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Renovation reaps rewards for yogurt maker

New cup filling, accumulating, coding, cartoning and case packing equipment help Stonyfield Farm double yogurt capacity at its Londonderry, NH, headquarters facility.

After cups are filled, they index to a station where plastic lidding is heat-sealed to the containers (right), before an overcap
After cups are filled, they index to a station where plastic lidding is heat-sealed to the containers (right), before an overcap

Privately held organic yogurt producer Stonyfield Farm recently invested $2.5 million in new packaging equipment as part of an $11.5 million expansion/renovation project that's doubled capacity at the company's Londonderry, NH, headquarters facility.

Last December, two key new lines were the first to be up and running in a new packaging room. They are:

* Line 1, the plant's highest-volume line at four million cases/yr that fills 8-oz cups of yogurt at 260/min speeds, and

* Line 2, a multipack line that fills 4-oz cups of yogurt sold in six-packs (see sidebar, p. 36), at 240/min rates.

The company also runs three older lines. One packs 6- and 8-oz cups at 210/min, while another handles 32-oz cups at 100/min. Space also exists to add another new line. Presently, however, the company uses that space to semi-automatically fill yogurt into pails for foodservice accounts. Total plant capacity is now 200ꯠ cases/week, double what it had been.

Coordinating growth

"Consumer demand was rising quickly, and we planned for a national rollout of the multipack, so we had to be able to produce at a higher pace," recalls Mary Jo Viederman, the company's director of "cow-munications."

To coordinate its growth plans and manage operations, the company enlisted John Daigle. "He worked with General Mills' Yoplait Division," says Viederman. "There aren't many people with his experience in producing yogurt."

The expansion "has doubled the size of our filling and packaging area," says Daigle, vice president of operations. "Before we had three packaging lines, but were only able to run two at any one time due to our batch processing constraints. We were running 600-gallon batches. That meant we couldn't run very long before we'd have to make a changeover. That was time-consuming and complicated considering all the products we make."

During the batch-processing mode, Daigle says, "We were running approximately 100ꯠ cases per week, and it took seven-day-a-week production, with two daily packaging shifts and one daily sanitation shift. In that format, we weren't able to grow because we were already running as much as we could."

After carefully analyzing its processing and packaging functions, the company switched from batch to continuous processing. By doing that, Daigle says, "It freed us to run the third packaging line. We were able to run a more concentrated schedule, five days a week, and use the weekends for plant construction and other tasks."

Standardized machinery

While the processing change represented a major step forward, the two new lines enabled Stonyfield Farm to meet rising sales demands. Daigle's previous experience helped guide him in the company's search for the equipment it needed to build capacity. All of the equipment was purchased with standardization in mind (see Packaging World, Oct. '99, p. 91, or packworld.com/go/standardization).

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