BRENHAM, Texas-Among the suppliers of packaging and ingredients at Blue Bell Creameries Inc.'s anchor plant here in central Texas is a lumber supplier. Yes, lumber. The famous ice cream maker from Texas also builds its own pallets at its 500,000 foot headquarters plant. But it also operates six robotic palletizers that feed a highly automated warehouse and distribution system. And while Blue Bell uses the latest packaging materials for those containers and novelty wrappers that accompany its product to the end user consumers, those packaged products are put into waxed, corrugated cardboard shipping boxes that come back to the ice cream plant for re-use.
Safeway's Denver milk plant produces milk and cheese for the company's private label program. From its 80,000 square-foot facility, the company manufactures more than 450,000 gallons of milk and 275,000 lbs of cheese per week. The cheese products are sent to more than 1,800 locations in approximately 10 states and three Canadian provinces; the milk products are distributed to nearly 150 stores in the company's Colorado region.
To complement Anderson Erickson Dairy's new 17,000 square foot state-of-the-art cultured products distribution center in Des Moines, Iowa, the company was looking for the best way to automate the palletizing of its cultured products packaging lines. According to Norm Dostal, director of plant operations, the real challenge on this project was finding an automatic palletizing solution that could handle our wide range of cultured products package sizes and have the equipment fit into a fairly tight space.
Garelick Farms, a Dean Foods division, Franklin, Mass. routinely processes more than a half-million gallons of milk each day making it the largest dairy operation east of the Mississippi.
RIIHIMÄKI, Finland-Among Finland's most intrinsic national treasures are its vast, pristine forests, harboring berries, reindeer, mushrooms and moose, and linking the country's peoples to a key part of their heritage. Subsequently, this eastern Scandinavian nation's modern paper and pulp industry is one of its most important, and one of the most progressive of its kind in the world. So it is at once ironic and completely natural that Finland's dominant dairy company's most recent capital investment will allow it to reduce its use of paperboard boxes as shipping containers.
FDA (21CFR 131.110) describes milk as "the lacteal secretion, practically free from colostrums, obtained by the complete milking of one or more healthy cows." Milk obtained aseptically from the udders of healthy cows contains a very low number (<1,000/ml) of bacteria. However, since milk is an excellent growth media, microorganisms introduced during production and handling may multiply rapidly under conditions of marginal refrigeration(slow cooling and storage between 40)
BRISTOL, Wis.-As its company's desserts business has grown steadily in the last few years, management at Lakeview Farms, Bristol, Wis., realized that shrink wrapping costs were eating into profitability.
Have climbing fuel prices got you down? It is safe to say a 10% or 15% reduction in monthly fuel expenses would be worth your time and effort; would it not? You can reduce fuel expenses in four ways: Buy fewer gallons of fuel by reducing engine hours operated, maximize engine efficiency, reduce miles driven, and reduce vehicle rolling resistance. While you may presume that engine hours and miles driven directly correlate and are somewhat redundant, that is frequently not so.
The shelf life of a food is the length of time that a product is acceptable and meets consumer quality expectations. However, since the quality of most foods decreases over time, there is a need to evaluate how long products will maintain commercial value. Shelf-life testing measures of the quality factors that define the food and the point at which failure occurs.
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