In 1965, when Ray Kroc reached out to Northeast Foods’ John Paterakis, seeking a single-purpose McDonald’s bun supplier, the two entrepreneurs reached a handshake deal that blossomed into a massive business. Currently, Northeast Foods and its affiliate companies supply roughly 50 percent of McDonald’s total buns and English muffins in the United States. Paterakis’ company earned the opportunity to grow with McDonald’s business with its innovative approach to producing high-quality, low-cost hamburger buns, indistinguishable whether they end up in New England or New Mexico. The technology available to increase efficiency has changed over the years, and as a family-owned company operated by engineering-minded individuals, Northeast Foods has been an early adopter of the technologies that provide reliable, consistent products. And now more than ever, speed is the name of the game.

The company’s latest plant, Automatic Rolls of North Carolina, delivers unheard of production speeds to meet market demand at the lowest cost to date in the McDonald’s system. To get to these speeds, engineers had to roll out truly innovative solutions, earning Northeast Foods Baking Management’s Innovative Bakery of the Year award. According to Dennis Colliton, vice president of engineering, speeding up counterintuitively meant slowing down.

Speed and innovation

Automatic Rolls of N.C. is a McDonald’s-dedicated bakery location feeding two distribution centers that service more than 1,000 restaurants throughout the Southeast. The facility is capable of producing 4-in. buns at a rate of more than 1,400 rolls per minute. To achieve those rates, “we had to divide and conquer,” Colliton says.

Instead of a single makeup line, the engineering team, consisting of Colliton, Andy Black and Eric Mohrmann–both corporate engineers–and Richard Tommy, plant manager, went with a dual eight-pocket makeup system to produce rolls for a bun pan specifically designed to carry 40 pieces. This helped to bring the pan-per-minute rate down without sacrificing total output. A vertical two-in, one-out pan merge (pictured on the cover) delivers pans from each eight-pocket makeup line to a continuous proofer infeed at 35 pans per minute.

“We also have dual tray lines and three wrappers–to obtain these kinds of speeds, we had to dual everything,” Colliton says. “We run the pans horizontally to keep the speeds down.”

With the large specialty pans–Big Mac pans push 27 lbs. each–the team was forced to look at innovative methods of pan stacking and unstacking. Nothing existed that could handle the load for long periods of time without wear and tear–conventional systems would not be sufficient. They worked with various suppliers, and decided on a unique gantry robotic stacker/unstacker that gently maneuvers the pans using vacuum cups. The dual gantry system picks up the pans six at a time, stacks them and, at the same time, unstacks 40 pans per minute. The system is connected to an automatic storage and retrieval system for full automation–no human intervention is necessary.

The pans are flipped, brushed, air-knife cleaned and stored upside down, focusing their unusually heavy weight on the rims and relieving stress on the actual baking surface. Inverted stacking aids in food safety, also, as less airborne material and fewer particulates collect on the concave baking surfaces when they are inverted.

“That was always a problem with automated pan storage,” says Black. “All of the stackers out there stack right side up, and one of the complaints has always been when you’re ready for storage, you’re not getting that pan turned upside down like in the old bakeries when you were pulling the carts off yourself and flipping one upside down to keep it clean. We didn’t really have the option for inverted stacking until now. The robotic gantry was the biggest chunk, but it was a series of little things that, when you bring them all together–two mixers instead of one, two dividers instead of one, five-by-eight bun-pans instead of the traditional four-by-eight–all those little things added up.”

All buns leaving the N.C. plant are frozen, so the team borrowed freezer innovations from other industries, namely ice cream. The freezer system features a vertically oriented, four-story space for optimal energy savings and cool air retention. The storage and retrieval system in the freezer is
completely automated (AS/RS), so workers aren’t often asked to brave the -10°F inside.

A pallet infeed conveyor moves loaded pallets into the freezer. The system has several sections allowing loaded pallets to be staged for storage while the system continues storage and retrieval missions already in the queue. When the freezer infeed pallet conveyor presents two pallet loads to the AS/RS, a mission to pick them up is generated. The AS/RS picks up the load of two pallets, transfers it to an open space in the rack storage system. Meanwhile, the identity and location of pallets are retained in the system for accurate storage and retrieval.

The system allocates entire lanes for a single product type–only one product code (SKU) will reside in any particular lane. This permits flexibility in retrieving a product type by lot number, as it eliminates the need to move other products out the way when retrieving for first-in, first-out pallet shipping.

Operators enter orders for pallet shipments via 26 pallet-truck orders into an automated freezer system supervisory computer.

A supervisor identifies the order and requests product delivery to the shipping dock by computer while a trailer is docked at a truck door. Once the truck order is identified, the AS/RS performs the missions required to bring the requested pallets to the pallet outfeed conveyor. The system is optimized to perform the fewest possible missions to satisfy the shipping dock, calculating the fastest possible time for order retrieval.

