When making pizzas, the process is pretty straightforward, but at Great Kitchens’ pizza topping plant in Romeoville, Ill., with six lines producing over 100 SKUs at a capacity of more than 100,000 lbs annually, a million things must go right for the operation to have a good day.

Like a carefully choreographed dance, the operation appears in sync to the eye from a distance looking down from a mezzanine window, but each step needs to be coordinated on the production floor.

“The big secret in making pizzas isn’t rocket science,” observed Jim Campbell, director of operations for the company. “You’re simply putting ingredients on top of crusts. The biggest challenge is putting those ingredients on the crust accurately so that every pizza and every slice is almost the same.”

At any given time, he pointed out, each line is producing different products with various toppings from sausage chicken pepperoni cheese and margherita to different-sized crusts ranging from 6- to 16-inch round traditional pizzas to 6- by 12-inch rectangular flatbreads and everything in between.

“We have to balance efficiency and being nimble,” noted Campbell, adding the USDA-inspected operation documents productivity by measuring daily efficiency rates that include throughput, downtime, waste and more.

At the 155,000-square-foot plant, where Great Kitchens is also headquartered, about 650 people work on two 8.5-hour shifts five to six days a week, depending on scheduling and peak season demand.

Some 85% of the crusts are shipped from the company’s nearby bakery in Chicago Heights, Ill. Trucks shuttle dozens of pallets of frozen products throughout the week to supply various Quantum Technical Services topping lines at the Romeoville facility. Both facilities are BRC-certified operations at the highest rating for food safety.

On the production floor, two Deville Technologies shredders transform blocks of low-fat mozzarella into fresh cheese for pizzas throughout the day. Employees shuttle 35-lb tubs of cheese to the waterfall applicators on each line.

Campbell pointed out that production can be shifted from some topping lines to others as product scheduling shifts. Flatbreads, for instance, can be produced instead of round pizzas on some lines, if needed. Production can also be shifted between more versatile manually packaged lines to higher capacity lines with robotic packaging to balance out the schedule.

During Baking & Snack’s visit, the six lines created everything from 12-inch cheese pizzas to multiple varieties of flatbreads and even a take-and-bake pizza where operators carefully place marble-sized pearls of mozzarella balls to create signature product for a customer.

“We can add eight or nine people to a line to add ingredients to customize a pizza,” Campbell said.

On one of its high-speed lines, operators manually place two 12-inch crusts, side by side, on the Quantum line. After spot depositing of tomato sauce, a Grice waterfall applicator applies fresh mozzarella before a second applicator applies crumpled sausage or other proteins.

After applying the initial ingredients, Campbell noted, operators can add vegetables and other personal touches to the products. Following toppings, the pizzas travel through a nitrogen blast tunnel freezer, then to a Texwrap shrinkwrapper.

From here, the pizzas travel to the packaging department, where the company has invested in its top three high-speed lines with custom-designed Aagard robotic packaging systems. Campbell said designing and building the three systems took around a year to develop the first packaging system, installed about two years ago.

Space constraints in the cramped packaging department posed part of the problem, but Campbell noted that Aagard accepted the challenge. The other issues involved different sized cartoning for various pizzas to preserve the versatility of the production lines while boosting capacity and training employees to operate and maintain the system.

Overall, the automatic packaging operation is a five-step process. First, the system plunges and folds the bottom and front end of the cartons before the robots pick up and place three plastic-wrapped pizzas at a time in the open boxes. Next, the system mechanically closes the lids, tucks in the front flaps and stacks them. The cartoned products are then manually case packed followed by tape sealing, ink coding and palletizing, then sent to the storage freezer.

Campbell, who worked closely with Aagard on the project, noted that the system automatically signals to operators when the pizza cartons need reloading. Adjusting from one sized carton to another requires an easy manual adjustment, where an indicator light turns from red to green to show that operation has been properly set for the next run of products.

However, he added Great Kitchens had to work with its carton vendors to make sure the boxes were consistent in size so to avoid any jam ups or other issues with the highly automated system.

Admir Basic, president and chief executive officer, pointed out three robotic systems enabled Great Kitchens to reassign workers to other parts of the operation at a time. The move helped alleviate part of the labor staffing issues that many food companies have struggled with over the past few years. Moreover, the three robotic systems broke through a bottleneck and boosted capacity.

“The positive of labor challenges is that it makes investment in equipment more attractive,” he observed. “We found out very quickly that our largest bottleneck in this facility was in the packaging area. It was the number of people and that was limiting our throughput.”

In Chicago Heights, about 100 people work on two, 12-hour shifts on a single Rademaker production line at the 165,000-square-foot facility, noted Ingrid Soto, the bakery’s plant manager. Two 120,000-lb flour silos, as well as a bulk soybean system, supply two, 1,800-lb Sancassiano mixers that have the capacity to produce 10,000 lbs of dough an hour.

The high-speed Rademaker sheeting and laminating line is designed for high-volume production. After the dough is sheeted, it travels through a series of reduction stations, a cross roller and a docking station before it heads to a serpentine proofer, where the dough sheet zig zags from top down. Soto explained that proofing times vary on the product, depending on the product variety. The sheet is die cut into individual pies after proofing.

Following par-baking in a Babbco tunnel oven, the crusts cool for about 23 minutes in a temperature-controlled, enclosed spiral cooler.

In the 45°F packaging room, the round crusts or flatbreads are automatically stacked before they’re placed in plastic, food-safe bags for protection, then loaded into case packs before palletizing. For food safety, an inkjet printer puts a “license plate” on the pallet with a barcode, item number, description of the product and quantity of crusts or flatbreads. 

Afterward, the pallets are transported to the storage freezer for shipping to the Romeoville topping plant at a later date.

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