Clockwork orange: juice business is booming, but SSI's Turlock facility always a dairy plant first and foremost

Dairy Foods, April, 2008 by James Dudlicek

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If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Well, maybe that's not the best way to characterize Super Store Industries' juice operations. Dairies have been making juices and drinks for years, sharing line time with fluid milk and other more lucrative products.

And SSI's Sunnyside Farms Dairy in Turlock, Calif., is above all else a food plant, and what food plant these days isn't coming up with new ways to maximize its manufacturing resources? SSI has been packaging juice in Turlock since 1994, six years after the plant was built as an ice cream and cultured facility.

At the plant about two hours west of San Francisco, up to 20 loads of orange juice arrive every week, along with daily deliveries of milk, cream and condensed. Chief among SSI's non-dairy clients is Minute Maid, for whom the Turlock plant recently inaugurated a 59-ounce plastic bottle line for the brand's new range of enhanced orange juice products.

Minute Maid supplies the recipes, ingredients and packaging, purchased on national contracts, for its lines packaged by SSI, explains Jeff Woodsmall, operations manager of SSI's Turlock Dairy Division.

Fed from a descrambler upstairs, plastic bottles hit the line already labeled and take a sanitizing bath in a vertical rotary bottle washer before filling. Two large, enclosed accumulators accommodate a rush of bottles as they wait for their turn on the filler, which operates at up to 140 bottles per minute.

Filled bottles move forward into a two-lane caser that boxes them up six per case. Sealed cases head up a spiral conveyor on their way to the cooler to await shipment.

Another recent addition at Turlock is the small bottle line, which fills containers ranging from 8 to 32 ounces at a rate of 120 to 230 bottlers per minute, depending on size and type of product. Juices, drinkable yogurt and flavored milk are handled on this line, including Lala smoothies, Juice Works nectarine beverages and SSI's own Sunnyside Farms Cowabunga single-serve milks.

Bottle caps are sanitized before they're applied by a 10-head rotary capper; a detector weeds out bottles with low fills or ones that managed to get through without caps. Finished product is bundled on Delkor SpotPak equipment. "We put a sleeving operation on the small bottle line, which expanded our abilities," Woodsmall says.

Among the products sharing line time at Turlock is the pomegranate beverage Pom Wonderful, a business for SSI that has grown from 4,000 cases to 10,000 per run in the past three years. Initially packaged in a glass bottle, Pom recently switched to a plastic container that mimics the look of the original unique bottle. "Pom is a challenging bottle to work with," Woodsmall says. "Once we overcame the static--the charging effect of the plastic--it went smoothly."

Turlock's chilled juice operation also packages 96- and 128-ounce plastic bottles and 64-ounce gable-top cartons. Supplied bottles are moved through a depalletizer that sweeps them into rows and onto a belt on their way to the fillers. A 30-valve rotary filler handles 125 jugs per minute; a gable-top filler does 140 cartons a minute. ESL-style fillers allow for more efficient, higher-capacity product handling; strategically placed accumulation units allow the fillers to run full time.

All orange juice arrives at the plant pulp free. Pulp, calcium and other fortifications are added as needed for the various varieties. The plant also handles bulk and tote packaging of juices and drinks for its partners and co-pack clients. The plant fills juice four days a week for West Coast customers, with operations sometimes running up to six days for nationally distributed products.

Still dedicated to dairy

SSI's Turlock plant is one of the few dairies in the San Joaquin Valley with a totally enclosed receiving bay (many California dairies sport open-air offloading areas) that can unload two trucks simultaneously.

All the milk comes from Dairy Farmers of America member farms within a 90-mile radius. Once it passes quality control checks, it's pumped into one of two 60,000-gallon raw silos. The plant also features two 20,000-gallon whey silos and a 20,000-gallon water storage tank for treated water. Used for blending juice products, water is treated at an on-site plant after being pulled from the local city well system. Treated water is pulled through several filters and a chiller before use.

The plant's three cultured filling lines handle 6 ounce cup yogurt, 6- to 24-ounce yogurt cartons and 24- to 32-ounce yogurt and cottage cheese. Three new Delkor SpotPaks are in use for cultured cup products.

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Cultured operations are being expanded with a new 40-by-40-foot fill room to handle business for a new foodservice customer. On two ice cream lines, the plant does round and square half gallons, pints and various size pails.

Finished products are stacked on pallets and shrink-wrapped, stored pending delivery in 23,000 square feet of cooler space added in 2002, when a 14,000-square-foot dry warehouse also was added for ingredient and packaging storage. Tricor software drives a computer-managed inventory tracking system that monitors shipments throughout the plant's delivery area that extends from the Oregon border south to Bakersfield and east to Nevada.