A look inside the plant of yogurt giant Dannon

At A Glance

The Dannon Co., Minster, Ohio

Interstate Milk Shipper Plant 135: IMS Ratings — 90% raw milk, 90% enforcement (April 2012)

History: The first production of yogurt was in 1968, with a larger facility built in 1977. Major renovations began in 2006, and since then, have continued every year.

Size: 336,000 square feet on nearly 30 acres

Employees: 400. Four crews work 12-hour shifts on production. The plant operates seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

Products made: Yogurt and cultured dairy beverages. Brands are Activia and Activia Light, Light & Fit, DanActive, Danimals Crush Cup and Drinks, Dannon Oikos, Fruit on the Bottom and other flavors. In all, the plant produces more than 100 SKUs.

Processing capacity: Approximately 2 million pounds a day

Storage silos: More than 50 100,000-pound tanks

Pasteurization types: High-temperature/short-time (HT/ST) and higher heat/shorter time (HH/ST)

Lines: More than 10 packaging lines, handling pre-formed quarts, drinks and form-fill-seal cups

Warehouse: More than 2000 skid positions

Auglaize County is a prosperous agricultural region in west central Ohio where the median household income is about $52,000 and the poverty rate is 7%, well below the state’s level of 14%. One town in the county is Minster, located about 50 miles north of Dayton. It was settled in 1832 by German immigrants. Minster’s town crest reflects the heritage of its founding fathers. The crest includes a Christian cross and two pagan symbols important to Saxons — an acorn and horse heads. A fourth symbol is a canal boat.

In 1843, the Miami and Erie Canal linked Minster to New York and New Orleans. While the waterway is long since defunct, this little town (population 2,800) continues to send products across the United States. It is home to The Dannon Co., which has been making yogurt in Minster since 1968.

Brothers Will and Paul Meyer operated a dairy in Minster. In 1968, Dannon (then owned by Beatrice Foods) leased space from the Meyers and taught them how to process yogurt. They made 13,646 cups. The next year, they turned out 1.2 million cups. Currently, Dannon can process more than 3 million cups a dayfrom this one plant. (Dannon also operates refrigerated yogurt production facilities in Fort Worth, Texas, and West Jordan, Utah.)

An array of about 10 form-fill-seal machines is the reason for the high volume. Each highly automated machine is monitored by one skilled person, who works a 12-hour shift. There are two lines for beverages. The other lines process blended and cup-set yogurts. Dannon has more than 100 SKUs and each SKU is made once or more per week depending on volume forecasts. (See “At A Glance” for the brands.)

Dairy food processing begins with milk, and Dannon requires a lot of it.  The facility accepts more than 2 million pounds a day. Tankers deliver milk 18 to 20 hours a day. More than three-quarters of the milk comes from within a 100-mile radius, with the remainder coming from slightly further away.  Dannon would like to find a direct milk source in Ohio, similar to its arrangement with Kansas’ McCarty Family Farms, the exclusive supplier to the Fort Worth plant from dairy farms in northwest Kansas. The deal reduces price volatility and provides other benefits. In 2011, when Dannon announced the McCarty partnership, Michael Neuwirth, senior director of public relations for Dannon, referred to the environmental benefits of the arrangement. 

“Seeking ways to continuously reduce Dannon’s environmental impact has been limited based on the indirect relationship between our company and dairy farmers through a co-op.” Now, Dannon and McCarty can collaborate on eco-friendly projects, he said.

Regardless of the source, Dannon’s appetite for milk is voluminous. When Dairy Foodsvisited in March, a fifth raw milk receiving bay was under construction. The company may build a separate milk receiving station across the street from the processing plant in order to ease traffic flow and reduce congestion around the plant.

Milk deliveries are double-checked for accuracy. Trucks are weighed and flow meters measure the volume. Actually, milk flows two ways in the plant. In addition to receiving milk, Minster ships out 200,000 pounds of cream (in four tankers) every day.

An onsite lab tests milk for coli form, yeast, mold and other characteristics. The lab also runs a full slate of tests that determine protein levels, butterfat content, viscosity and organoleptic factors. The plant falls under the jurisdiction of the Ohio Department of Agriculture and the federal Food and Drug Administration. In the April 2012 Interstate Milk Shippers List, the Minster plant scored 90% on raw milk and 90% on enforcement.

Product testing occurs on the production line. Operators pull product every 30 minutes to check packaging and sensory characteristics. When there is a flavor changeover, the same tests are performed again, this time with a quality lab technician. Finished products are kept in a cooler for their shelf life and subjected to organoleptic testing.

