From a manufacturing perspective, Great Kitchens has focused on the fundamentals by applying discipline to everything it does. The Romeoville, Ill.-based pizza company has targeted manufacturing costs through better managing procurement by consolidating suppliers and the number of ingredients it uses.

In addition to simplifying manufacturing, the move increases the volume of each ingredient it purchases to control costs and ensure better delivery. That’s especially important because of the premium ingredients it uses, such as whole milk mozzarella and Fontanini meatballs.

Overseeing the company’s strategic plan is a combination of long-term Great Kitchens veterans and personnel brought in by Brynwood Partners, which purchased the pizza producer a few years ago.

They include Admir Basic, president and chief executive officer; Anand Srinivasan, chief financial officer; John DeVriendt, vice president of operations; Jim Campbell, director of operations; Adam Jarosz, chief engineer; Lucas Lehtinen, director of procurement; and Samia Shwaiki, director of human resources. Product development is led by Nancy Jose Cecil, vice president of R&D, and Barb Parks, director of commercialization.

“We’ve been able to fine-tune our commercialization timeline to as little as six weeks,” Basic noted. “Of course, packaging is the longest lead time in development, but we know speed-to-market in the perimeter of the store is key.”

Day-to-day production is overseen by the plant managers, including Joseph Bielanski at its Romeoville, Ill., operation, Ingrid Soto in Chicago Heights, Ill., facility, and Bruce Forman in Brockton, Mass., plant.

During the past year, the company has made strategic capital investments a part of its broader strategy to drive operating efficiencies, lower its costs and enhance the company’s capabilities to serve its customers and the market.

In the 35,000-square-foot, USDA-inspected Brockton facility, 140 personnel work on two, 8.5-hour shifts five days a week with two lines, including a more traditional dough ball and press operation and a new sheeting line that started up in August.

DeVriendt noted the project took one year to transform the warehouse to make room for the new line’s mixing and makeup areas and to upgrade the building to support it. He added it took only about two weeks to install the equipment in August to get it up and running.

The operation was supposed to be in the ramp-up period when Baking & Snack visited in September, but the transition from a traditional dough ball to the sheeting operation went almost seamlessly.

On the new Line A, operators manually feed ingredients into 350-lb mixers, which provide a continuous flow of dough to the Rondo makeup sheeting system. A bowl elevator lifts the dough and dumps it into the hopper of the extruder, initially creating about an inch-high sheet that’s reduced with two sheeting stations and one cross roller and features automatic trimming and flour dusting. The sheet then travels through a multi-tier proofer that operates at different times and temperatures, depending on whether the item being produced is deep-dish pizza, calzones or strombolis.

After proofing, the dough sheet enters a docking station and roll cutter. Here, DeVriendt said, the line can cut out individual dough circles that are automatically placed and manually pressed into deep-dish pans. For the “hand-crafted” stromboli, a roller cutter slices the sheet into four strips, which are manually filled with meat, cheese and other toppings, then hand-folded and crimped before guillotine cutting and sealing into 9-oz pieces before baking in the new two-zone Babbco oven.

Jarosz said the system requires up to 12 people to manually fill and fold the dough because of the high fillings-to-dough ratio, which limits automation, and to enable quick changeovers.

Line B has a Diosna mixer and a Reiser Vemag divider from which dough pieces come out single file, enter a cone rounder and travel to an intermediate proofer. The dough is sheeted into round dough pieces and manually filled with steak, cheese and other ingredients before rolling and sealing and baking in another Babbco oven.

For pizzas, the crusts are par-baked in the Babbco ovens before they’re cooled and filled using Quantum Technical Services cheese, sauce and meat applicators.

All products cool for about 45 minutes in one of two IJ White enclosed spiral coolers set at about 35°F. During Baking & Snack’s visit, the tubes of calzones were cut into 3.75-oz pieces to create Tastefulls Steak and Cheese handheld items.

The lines are also outfitted with Quantum Technical Services cheese, sauce and meat applicators for topping deep-dish pizzas. The products are blast frozen before entering the packaging department, which features a variety of flow wrappers, cartoners and metal detection systems before case packing, palletizing and freezing.

Great Kitchens recently invested in its Romeoville facility. Specifically, it added three Aagard robotic packaging systems that removed bottlenecks on its highest speed Quantum topping lines and allowed the company to move about 15 people per line to other positions in the operation.

Campbell, who worked closely with the vendor on the project, noted the first-of-its-kind system automatically forms pizza boxes before robotics pick and place three plastic-wrapped, blast-frozen pizzas. The system then automatically closes the boxes and stacks them before they are manually case-packed, tape-sealed, ink-coded and palletized.

Basic added the robotic packaging has enabled the operation to ramp up capacity. In fact, with investments in new topping and shrink-wrapping capabilities, the facility was able to produce more products on five lines than it did before on six of them.

 “These systems removed a significant amount of labor; it allowed us to reallocate people from the back of the line to the front of the line and to other parts of our manufacturing process,” he said.

Looking ahead, Great Kitchens is just beginning to write the next chapter as it invests in its operations and expands its presence in the market. The company certainly has a history of meeting great expectations. That’s why its motto is, “Great Pizzas Come from Great Kitchens.

This article is an excerpt from the November 2024 issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on Great Kitchens, click here.