BY DAVID MALONEY, CHIEF EDITOR
AUTOMATION
Material Handling
SI TUATED IN THE HEART OF CEN TRAL CALIFORNIA’S
orange- and lemon-growing region, Bee Sweet Citrus specializes in packing and shipping California citrus, supplying
customers around the world with oranges, lemons, grapefruit, mandarins, and the like. Since its founding in 1987,
the business has blossomed from a startup operation that
handled 10,000 cartons a year to one that now handles 10
million.
But the story hasn’t been all sweetness and light. In
2016, for example, it became clear that things were starting
to sour at the company’s 400,000-square-foot facility in
Fowler, Calif., which provides cold storage, packing, and
distribution services for customers like grocery stores and
big-box retailers. To be specific, the company was encoun-
tering bottlenecks at the ends of its packing lines—bottle-
necks that were putting the squeeze on its operations.
At the time, cases of citrus were being palletized by hand
after they were packed. That required a lot of heavy lifting
on the part of workers—the facility handles some 50,000
cases daily during peak seasons, with each case weighing
around 40 pounds. It wasn’t unusual for work to fall behind
in the manual palletizing area, creating slowdowns further
upstream or even bringing activity to a halt.
The pressure to perform under these conditions took a
toll on morale. “We had a lot of turnover before as a result
of the pace of our stacking, and it was a lot of lifting for our
people,” says Thomas Marderosian, industrial technology
manager at Bee Sweet Citrus.
To solve the problem, Bee Sweet began looking into
options for automated palletizing. But it knew from the
Bee Sweet Citrus juices
up its packing operations
As business blossomed, the California citrus packer began experiencing bottlenecks in
its packing operations. A sophisticated automated palletizing system cleared the jam.
