At South Coast, all frozen products are hand-cased for quality control.
Upon exiting the freezer, cookies pass through a Thermo Scientific metal detector before they are greeted by three packaging line workers who execute the final quality inspection before placing the sheets in cases. “That’s the secret sauce,” Mr. Kallesen said. “They’re our last defense on quality; they know not only the cookies’ shape and size but also how we package it. Our customers pay for that. And these people make sure the cookies are put in these boxes correctly and uniformly.”
Although the overall packaging area is in stages of automation, the case packing is something that Mr. Hayden believes should always receive the human touch. “I don’t believe in automating the placement in the box,” he said. For one, as Mr. Hayden pointed out, the operators know the ins and outs of packaging and can recognize when something’s off. “It’s a big deal for our customers if a puck is missing from a $4.99 or $6.99 sell unit. If it’s missing one puck out of a case of 300, there are 11 that get wasted. That’s why I rely on the quality control.”
Aside from case-packing, the remainder of packaging, including case erecting, bag inserting and box closing are either automated or on its way to automation, all through ABC Packaging, depending on the line.
“We bring technology in one step at a time,” Mr. Hayden explained. “When we first opened, it was all manual case erection because I was completely focused on quality and consistency of the product.”
On Line No. 1, all these stages are now automated with an ABC line. “When we had that right, we brought in an automatic box erector; when we got that right, we brought in the box closer, then the automatic bag inserter. Now that all of that is right, we’ll add an automatic palletizer next.”
While Line No. 2 had already incorporated the automatic box closer, it is has just begun to install the ABC case erector and bag inserter. The next stage will also include an automatic palletizer.
Once frozen product is cased, closed and sealed, and before it heads to the freezer to await the green-light for shipment, a label is printed and applied to each case. “We don’t maintain any stock on labels,” Mr. Hayden noted. “To me, you’re asking for a food safety disaster if you have printed labels lying around that could end up on the wrong product.” Instead, a blank roll is printed and applied on each case one at a time.
On each label, a yellow highlighted box indicates the lot code and batch information to close the loop. “If a customer has a question, or there’s ever an issue, we can get the information from the yellow box and track it,” Mr. Hayden said. “We can track everything.”
As part of its GFSI certification, South Coast must be able to, within four hours, track any product from raw materials to 99% accountability for where it is. “GFSI put us to that test. They walked through the plant and would pick up a box in the freezer and hypothetically say, ‘The flour in this was contaminated,’ and we were able to track down within the hour where every one of those cases was sent.”
Learn more about South Coast's testing regiment in the next section.
