TCCA’s new ice cream plant in Decatur, Ill., supports its strategy to meet rising demand on the East Coast.
Packaging World
Tillamook County Creamery Association (TCCA) is expanding its manufacturing operations beyond its Oregon home, launching a new ice cream plant in Decatur, Ill.
Opened on June 4, the new facility answers rising East Coast demand, following Tillamook’s 2017 decision to expand beyond the Western U.S. The company sold about 27 million gallons of ice cream in the U.S. in 2024 alone, reaching about 15 million households, according to David Booth, TCCA president and CEO.
“You would think a majority of that was in the Western part of the U.S., but honestly, today, we sell more to households in the Eastern U.S.,” says Booth. “You can see the importance of building this facility in Decatur, to get closer to our customers and consumers; it’s so important.”
Renovating an old plant to satisfy new consumers
The facility is just under 60,000 sq ft, and not far from Decatur’s downtown. Its structure is over 100 years old, and before some time spent vacant ahead of TCCA’s arrival, it was also an ice cream plant.
While TCCA was able to inherit and retrofit some equipment from the previous tenant, renovating the plant up to modern standards took an investment of around $65-70 million.The company renovated an over 100 year old building for its new Decatur facility.TCCA
“This plant was very well-built in its day. It’s all concrete,” explains Mike Bever, executive vice president, chief supply chain officer at TCCA. “But a lot of that concrete had some breakdown over the years, and so we ended up having to go in and put a steel superstructure under a lot of those concrete floors. So, what was a very strong building to start is now probably indestructible.”
Renovation costs also included bringing in new automated machinery, and quality-of-life changes like opening windows to add natural light.
Now that the facility is up and running, TCCA plans to produce about 3 million gallons of ice cream there in the first year and ramp up to 15.5 million gallons at full capacity over the next several years.
“Overall capacity here is significantly greater than our ice cream plant in Oregon,” says Bever. “It will be more than double the capacity of that plant.”
The plant’s workforce will also ramp up accordingly, starting with 50 new jobs upon opening, and rising as production scales.
Part of the growth plan is to scale up operating days per week. “We are currently running four days per week, 20-hour days. We shut down to do CIP, and it’s taking us about four to six hours to CIP as we get these folks trained up,” says Ruben Urrutia, TCCA’s director of plant operations in Decatur. “But we will eventually convert to a seven-day workweek, 20 hours per day. That’s the plan in 2026.”
Watch this video tour from the TCCA plant's opening day.
Automated carton forming above
A Dyco Inc. staging area holds assembled cartons before they are sent to filling.Packaging WorldTCCA’s packaging operation is situated across two levels, starting with carton assembly on the upper floor.
To assemble family-size cartons, “we take flat pieces of poly-coated paper, and carton formers will wrap, roll, attach a bottom, heat seal it all together, and do it at about one every second,” says Steve Marko, senior director of R&D at TCCA.
Those assembled cartons fill up a Dyco Inc. staging area, along with premade lids which enter the equation through a Huhtamaki feeder system. Once ready, the cartons head through a drop chute down to the filling room in the floor below.
The assembly room may be full of machinery, but it only requires a single worker to operate. “There’s a lot going on, but all they have to do is stage the sleeves, and the machine takes over. Fill the lids, and the machines take over. It makes it pretty efficient, a bit less stressful,” says Marko.
The next steps in packaging below
Filling and end-of line equipment take up much of the facility’s lower floor.
Separate filling lines handle family-sized ice cream cartons and three-gallon tubs for retail customers like hotels and sweet shops. The fillers operate at a rate of about one per second on the family-size side. The tub-side filler has capacity to run about 12 tubs per minute but limiting it to three to four tubs per minute satisfies the company’s demand.TCCA's family-size filling line fills cartons at about one per second.TCCA
After filling on the family-size side, workers quickly conduct checks for proper seals and lid placement. The cartons then pass through a metal detector to check for foreign material, and then onto a scale to ensure the correct weight. “If it doesn’t meet weight, automatically an arm comes through and rejects that can immediately, and it never gets through the system,” says Marko.
Following quality checks, the family-size cartons head to a spiral freezer at about -30° F, while the three-gallon tubs go to a blast freezer. The ice cream fills at a consistency similar to soft-serve for easy pouring, so spending about 90 minutes in the freezer hardens it before end-of-line packaging.
After the family-size cartons exit the spiral freezer, they enter a shrink bundler, automatically setting them in six-packs with plastic wrap. A shrink oven tightens the plastic wrap around the packs, and a worker moves the wrapped packs onto pallets.
TCCA has plans for further automation with robotic palletizing, which “we most likely will have before the end of 2026,” says Urrutia.
With a scalable production line in place and further automation on the horizon, TCCA’s Decatur facility marks more than just a geographic expansion; it’s part of a broader shift in the company’s ambitions.
“This little brand has been around in the ice cream business since the ‘40s, and quite honestly, we just never put the growth aspiration behind it, which we started to do in 2017,” says Booth. “This facility has been years in the making. It took tremendous vision, cooperation, collaboration with many individuals and community partners, but it’s just a step forward in our vision of tremendous growth into the future.”
Watch this video tour from the TCCA plant's opening day.
Editors report on distinguishing characteristics that define each new product and collected video demonstrating the equipment or materials as displayed at the show. This topical report, winnowed from nearly 300 PACK EXPO collective booth visits, represents a categorized, organized account of individual items that were selected based on whether they were deemed to be both new, and truly innovative, based on decades of combined editorial experience in experiencing and evaluating PACK EXPO products.
Explore our editor-curated report featuring cutting-edge coding, labeling, and RFID innovations from PACK EXPO 2024. Discover high-speed digital printing, sustainable label materials, automated labeling systems, and advanced traceability solutions that are transforming packaging operations across industries.
The company renovated an over 100 year old building for its new Decatur facility.TCCA
