BY PETER BRADLEY, EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
AS/RS
materialhandlingupdate
YOGURT HAS CACHET. IT’S WIDELY SEEN AS A HEALTH FOOD.
It’s tasty. And its sales, led by consumption of Greek yogurt, continue to
climb faster than most other categories of packaged food.
For yogurt producers, managing that growth means, among other
things, ensuring that distribution can keep up. Dannon, the leading producer of yogurt in the U.S., is among the companies experiencing solid
growth, and its Oikos brand Greek yogurt is the fastest-growing brand
in that rapidly expanding segment. Ensuring that distribution can keep
up with demand, among other factors, led Dannon to make a major
investment in a new warehouse attached to its production facility in
West Jordan, Utah.
The new warehouse, which distributes Dannon products to company
DCs nationwide, opened last year. It includes a deep-lane automated
storage and retrieval system (AS/RS) that can store 7,000 pallets. But
automation was by no means a certainty when Dannon began planning
the project. In fact, it marks the company’s first venture into
automation in the U.S.
The previous cooler warehouse had 1,000
storage locations for pallets—only half the
production capacity of the plant. Those
storage limitations forced Dannon to do
some things that were less than optimal. It
required shipping some product as soon as
it came off the production line
whether its DCs were ready for it or
not. Other finished product had to be
shipped to a third-party warehouse in
the area and then on to the DCs,
adding to transportation, handling, and storage costs.
To help manage the flow
of outbound goods from
its Utah plant, yogurt
giant Dannon built a new
warehouse featuring an
automated storage and
retrieval system. The
result? Annual cost
savings of over $3 million.
Milking benefits
from an AS/RS
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