How do food companies continue to save money while remaining competitive with a high quality product?

With all the news today about rising fuel costs and inflation we thought we would share with you a short summary of how one global U.S.-based food company is cutting costs and fighting business inflation by consolidating their food production operations.

We recently caught up with the operation manager at an Ore-Ida frozen food processing plant in Ontario, Oregon.  This was out first meeting with Ore-Ida after they had installed a Pulsair Programmable Controller (PPC) sanitary air mixing system to streamline and control the blending process of two types of vegetable oils used in the cooking of their frozen potato products.

They were excited to share with us that they were saving more time and money by no longer using their old mixing methods. Prior to the installation of Pulsair System mixing equipment, Ore-Ida was utilizing a custom blending facility at a separate off-site location. The logistics of this operation required that rail tank cars of the two different oils would be off-loaded at the blending facility, blended, then reloaded into the rail cars, transported back to the facility in Ontario and off-loaded again.

The vegetable oils are now efficiently blended onsite in two stainless steel tanks and by utilizing the intermittent mixing modes on the graphical touchscreen PPC, Ore-Ida reduced the amount of nitrogen gas used in the mixing of their oils.  In addition to the time and cost savings, the use of Pulsair Systems allows Ore-Ida to exactly control the quality of their finished product.

What sort of cost cutting methods are you employing that don’t jeopardize your time to market or the quality of your products?