Success is peanuts for skippy facility: the sole packager of a Unilever flagship brand uses hard work and flexibility to adapt to new demands

Food & Drug Packaging, May, 2004

Little Rock is the capital of Arkansas. It's also the capital of Skippy.

Unilever's 158,000-square-foot Little Rock facility; opened in 1977, is the only place in the U.S. that Unilever produces Skippy peanut butter. The closing of sister facilities in Virginia and California several years ago left Little Rock to carry the load.

Being the sole producer/packager of one of Unilever Bestfood's flagship products always was a big responsibility, and it hasn't gotten any easier. New products and packages have brought the plant's totals up to 13 formulations and 72 stock-keeping units (SKUs), including exported products. Among the recent innovations are Squeez'It, a multilayer tube, and the Skippy version of Carb Options, Unilever's low-carb extensions of its major brands.

"The pace of innovation has increased fivefold over the last few years, and that's very gratifying for us," says plant manager Patrick Mathieu.

Squeez'It plays into a couple of major food industry trends. Smaller portions, especially in packaging that is noticeably different from the mainstream form, allows for higher profit margins. And children like "interactive" food packaging and products--a trend that Unilever has tapped into in the past with products like Fun Fruits and Fruit Rollups.

"We have to look at the brand and understand what the consumer wants," says Stephen Gaeta, Unilever Bestfoods director of packaging in North America. "When we have a home run, it's because we all pulled together and hit a consumer need."

Squeeze play

Doing so has required some ingenuity, at Little Rock. For instance, Unilever at first looked into co-packing Squeez'It, as it does with Squeeze Stix, single-serve tubes introduced in 2002. But Squeeze Stix could run easily, with slight modifications, on existing single-serve pouch machinery already operating at many contract packagers. The problem with Squeez'It is that the fillers used for those types of tubes are intended mostly for personal-care products.

Little Rock ended up having to install a new line with a filler and a case packer normally used for products like body lotion. The product also required formula modifications and new processing equipment to obtain the lower viscosity needed for the product to flow out of the tube.

Mathieu is fond of breaking production statistics down by peanuts. The plant processes an average of 1.2 billion peanuts a day, storing them in silos that hold 200,000 pounds each. And, oh yes, it takes an average of 853 full peanuts to make every 18-ounce jar of Skippy.

The plant has four packaging lines and three processing lines. Of the latter, two are for full-fat SKUs and one switches between low-fat and Carb Options products.

Processing Skippy requires careful segregation and trace-ability--and not just because the plant handles so many different formulations. Even within the same formulation, plant personnel have to mix and match peanut lots carefully.

Going nuts

The peanuts go through a roaster for about 40 minutes, a process which turns the peanuts golden brown and the skins dark brown, leaving them very brittle. The skins are then rubbed off by high-speed rubber belts. Each peanut is then sorted by a vision system to remove poor quality peanuts. A first round of milling turns the nuts into slurry. They are held in storage kettles until a transfer to mixing kettles for the introduction of stabilizer (a mixture of cottonseed, rapeseed and soybean oils), sweeteners and salt.

This is a critical step. Once the stabilizer is added, the product can no longer be held still; it must be kept moving, or its viscosity will increase to the point where it can no longer be pumped. This means the product has to move throughout the entire packaging area in a continuous loop, with its temperature maintained above crystallization point by jacketed lines.

Scraped-surface heat exchangers are used to bring peanut butter to is filling temperature.

Jars, which constitute more than 95% of the Little Rock plant's output, are polyethylene terephthalate, supplied by Amcor PET Packaging. They are cleaned by a Bevco Model 150 rinser that turns them upside down and blasts them with ionized air.

Filled and closed

The jars are filled on an 18-head rotary volumetric filler from Pacific Packaging Machinery Inc. After passing through a Cintex metal detector, the jars are capped by a 12-head capper from the Pneumatic Scale div. of Barry-Wehmiller, with arms that pluck lids, from Owens-Illinois, from a chute and insert them into the chucks.

The jars are weighed by a Checkmate 2 checkweigher from the Hi-Speed Div. of Mettler-Toledo. They then go under a Lepel Corp. TR Series induction sealer that attaches the inner seals, carried underneath the lids, to the jar tops. A Trine Labeling Systems Model 7000 cuts and applies roll-fed vinyl labels. The standard labels are partial wrap labels, but Unilever Bestfoods occasionally runs full wrap labels to add room for recipes, promotions or other embellishments.

The jars are coded by an Excel Series 170i system from Videojet Technologies. A case packer from Standard-Knapp Inc. places them into corrugated trays in a 3 X 4 configuration. A system from Arpac Group shrink wraps them, and they are palletized by a system from Currie Machinery Co.