Garelick Farms, a division of Dean-Suiza, is the largest dairy operation east of the Mississippi, processing more than a half-million gallons of milk each day. Located in Franklin, MA, and in operation since 1931, Garelick Farms also produces cream, ice cream, sour cream, cottage cheese and juice.
Vacuum packs play a key role in delivering gourmet frozen meals from Grace's Kitchen Inc., an approach that is helping the Seattle-based firm gain freezer space in some of the fastest growing retail chains nationwide.
The package used by a Park City, UT, bottled water venture will take longer to decompose than the residence time of the liquid in its aquifer, which was carbon dated at roughly 20,000 years. That's not stopping Wasatch IceWater LLC from boasting about the earth-friendly aspects of its flexible pouch.
What do you need to know and when do you need to know it? A knee-jerk response might be that you need to know everything about your plant and you need to know it in real time. But in reality, fast data collection simply for data collection's sake won't save you money or improve your efficiency.
With a fluctuating economy and pressure to keep dairy prices low, the Maryland & Virginia Milk Producers Cooperative Association was looking for ways to improve product processes for its Laurel, MD, manufacturing plant, which processes butter, condensed milk and non-fat dry milk for use in infant formula, ice cream, candy and bakery items.
Finding ways to combine proud dairy traditions and modern technology is standard operating procedure for Norager Mejeri A/S. Located between Hobro and Aalborg in Northern Jutland, the Danish company is part of the Nordex Group. The dairy employs 80 people and produces 14,330 tons of feta cheese each year.
Something fishy was going on at Cordova, AK-based Norquest Seafoods, Inc. Production managers were faced with grinders that plugged up and overflowed when handling the remains of the fish products the company processed.
If RFID succeeds at the case level, what can you expect? A lot of data. Besides the IT bandwidth, data storage, data aggregation and processing issues, does this matter? If RFID succeeds, all this data means adequate information management has kicked in. Unfortunately, this will be a problem for manufacturing or processing operations, not just distribution centers.
With efficiency the battle cry of all processing plants, older equipment calls out for a makeover. This was the case with the positive displacement pump-style filler that had been in place on a salad dressing line since 1992 in Johnny's Fine Foods' Tacoma, WA-based plant. "The machine was okay when we installed it, but after years in use, the speed was not up to par and it was becoming increasingly inaccurate," says Henry Gumm, plant manager with Johnny's.
The appropriateness of carbon monoxide as a component in modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) for meat and seafood became a very public debate in February, pitting a natural-extracts supplier against some of the industry's biggest meatpackers in a match refereed by the Food and Drug Administration.
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