On the production floor

After milk is tested and accepted, it is pasteurized, separated and homogenized.  Processing requires a lot of heat, so dairy plants try to recover and re-use heat whenever possible. A re-generation feature on the plate heat exchangers recovers the energy expended on pasteurized milk and uses it to warm up cold, not-yet-pasteurized milk. This gets the milk up to pasteurization temperature quickly, so less heat is required.

Milk is pumped to fermentation vats with capacities of 100,000 pounds of milk. Depending on the product, the milk ferments from six to nine hours. In the last five years, Dannon invested tens of millions of dollars in capital equipment on processing expansion and new packaging lines, said plant manager Doug Roy. He cited the plant’s “best-in-class” valve technology which continues to enable the plant to drive world class efficiencies.

What is striking about the Minster plant is how automated the lines are. In a form-fill-seal machine, plastic roll stock is formed into yogurt cups and sealed immediately after filling. Minster has about 10 such lines. Roy notes that this is an efficient processing and packaging method, and one that provides the highest level of food safety. One person operates an entire line. These highly skilled operators have a great sense of pride in their work and the products they make. Many have worked for Dannon for more than 30 years. Along with a strong work ethic in Minster, there is also a strong teamwork-based atmosphere where production operators support each other’s lines when problems arise.

 On the beverage lines, Dannon uses blow-molded bottles. The bottle vendor has a plant on-site and can feed bottles from the ceiling to a hopper at the front of each beverage filling line. Bottles are filled, a shrink label is applied and the packages are coded and dated.

At the end of the production lines, the freshly filled yogurt packages and beverages are assembled on pallets. Automated guided vehicles pick up the pallets and convey them to the cooling tunnels. The AGVs are guided by mirrors in the area.

The pallets are built to allow maximum air flow to speed cooling. From the tunnel, the product moves to a storage cooler that can accommodate approximately one day’s worth of production. Then the products are moved out to distribution centers in Dayton, Ohio, and Orefield, Pa. Other Dannon DCs are in Salt Lake City and Fort Worth, Texas.

Energy efficiency, employee safety

Form-fill-seal and the AGVs are examples of how Dannon uses automation for efficiencies in production and energy, as well as for safety.

“Our automation control of all processes is comprehensive and sets a new standard for operations and quality control,” Roy said.

A plant as large as the one in Minster requires a lot of heating, cooling, lighting and water. Dannon has installed high-efficiency compressors, pumps and boilers that vary their energy levels based upon the real-time demand of the facility, Roy said.

“Matching the creation of utilities with consumption on a real-time basis provides the optimum cost efficiency for the plant. We also do a lot of chemical recovery and water recovery through programming and monitoring devices during CIP,” he said.

Dannon has a goal of zero safety incidents. It follows traditional practices like lock-out/tag-out, communications and auditing. But the real key to reducing safety incidents to zero is to instill “a culture of peer-to-peer behavior-based safety,” said Roy, who worked in an automotive plant before joining Dannon. The culture is one in which “we are all looking out for one another’s safety,” he said.

Employees cannot escape the safety message. Outlines of footsteps leading to the production area mention safety. In the area where employees wash up before their shifts is a bulletin board titled “Why I’m Safe Every Day.” Employees have pinned photos of family members and others important to them.  Another banner states, “Safety Begins With Me.”

Safety teams instruct employees on best practices in manufacturing. Video cameras on the production lines allow team members to observe work habits and behaviors that need correction, such as improper lifting techniques or reaching under or over equipment.

Elsewhere on the production floor, focus improvement teams analyze why things break, and how to minimize technical downtime. Measuring, analyzing and correcting help any business to improve and become more efficient. Dannon uses various metrics to gauge risk and measure efficiencies. For example, it tracks losses of milk and protein, which are valuable inputs for a yogurt processor.

Key indicators followed at Minster are:

• Safety (measurements include lost time, recordables and near misses)
• Quality (consumer comments, first-time quality, internal process conformance)
• Cost (product losses, line losses of packaging material, labor costs, energy use, chemical costs)
• Delivery (plant efficiency and product service level)
• Motivation (engagement, attendance, team involvement)

Dannon has no plans on slowing down. In the last year alone, it invested $88 million in this plant. This may create up to 100 new jobs in the area over three years. Dannon is also considering an expansion of cold storage and increasing storage space for packaging material. To keep up with the pace of change at Minster, there are project management teams dedicated solely to capital installations and other teams working on equipment commissioning. Teams focused on specific projects “can be highly successful when completely dedicated to this effort,” Roy said.

The barges and mules on the Miami and Erie Canal are long gone. The canal has been developed into a hiking trail. These days, refrigerated tractor trailers filled with Dannon products connect Minster to the rest of the world. The town’s founding fathers no doubt would be proud.