contain more than one million pounds of flour while the others store ingredients such as sugar, salt and dextrose. "In designing this facility, our production and research people went through two years of production history to see what we use and how we use it," says Tony Murray, director of information technologies for Washington Quality Foods. "We came up with about 16 ingredients other than flour, and we built a tank farm to house those ingredients so they can be conveyed to the mixers automatically."