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Growth Potential
American Conveyor helps dairies increase production.
Ridgewood, N.Y.-based American Conveyor Corp. has been
building and installing container-handling systems for many of
America’s best-known dairy processors since 1993. From small dairies
like Monument Farms in Weybridge, Vt., to exceptionally large operations
like Garelick Farms in Franklin, Mass., and across the country from Sarah
Farms in Yuma, Ariz., to Velda Farms in Miami and National Dairy
Holdings’ Dairyman’s Dairy in Cleveland, American Conveyor has
installed hundreds of thousands of feet of dairy conveyor, including tens
of thousands for Dean Foods locations around the country.
American Conveyor’s strong customer support,
on-time delivery and willingness to manage entire projects — such as
Smith Dairy’s distribution center in Orrville, Ohio, including
warranting third-party equipment — has allowed the company to
experience double-digit growth each year since its inception. While all
equipment is fabricated in state-of-the art CIM production facilities at
Ridgewood, seven regional sales engineers and nine distributors are located
across the country to provide faster and more personalized customer
support.
American Conveyor’s competitors say that
American wins the business because of its “cheap” price, and
when you consider that American underbid the next lowest bidder by more
than $100,000 on a just-completed million dollar cooler project at Velda
Farms in Miami, it might be true. When you ask American Conveyor’s
customers why they got the job, they never say price. They say functional
equipment, excellent customer service and delivery when promised.
When Dean’s Garelick Farms was looking for an
“extreme makeover” of its shipping and conveying operations,
they called American Conveyor, a trusted Dean supplier. The Franklin,
Mass., plant processes more than a half million gallons of milk every day
and is the largest dairy operation east of the Mississippi. “The new
conveying and handling system decreased shipping and handling time by 40
percent and allows us to ship as many as 270 cases of milk, juice and other
beverages per minute,” says Cleland Cochrane, Garelick’s plant
manager.
Smith Dairy’s plant manager, Karl Kelbly,
contacted American Conveyor to explain he was searching for a more
efficient way to load trucks to enable them to decrease the time required
for load-outsays.
“Now it only takes 16 hours to load-out the
same volume of product that used to take 27,” says Dean Reed,
Smith’s project manager.
American Conveyor vice president Richard Dauphin says
the company is used to solving unusual problems for both large and small
dairies. “That’s what we do, but the logistics of a
distribution center separate from the processing plant made Smith’s a
challenging project,” he says. “By the time the project was
finished, their cooler would be expanded by 34,000 square feet and we would
design, build and install three unitizers, four de-unitizers and more than
5,000 feet of conveyor. We seamlessly integrated all the parts we built
with a third-party’s palletizer, another’s bossy cart
accumulation system and two software systems. Seamless integration was
important because the performance warranty for the entire system would be
on our shoulders.”
Building dairy storage facilities that match the needs
of its customers is what American Conveyor is known for, says company sales
manager Steve Winning. “Typically a small dairy might choose a basic
two-chain loop with a shipping line, a medium-size dairy a multi-loop order
and pick system or straight-line drag and drop system with one or more
shipping lines, he says. “Higher-volume dairies like Smith’s
might choose a grouping system that includes unitized handling, clamp block
storage or direct stack load-out, or very high-volume dairies like Wawa, a
high-rise storage and retrieval system. And depending on their customers,
of course, any size dairy might ask us to build a dolly or a bossy storage
system.”
Because American Conveyor understands that downtime
for its customers is money lost, the company maintains a full inventory of
parts for its competitors’ equipment as well as its own, and we
support a regional service team that performs maintenance and repairs
around the clock. “We have a reputation that we are very proud of,
says Troy Goudreau, American Conveyor’s service manager. “We
get new installations up and running without shutting down a dairy’s
operations.”
—
American Conveyor Corp., 1819 Flushing Ave., Ridgewood, N.Y., 11385,
phone: (718) 386-0480, fax: (718) 456-1233, e-mail:
info@americanconveyor.net, Web site:
www.americanconveyor.net
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