SMALL WONDER

Dairy Field, Sep 2004 by Dudlicek, James

Old Home's own brands and co-packing partners flourish due to manufacturing acumen at bantam-size St. Paul plant.

Officials at Old Home Foods say the company is growing so fast they'll need a new plant within five years.

In the meantime, it's clear they're making the most of what they have at their compact processing facility in a building shared with the company's corporate headquarters on University Avenue in St. Paul, Minn.

Fronting on a retail corridor and bounded by a residential area, the plant likely goes unnoticed by most motorists heading through the heart of Minnesota's bustling capital city, unaware that some of the state's top-selling yogurt, sour cream and other cultured dairy products are made there.

It's from this 30,000-square-foot, two-level facility, which dates back to the turn of the 20th century, that Old Home supplies its 32 direct-sale distribution routes and other retail customers. Sour cream, dips, yogurt, cultured soy, organic and natural cultured dairy beverages are made at the plant.

"One of the things we pride ourselves on, because of our size, is being quick and nimble," says Robert Brooks, vice president of operations. "The culture at Old Home has always been to manage resources closely and put as much behind your brands as possible."

Smooth Operators

The genesis for all of Old Home's cultured dairy foods takes place on the plant's second floor, where milk is pumped up from the delivery bay for general processing.

The plant receives up to 150,000 pounds of milk every day, primarily from Wisconsin's Ellsworth Cooperative. Organic milk is supplied by Organic Valley in Chaseburg, Wis., while soymilk used for co-packed products comes from Northern Food & Dairy in Alexandria, Minn.

All milk is tested before it's released for HTST pasteurization. The pasteurized milk is pulled from two pasteurized tanks and moved to the blending tank, then to the mix tank. "All of our final formulas are batched up here," Brooks says.

From there, the bases formulated specifically for each type of cultured product are sent on to the plant's various production lines.

The newest line churns out Old Home's popular yogurt smoothies, introduced a year ago with a light version launched earlier this year. Four new culturing tanks are dedicated to the drinkable yogurt line. Along with the new filler for the drink line, they are part of a $2 million investment, Brooks says.

The tanks yield about 6,500 gallons of total culturing capability, helping Old Home produce 90,000 to 100,000 10-ounce bottles of drinkable yogurt on each of the plant's five weekly 10-hour shifts.

Yogurt base is piped into the filling room to the flavor vats. Brooks explains the smoothies are composed of yogurt base and a water/pectin solution. These components are combined and homogenized for stabilization before flavors and, if needed, colors are added; up to seven flavors are run daily. This combined mixture then moves on to the filler.

Plastic bottles are fed into the line's new 36-head rotary filler, which Brooks says will soon be equipped with a cap elevator to mechanize the currently manual task of keeping the machine supplied with bottle caps. "We're continuing to invest in this operation," he says.

Bottles are filled with product that has passed through a metal detector, then are sealed with tamper-evident caps. Samples are taken from the line every 15 minutes to be weighed, using a scientific calculation to determine whether or not the weight is off enough to warrant adjustment of the filler. Sealed bottles eventually wind up downstairs for packing, storage and shipping.

There are four production lines on the first floor, handling various sizes and varieties of yogurt, sour cream and dips. There's also a moveable bulk line - designed for 5-, 20- and 40-pound bag-in-box - that's set up when needed.

The products made here progress in a similar fashion; plastic cups are filled and a foil seal is applied, followed by a plastic cap.

Wire Service

The next step on the line is where Old Home truly differs - at least for the time being - from most of its counterparts in the industry.

Brooks says 90 percent of the plant's Old Home-branded products is distributed on 32 - "soon to be 33," he notes - DSD routes, and a significant amount of that product reaches retailers in wire baskets.

"Wire dictates our flow and has created some confinement as a result," he says. "The upside is it's very easy to ID the products. For the most part, it's going by the wayside."

As a result, Old Home will be making a "significant leap" in its jump to film-wrapped bundle packaging, Brooks says. Already, Old Home products are emerging from the plant in clear film-wrapped cardboard flats.

Old Home recently installed the latest in shrink-tunnel technology, allowing multiple sizes and packs of products to be wrapped at a rate of 55 to 60 finished packages per minute. "That allows us to run our fillers at top speed, which is over 300 bottles a minute," Brooks says.

Fed into the machine, cardboard flats of 12 bottles or cups move onto a sheet of clear film, which sticks to the bottom of the flat. The machine pulls the sheet over top of package, which then enters the tunnel for heat shrinking.