The first thing you notice when you enter the Land O’Frost facility in Lansing, Illinois, is the pace of the operation. There are forklift trucks buzzing from station to station, pallets being stretched wrapped, and workers packing case after case of deli meats and hot dogs. After all, you don’t pack and ship 128,000 pounds of meat daily by moving slowly.
The second thing you’ll notice is how humans and machines work side by side. Every step in the packing process is designed to maximize the unique strengths of manual labor and automation. Their staff is both exceedingly knowledgeable and extremely friendly.
As Frank Mejia, head of continuous improvement puts it: “Automation means helping our employees have a better work life.”
This drive for improvement led Frank and Land O’Frost to Formic. Formic designed, deployed, and currently maintains 5 gantry style palletizing robots in their facility. These robots can each execute up to 12 picks per minute and have stacked more than 60,000 cases already. Formic also trained Land O’Frost line workers to operate the systems, so those same employees who used to stack boxes are now robot operators.
Frank Mejia, head of continuous improvement at Land O'Frost
A Business Built on Innovation
Land O’Frost was founded in 1941 as a cold storage business (hence the name) but expanded to encompass deli meats, sausages, and premium hot dogs. It’s a third-generation family-owned business that originated on the south side of Chicago and has grown to encompass multiple brands and staff more than 1,500 employees. The founder, Antoon Van Eekeren, came to the United States with $25 in his pocket, and his son Paul Van Eekeren designed some of the machinery in Land O'Frost facilities.
Their operation is a finely tuned machine, but they didn’t become that way overnight. Over the years, continuous improvement engineers like Frank Mejia have found repetitive tasks to automate. This attention to detail and steady focus on incremental improvements is how Land O’Frost continues to stay successful. In other words, this is how the proverbial “sausage is made.”
Desire to Improve Working Conditions, Labor Scarcity Drives Desire to Automate
Frank examined every step of their production and packaging process in search of repetitive, and thus, automatable steps in their facility.
Frank began to focus on palletizing due to the repetitive and straining nature of stacking boxes. He saw an opportunity to allocate labor resources elsewhere, reduce OpEx spend, and improve the day-to-day working conditions at Land O’Frost.
Another issue with the manual palletizing process was the difficulty of product changeovers amidst staff shortages and turnover. Land O’Frost is running various SKUs, meaning each time there was a product changeover, there was also a new pallet pattern. This represented a big challenge for Land O’Frost, as every time they experienced staff turnover, they would need to train their new line workers on each pallet pattern. This represented a big lift on the floor operators and led to an increase in training requirements.
Palletizing Robots Bring Operational Excellence
Land O’Frost facility’s packing lines before automation
The key requirements for functional palletizing cells on Land O’Frost production lines:
- Ability to fit within the constrained footprint (roughly 9x9 of available space) of their end-of-line
- Ability to stack up to 12 moves per minute
- Safety caging
- Ease of training and product changeovers
- High uptime
Frank had never worked with an “as-a-service” company before, but as Frank said: “Having someone handle the maintenance, it’s not something that we’re used to, but it’s definitely one of the key points for us. We’ve had very minimal downtime on the units because they’re being maintained by Formic.”
Another advantage of working with Formic is the adaptability. Formic worked with Land O’Frost to design a new end-of-arm tool to accommodate a new SKU, further enhancing their automated productivity.
Formic deployed all five gantry-style palletizing systems over the course of two weekends, programmed all relevant SKUs and pallet patterns, and trained floor operators to use the machines. Those same workers who used to stack boxes are now robot operators!
Formic’s partnership with Land O’Frost has not only simplified their changeovers and facilitated labor reallocation, but they are also saving 20% on labor-related OpEx every day. Perhaps most importantly, Frank doesn’t need to worry about palletizing anymore and can focus his time and attention on other facility improvements.
Land O’Frost boxes come down the production line, an operator presses a button, and a Formic robot handles the rest, until those pallets are stacked perfectly and ready for shipment.
4 of the 5 Formic cells working hard in the Land O’Frost facility