Baking & Snack - February 2020 - 50

KWIK TRIP

Left: The Kwik Trip
warehouse is a
metropolis that contains
automation for finished
product coming in from
packaging and going
out to the stores.
Right: Kwik Trip dialed
in automation on the
packaging lines to avoid
starving one line and
flooding another.

AMF bulk baggers and a Bosch individual bagger for hot
dog buns, followed by Burford Corp. bread and bun tiers.
"We spent a lot of time and effort to make sure each
individual line is getting product, and we're not starving
one and flooding another," Mr. Fonstad explained. The
bakery built in plenty of redundancy, so if one packaging
line goes down, it can fire up another.
Once products are bagged and tied, an AMF robotic
Versaloader loads bags into trays before they head over
to the warehouse, which takes up more than 1/3 of the
plant's square footage. In this 87,000-sq-ft space lives a
metropolis filled with somewhere in the neighborhood
of 80,000 trays stacked in towers up to 20 high. They're
managed by a Cimcorp order pulling system, the likes of
which is almost unseen in the baking industry.
The system manages the inbound and outbound items
with six gantries that are zoned inside three cells. Once
trays are stacked, product data leaves the AMF data control. "We transfer that data into Cimcorp," said Bruce
Burmeister, bakery production manager. "Cimcorp will
take trays and upstack them to 20 high, and the system
knows where to pick a spot on the outbound side to place
them. When the orders come in from the store, it will pull
those orders by store and route."
The system can grab a single tray or pull all 20 at once.
"It's like a sleeve over the trays," Mr. Fonstad said. "It clamps
onto them, picks them up, and off it goes."
Inventory is held no more than a day and a half before it's
transferred to the distribution center and loaded onto route
trucks for delivery to all 700 stores. To keep up with that,
the gantries move at 22 mph picking and placing product.
To ensure coworker safety, the cells are blocked off by fencing, and the system comes to a stop if anyone crosses inside.
Before, this was all was done manually, but skyrocket
growth made the sheer ergonomics a challenge for human hands. Kwik Trip discovered the Cimcorp system
in the dairy industry and is aware of just one other
bakery operation using this system. "This was an enormous job, and there weren't a lot of options out there,"

50 Baking & Snack February 2020 / www.bakingbusiness.com

Mr. Burmeister said. "Just imagine what it would take to
manage this many trays by hand."

How time flies
It's hard to believe that all this automation and data management was just two years in the making, even for those
who were directly involved.
"I never dreamed we'd be standing in this bakery today. After we built the one in 2009, I never thought we'd
build another one," Mr. Fonstad said. "But as Kwik Trip
has grown, we wanted to support vertical integration, so
our ownership - Don Zietlow and his family - knew we
needed to build another plant to support retail's growth."
While the new bakery may have been designed to accommodate four times the capacity of 2016 ... between
the c-store boom and the perseverance of the Wisconsin
work ethic, who knows how soon that day will come? Mr.
Fonstad isn't worried. "We have a lot of production hours
to fill up yet," he said.
One thing is for sure: No matter how fast it flies, Kwik
Trip has supplier relationships to stand the test of time
and a workforce that will prepare the bakery for the future. "The longevity of Kwik Trip coworkers is something we are very proud of," Mr. Fonstad said, noting Mr.
Walters' and Mr. Burmeister's combined experience of
more than 60 years and growth opportunities for younger
bakers such as Mr. Reimer. "Kwik Trip is the land of opportunity," he said. "If you stay here and work hard, you
can take on more responsibility and become a leader. Eric
[Riemer] is a great example of that."
At the rate Kwik Trip and the c-store market are growing - and as fast as the bakery is moving - opportunity
could knock at any time. "We knew the rates were going
to be extremely fast; that was the thing we were most impressed with," Mr. Fonstad recalled. "We asked ourselves,
'Can we build a plant that will make buns and bread that
fast?' You talk about it and hear about it, but when you
see the equipment installed and running ... it's simply remarkable how fast this plant is."

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Baking & Snack - February 2020

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