JTM Food’s Wichita plant, which the company opened in September 2023, is fully automated, and Monty Pooley, president and chief executive officer, said that line speed and product quality go hand-in-hand.

“The analogy we use is that these pies are like little lightbulbs,” he said. “The fewer touches, the better the chance that lightbulb — or pie — is going to make it through the system looking like it ought to. Automation allows us to reduce touches.”

Although the plant is spacious at 195,000 square feet, leaders are keeping space tight for the first two lines to ensure they have plenty of room to expand in the future, with plans to eventually house eight to 10 lines. While the first line is producing 2-oz pies and has the capability for 1-oz products, the second will make 4-oz pies and will be capable of 3-oz as well. The equipment will be virtually the same, but the second line will be equipped to add a top drizzle.

The company was preparing for the second line during Baking & Snack’s visit, which is expected to be running in July. Pooley noted how important it is to ensure that the foundation, which is treated with a sealant to ensure there are no cracks or crevices where the new machinery will go, is done right before bringing in equipment.

“Once we get that infrastructure set, then really the easier or faster part is bringing in the equipment and putting it on top of that foundation,” he said.

The first line can make 358 2-oz pies a minute, more than 170,000 pies in an eight-hour shift. The line is fed by two 80,000-lb Gemini Bakery Equipment flour silos located in the plant, and outside GW Cobb storage tanks for oil, fructose and sucrose. Two 50-foot-by-50-foot Kolpak freezers hold raw ingredients and some finished product. During an eight-hour shift, the Wichita plant makes 20 to 25 batches of dough in a 900-lb capacity Sancassiano mixer. The doughs go into a Colborne Foodbotics table where dough is sheeted and filled. 

Fillings are all made from scratch in-house and are cooked in Lee kettles on a platform built by UDMC. Up to seven batches of filling are made each day.

After the pies are cut, they move to the dealer table then head into the 31-foot Heat & Control fryer. The warm pies travel under a Hobart glazer then are moved to an IJ White ambient spiral cooler. A Garvey accumulation system handles overflow, taking the pies onto a roundabout belt, and they are slowly fed back into the line as they head to packaging.

After passing through a Mettler Toledo metal detector, the finished pies go into the SACMI flowwrapper then the SACMI Trisealer picks and places the wrapped pies into boxes, and the boxes are hand-packed into cases before ending at the Lantec pallet wrapper. 

JTM works closely with third-party carriers to make consolidated truckloads as efficient as possible.

“In reality, once you place an order, you will have product in no more than 14 days,” said Larry Bilello, chief commercial officer. “It’s a made-to-order process. That production scheduling, logistics and final shipment have to be connected together to make sure the product is as high-quality as can be.”

JTM Foods has ambitious plans to expand the categories they inhabit, but also to find other avenues to serve consumers of sweet snacks. The Wichita plant shows the ambition and optimism of leaders focused on the future.

“We want to be the best choice in snacking solutions,” Pooley said. “We want to expand the portfolio of solutions in ways that make sense for our partners. If we work well with the categories that we have today, we could take that same approach and expand into categories where there are opportunities, and there are opportunities out there.” 

This article is an excerpt from the June 2024 issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on JTM Foods, click here.