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Food Plant Design - New Plant

Market Maneuvers

Refrigerated & Frozen Food Magazine

A discussion about food plant facility design with John Cavanagh, director of engineering for Blount Seafood Corp., Fall River, Mass. Blount opened a new 65,000-square-foot plant in Fall River at the end of 2004. The operation processes frozen soups and sauces, crab cakes and other specialty food products for foodservice and retail channels.

Refrigerated & Frozen Foods: It’s not often that companies build a new facility. What prompted your move?

John Cavanagh: We were fortunate to have increasing customer demand create the need to expand our manufacturing operations.

R&FF: What were a few of your “must-have” attributes when designing a facility?

Cavanagh: Our team (Team Blount) required the food manufacturing capability to produce the highest-quality food products and a facility designed to be lean and cost-effective. A lot of resources were dedicated to maximize energy efficiency, flexibility and the ability to expand in the future.

R&FF: How did food safety concerns affect design decisions?

Cavanagh: We place the highest priority on food and personnel safety. In designing our new plant, we integrated automated process equipment and controls, hands-free sinks and other sanitation equipment and a full QA micro test lab. We viewed all these elements as “critical” to supporting food safety programs.

R&FF: How did employee safety concerns affect design decisions?

Cavanagh: Building a new facility gives you the opportunity to do things right in all areas. Personnel protection is no exception. As an example, we placed the vast majority of our refrigeration systems’ valves and controls outside the building to minimize the potential risk of employee exposure. We also incorporated ammonia detection, sprinklers and alarm systems that meet, or exceed, all building code requirements.

R&FF: Did other processing concerns affect design?

Cavanagh: Issues of flexibility and operations efficiency were very important to us, and we continue to develop our lean enterprise systems on an ongoing basis. In building our new plant, we designed our facilities to provide the right physical plant and process technology — in the areas of customer support, product development, manufacturing operations and logistics — to be able to maximize the value stream of all of our products. As an example, company associates in all major areas had significant input in the plant layout designs, including the proximity and layout between functional groups, and we provided the equipment and software to facilitate material and process flow in manufacturing and customer service.

R&FF: How did issues of new product development affect your thinking

Cavanagh: Our food science and culinary personnel were key design team members in developing our new R&D facilities. We were able to significantly expand our pilot-scale equipment capabilities and provided built-in customer demonstration and meeting space.

R&FF: What else influenced your decision-making process?

Cavanagh: Ease of access to major highways was one of our primary site selection requirements. Our site was designed to provide very efficient truck access to our plant and to accommodate future expansion. Also, in the area of building design, we incorporated LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) engineering standards to achieve maximum plant energy efficiency. Specifically, we increased levels of building insulation, upgraded to premium-efficiency motors, recycled construction materials on-site and installed advanced refrigeration, HVAC and water recycling systems.