Marson Foods’ new 147,000-square foot- Hazelwood, Mo., plant is a wonder of bakery automation. From raw ingredient handling all the way to the freezer, only three people are needed to operate an entire line. The bakery currently has two lines — one for waffles and another for waffle sandwiches — but will eventually hold up to seven.

Built in 2022, the facility features 60,000 square feet for processing, 60,000 square feet for packaging, 18,000 square feet for warehousing and 9,000 square feet for offices. It runs four 10-hour shifts Monday through Thursday, with Friday dedicated to sanitation and maintenance. 

Production begins at a Cepi ingredient handling system, where major ingredients are stored in three 135,000-lb silos, two for flour and one for sugar. Marson Foods also uses an invert sugar system that converts granular sugar into its liquid sweetener.

“It’s something you don’t see very often,” said Tyler Wallace, Marson Foods’ chief operating officer. “You have a hopper that accepts granular sugar, and it goes through a heat exchanging system where you’re hydrating the sugar, stabilizing it with very small amounts of citric acid to dial in the correct pH, and then cooling it through another heat exchanger.”

This sweetener is stored in one of three 3,000-lb flavoring tanks. The entire ingredient handling system is expandable, Wallace said, and ready to support up to seven lines.

Major ingredients are conveyed to two bottom-discharge 1,600-lb Polin mixers, where two employees add minor ingredients. 

On the day of Baking & Snack’s visit, Marson Foods was making its Choc O’ Crisp Cereal Blast! waffles. After mixing, the bottom of the bowl drops out, and dough is transferred via incline conveyor to a Polin dough feeding hopper and Acemal divider, which can create 500 dough pieces a minute. Dough pieces then proof for 30 minutes, after which they are automatically transferred onto waffle plates before baking in an Acemal tunnel oven for 3 minutes. Once baked, waffles cool ambiently for 45 minutes. The line currently produces approximately 30,000 waffles an hour, or 300,000 per day. 

“The plan is by end of year we’ll be running roughly 2 million waffles a week,” Wallace said.

Once cooled, waffles are conveyed to a Syntegon horizontal flow wrapper and Mettler Toledo metal detector. A Syntegon robotic case packing system packs the wrapped waffles into 72-count cases for schools, conveyed from a Massman Automation case erector. It can also run 6-, 12- and 24-count containers for retail, which Marson Foods plans to begin running in September. 

“Most lines don’t have that — you’re either running institutional or you’re running retail,” said company co-founder Dave Marson. “We were able to take this technology and incorporate both.”

The line automatically rejects waffles that aren’t properly spaced heading into case packing, and these waffles are manually returned to the line. Marson said the highly automated packaging system offers huge labor savings.

“This saves 30 people per shift,” he said. “It pays for itself in one year.”

In total, just seven employees rotate on and off the entire line throughout a 10-hour shift.

“This whole line would’ve taken 100 people to run [without the automation],” Marson said.

The waffle sandwich line, which was nearly complete during Baking & Snack’s visit, runs almost identically to the waffle line. However, once waffles exit the cooling tunnel, a bypass system slides the waffles onto a fully automated sandwich packaging line, which runs 500 sandwiches a minute.

“It will literally slice the waffle, pull it apart, put the sausage or chicken on automatically, the cheese on automatically, the top on automatically, then send it into a wrapper,” Marson said. “It’s super flexible.”

Waffle cases pass through a Massman automatic sealer and are conveyed to a Massman robotic palletizing system. A robot picks and places 96 cases onto a pallet, which then passes through a Lantec stretch wrapper. Pallets are then forklifted to the bakery’s 7,500-square-foot freezer to await delivery. The freezer holds 1,200 pallets and utilizes a fully automated storage and retrieval system from Interlake Mecalux, which eliminates personnel from working in the harsh freezer environment.

Marson said he’s already planning additional automation for the plant. For example, he expects forklifting to be automated by AGVs within the year.

“We’re looking at each area of the business and then figuring out ‘What is an automated solution? What new automation is coming down the pipeline? Is there anything that can be improved?’ ” he said.

This article is an excerpt from the August 2024 issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on Marson Foods, click here.