When Great Kitchens decided to upgrade its Brockton, Mass., plant last year, the operations and engineering teams faced a puzzle with many pieces and several obstacles. The first involved replacing the aging dough ball and press line with a much longer sheeting operation with a new oven and fitting it in the already cramped facility.

The next was reconfiguring the building, installing the equipment, keeping the second pizza line running during the project and supplying its customers with Pizzeria Uno deep-dish pizzas as well as its branded strombolis and calzones without missing a beat or its deadline for finishing the yearlong project in August.

“It took time to find the right vendors,” recalled Adam Jarosz, director of maintenance and engineering, Great Kitchens. “The challenge here was space and trying to fit a sheeting line in a 35,000-square-foot plant.”

That required the company to take a portion of its warehouse and convert it into a food-safe room for mixing and makeup. The general contractor spent up to six months doing everything from removing warehouse racks to refinishing floors to installing drains and adding utilities. Next, the plant had to swap ovens, getting rid of the oldest tunnel oven preparing for the installation of the newest Babbco oven.

“We ramped up the inventory so we could shut down the whole plant for one week for the oven swap,” noted John DeVriendt, the company’s vice president of operations. “We’re able to run pretty much every item on both lines so that gave us the ability to keep everything going.”

For the next three weeks, the plant installed a Rondo sheeting line and new tunnel oven. A giant curtain between the lines kept the single production line running while the project continued. With one line being down during the transition, he added, the company encouraged employees to use vacation time and rotated employees to give everyone their fair share of work hours.

“Adam did a phenomenal job getting the Rondo equipment all set up before their technicians got here,” DeVriendt said. “That bought us a ton of time. It really tightened the window.”

In August, the new sheeting line started up. Since none of the employees had worked on a sheeting line, the company allotted a full month to ramp up the line to full production, but it didn’t need it after the crew met its production goals on day one.

“Originally, the entire September was designed for starting up products,” Jarosz said. “That plan just completely went away because we were able to switch in between products. Everybody here from an operations group got onboard and became familiar with the equipment really quickly and how to make adjustments.”

DeVriendt attributed the smooth start up to a couple of factors. First, a thorough factory acceptance test resulted in just one minor issue with a motor during the installation. Second, the employees found the Rondo line easy to operate.

“They’ve done a really good job at making it user friendly,” he said. “I thought it was going to be very difficult to build the skills and knowledge on the new line, and I was incredibly surprised how smooth the transition went.”

Today, he added, both production lines can produce all of Pizzeria Uno’s products, which provides flexibility and greater capacity as the brand expands its presence nationally.

This article is an excerpt from the November 2024 issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on Great Kitchens, click here.