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Accuracy in complex filling

When small amounts of an ingredient need to be blended into a rice, grain, or dry baking mix product, accuracy and reliability are an absolute must. Honeyville gets just that with its auger fillers.

Honeyville uses a dual drop volumetric cup filler with staging gate to fill two containers at a time.
Honeyville uses a dual drop volumetric cup filler with staging gate to fill two containers at a time.

Respect, fairness, and integrity are more than just words—they’re guiding principles that Honeyville, Inc. has been following for more than 70 years. Those values also extend to the vendors they do business with, which is one of the reasons why Honeyville selected Spee-Dee Packaging Machinery to help them fill and package their grains, rice, and other dry baking mixes.

Founded by Lowell Sherratt in the early 1940s, Honeyville has grown to become one of the nation’s top producers of grains, flours, specialty ingredients, and food services to food manufacturers around the world. Today from its Rancho Cucamonga, CA, facility, Honeyville manufactures and packages millions of pounds of products every week. And the role of measuring, filling, and packaging much of that product falls on a fleet of nine Spee-Dee auger and cup fillers.

A core element of Honeyville’s business model includes blending many additional ingredients into its products. Honeyville has an in-house research and development department to prepare exact blending formulations for the several hundred brands it packages from its California facility. To accommodate this demand, Honeyville uses a variety of specialized blenders, each having a high-level capacity. After the product is blended in large totes, they are packaged, depending on application, in any number of pack styles, such as: horizontal fill packages, horizontal zip pouches, pre-made bags, pillow bags, flat bottom bags, cans (401, 502, and 603), paper cups, bag-in-carton, pinch bottom bags, bulk bags, and totes.

“Someone brings an idea, and we offer a variety of solutions to what they can do with that idea,” says Johnny Ferry, Vice President Marketing and Product Development. “For example, if they had a special family pancake mix and they wanted to spice it up somehow, we go back and sample it, and perform the necessary R&D work with them until we get it right. Then, when it comes to packaging, if they want it in a carton, cup, or can, we have the capability to do all that for them. We’re really a one-stop shop when it comes to food formulation, blending, and packaging.”

To package product, Honeyville uses nine Spee-Dee auger and cup fillers on its vertical and horizontal form/fill/seal machines, as well as its cupping and canning lines. After learning about Spee-Dee’s filling capabilities in the food industry at a PMMI seminar, Richard Larsen, Honeyville’s Vice President of Facilities, believed they would be a perfect Honeyville partner.

“As we discussed our numerous applications with them, we realized Spee-Dee would be a good fit for us,” Larsen said. “They understood our industry and were able to guide us. We started out with the rotary cup fillers on our cupping line, and that was the first time I had any experience at all with rotary cup filling. It took a bit of convincing to do that type of volumetric filling, but after sending them more than 30 different products to test in their facility in Wisconsin, we saw the results and knew we were making the right choice.”

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