Between the “double down” dual line approach, the creation of a specialty pan stacker/unstacker to handle extra-large pans, and the integration of a fully automated freezer/inventory system, the input to output flow at the N.C. plant is optimized for both speed and volume throughput.

“Early on, if you ran 1,800 dozen to 2,000 dozen buns per hour, that was state of the art. The new N.C. bakery produces 7,000-plus dozen buns per hour,” says Bill Paterakis, president and CEO. “Also, then you had 12 people on the line in production. Now we have six or seven, so we’re getting three to four times production with half the labor–driving costs down.”

Assuring consistency

For any McDonald’s supplier, the ultimate goal is consistency. Automatic Rolls of N.C. has a vision system in place to reject off-spec buns. Color, size, shape, slope, diameter, blisters, heel shape, flour on the heel and blotchiness are just a few quantifiable variables the system measures. When running seeded buns, the system does seed counts, addressing missing or discolored seeds.

The device relies on three cameras, one shooting from above recording color, seeds, etc. Another camera shoots from underneath, and also takes a line scan of the heel–piecing the images back together for measurements on the whole heel. A third, angled camera performs a laser triangulation measurement with a laser shooting down at a certain angle and a camera at a 40-degree angle. By measuring the difference in the laser height, the camera is measuring height and slope. The system measures and evaluates every single bun going through the system–at 1,400 buns a minute.

“And that was a challenge for the vision company,” Black says. “We added preventive measures all along the line as well, so if anything was out of spec as far as ingredient draws, if we’re over or under on any of the draws, that triggers the alarms. There are several steps along the way where if you were going to have variation, you would know about it, and the alarm would let you know right away.”

The alarm system itself is new to the industry. It consists of a voice alarm integrated with the processors on the lines. In real time, when an alarm is triggered, the system sends a pre-recorded voice alarm over the PA system. It also sends emails and text messages to cell phones, with a report that identifies where the problems are and how many minutes a particular machine may have been down.

“In a plant this big, with so many sounds, you can go kind of crazy with the buzzers and the lights. So the voice alarm directs workers to the issue,” says Black. “Sometimes you’ll get an oven alarm, or a proofer alarm, and you’ll see people go running. They know exactly where they’re going; there aren’t different buzzers that need to be differentiated in order to figure out where to go.”

Northeast Foods and partnerships

Bill Paterakis is always looking at what suppliers are doing that’s new and innovative. He challenges them; the ones that are progressive, the ones trying to add cutting-edge technologies, are the ones with whom Northeast Foods is likely to build relationships. The company isn’t publicly owned or owned by hedge funds, so it isn’t beholden to anyone in trying new things–Paterakis himself has an engineering background, and he looks for companies that share his forward-thinking approach.

“We have a long-term objective in our capital expense area. Most companies are looking for two- to four-year capital expense paybacks. We may look at that, or we may look at 10 years. If it’s the right thing to do, even long term, we’ll do it. When you look at N.C., there are some firsts in the industry. We are willing to take a few risks to achieve things that have never been done before if we can envision results that achieve greater efficiencies or reliability.”

For instance, Paterakis took a chance by partnering with a smaller, lesser-known supplier to create the new gantry robotic stacker/unstacker, but he recognized that the supplier was diving into the project as a risk for that company, too. The supplier shared Colliton’s vision, saw Paterakis’ end goal, and the two companies were willing to take chances on one another instead of making the safe play.

“At the end of the day, the logo says Northeast Foods, but without those suppliers and their own ingenuity, we wouldn’t be where we are today,” Paterakis says. “I think there are quite a few companies in this project that we’ll look to be partnering with in the future.”

A strong internal engineering staff has allowed Northeast Foods to be picky when it comes to supply partnerships. Colliton’s engineering team is very specific about what it wants out of a partnership, and takes much of the burden of orchestrating installations upon itself. They started with the basic concepts for the N.C. plant, knew that they wanted to go with speed and developed their sustainability goals. And before any suppliers were contacted, the team made a wish list reflecting input from their collective experiences in high speed production baking, or as Tommy called it, “a do it right the first time list.”

Certain bigger companies have been successful cutting back on engineering staff, relying more heavily on suppliers but Northeast Foods hasn’t taken that approach.

“I don’t know how you survive in today’s climate, with more complicated technologies, unless you have homegrown talent, and not just in design, but in the software being used today,” Paterakis says. “You need people who understand the technologies that are evolving at rapid speeds. We do a lot of stuff internally because we have a lot of good ideas, and we don’t always know where to go to make it happen, we’re lucky to have those guys. While the overall industry might seem to be relying more on suppliers, I can’t imagine operating multiple volume bakeries without a strong internal engineering department.”

Paterakis attributes his company’s innovation streak to McDonald’s high standards. “Their unique partnership approach to the business is refreshing. It motivates you to excel and fits right in with our own business culture. The trust that started with a handshake still exists.”

“The overall idea is that, to be a low-cost producer, you need to have high levels of automation,” Colliton adds. “We think we’ve achieved that here.”