56 DC VELOCITY FEBRUARY 2017
www.dcvelocity.com
applications
A look at how DCs are using equipment and
services to rev up their operations
Vieira’s Bakery needed more frozen storage capacity—and
it needed it fast (that is, before its fourth production line
came online). A producer of European-style breads, the
100,000-square-foot Newark, N.J., bakery had ramped up
operations in order to ship nationwide and to Canada. But
its physical plant had fallen short of its needs. To be precise,
the bakery needed more freezer space to store its 150-plus
stock-keeping units (SKUs) of frozen par-baked and fully
baked rolls and breads.
“Because of insufficient freezer capacity, we sometimes
had to switch products on the same production line a
few times a day, which reduced productivity,” said Carlos
Vieira, founder and president of Vieira’s Bakery, in a
press release. “Adding freezer capacity was essential before
implementing our fourth production line and critical to
our expansion efforts.”
Trouble was, there was little room for expansion. While
Vieira was able to buy some additional land next to his
plant, it did not offer sufficient space to construct a new
building.
To help solve its capacity problem, Vieira turned to Daryl
Hull, a racking and material handling consultant with 40
years of industry experience, and Steel King Industries,
a storage system and pallet rack manufacturer. In short
order, Hull came up with a solution. Rather than try to
erect a standard building and put storage racks inside it,
he recommended that the bakery go with something a little
different: a rack-supported freezer storage structure with
insulated panels attached to the top and sides to form sidewalls and a roof.
“Rack-supported structures help to maximize storage
because the building envelope exactly matches the storage
space,” said Hull in the release. “The design eliminates the
need for building columns, which waste space and interfere
with traffic. Instead, the rack uprights act like building
columns, and freezer units can be positioned within the
racking to further optimize storage.”
In the end, Vieira opted to build a rack-supported push-
back-rack structure that added about 8,000 square feet of
storage space and 1,200 double-high pallet positions. The
company was able to fit the rack-supported structure into a
corner of Vieira’s existing land.
As for the racking itself, the bakery chose pushback
rack in a four-deep configuration from each aisle face to
maximize storage density. With this type of rack, pallets
are stored behind each other in a series of nested carts and
are loaded from the same side of the system, eliminating
the need for separate aisles for each function. The system
is composed of a stable rack along with a series of inclined
carts and rails. When one pallet is pulled, the one behind it
rolls forward.
There was an added complication with this project,
however. The rack-supported structure would require
exceptional strength to support up to 1,200 double pallet
A rack-supported structure helped Vieira’s Bakery solve its storage space crunch without having to
erect a whole new building.
Rack-supported freezer gives
fast-growing bakery room to rise
