Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - November 2008 - (Page 20)

2008 Executives of the Year Ramon Avila, packaging specialist, has been part of the Snak King family for 29 years. Continued from page 19 Arturo Lopez, tortilla chip operator, tracks the progress of one of the three tortilla chip lines on a PLCcontrolled machine. to be cleaned. The sanitation team self-audits its work and then relies on a secondary audit completed by the quality team for veriﬁcation. Third-party audits, many done by Snak King’s customers, verify that the company’s total quality systems are effective. Each private label customer performs its own type of audit, resulting in a much tighter ship, Jones says, and because Snak King co-packs and manufactures private label products and snacks sold under its own brands, the operation has to be more demanding on quality and consistency. From a production perspective, the plant follows strict processing procedures with regards to formulas and batch sheets. The plant supervisor and equipment operators review the raw materials that will be used on each product run while the quality control team veriﬁes the materials being used. Conﬁrming what’s being produced against what’s listed on the package runs in a similar fashion. The supervisor and quality control team compare the information on a package against the list of materials being used to ensure the line is producing exactly within the listed speciﬁcations. The plant runs three, eight-hour shifts, ﬁve days a week. All products are made-toorder and ship within a week. Overall, about six lines run simultaneously. After ﬁve days of production, each line shuts down for two days of sanitation and maintenance. “We don’t run every line every day,” Jones says. “We have more processing capability than we need on a daily basis.” As a result, the company staggers production to allow operators to move from one line to another to produce additional products or to learn how to make different items. Most of the lines operate under similar procedures. Bulk ingredients are piped in and incorporated in an automatic blender. All incoming ingredients contain disclaimers for allergen and organic materials, which is crucial for complying with U.S. Department of Agriculture organic certiﬁcations or to meet Kosher criteria for some products. On a typical tortilla chip line, the ingredients travel through a series of rollers and sheeters, then through a roller cut- ter that creates the snacks’ shape before they’re fried at an average of 350°F. Then the product cools brieﬂy before traveling through a seasoning tumbler. The tortilla chips then head to automatic scaling and bagging in a form/ﬁll/seal bag. At various stages throughout the entire process, product quality is constantly inspected. Finished goods are packed into master cases, sealed, palletized and stretch wrapped prior to loading for shipment. The company relies on software to manage raw material, packaging and ﬁnished goods inventories. All raw materials and packaging are tracked using bar code “license plates.” At critical stages in the production process, each raw material’s “license plate” is scanned for up-to-theminute inventory adjustments. This procedure ﬁts nicely within Snak King’s overall just-in-time, produce-to-order system. For security, all Snak King employees enter the building by swiping an employee identiﬁcation card. The card’s six-digit identiﬁcation number tracks when the employee enters and exits the building and clocks in and out 20 Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - NOVEMBER 2008 www.snackandbakery.com http://www.snackandbakery.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - November 2008

Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - November 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Cover Story: The Comeback King Royal Treatment Let Freedom Ring New Products The Heat is On Engineering Management Going in New Directions Warm Up with Cold Treats The Final Word

Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - November 2008

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