Two lines, one vision for success: new brands and line extensions call for increased...

Despite the tranquility of the mountain valley surroundings, exciting things are happening indoors at Safeway's Grocery and Bottled Water plant in Merced, Calif.

Preliminary ingredients and finished pallets of O Organics salsa and pasta sauces, preserves and pasta sauces roll in and out,

"Every year, we're raising the bar with the technology of our equipment and the in-line inspections we have in place," says David Nelsen, vice president of manufacturing for Safeway. "The goal is to reduce variability in the workplace in order to improve quality and reduce costs."

Production family matters

This May, the plant celebrated its 10-year anniversary, and employees took time to remember the plant's somewhat cluttered beginning. When the Merced location was constructed, enough equipment for three plants was brought into one facility during a consolidation effort. Employees originally ran two production lines--one for grocery products and the other for peanut butter.

The plant still operates two lines, each with an enclosed filling area, but peanut butter production was replaced with a bottled water line in 2003. All of the rooms were scrubbed down for safety reasons, water lines for spring and purified water were installed, and employees were trained on the new equipment. But the lines were completely switched within a week.

"It was due to creative scheduling," says plant manager Amalee Jayasinghe.

It was also credited to the motivation of the line operators, according to Michael Williams, plant superintendent.

"Empowerment of the employees is the utmost. Otherwise, we wouldn't have seen the successes we have," Williams says.

Employee participation is aggressively promoted and rewarded--the motto "Think like successful owners" is spread across the production entryway with the Merced plant vision statement. The vision is updated every year in November, when plant employees meet to discuss production goals. Every employee receives a credit-card-sized copy of the plant's vision and key initiatives.

Line operators also participate in "Six-Minute Meetings" at the beginning of every shift to review the previous day's activities, and on Wednesdays, they have preplanning meetings to develop the following week's schedules and action plans. "Seven by Seven" meetings (which refer to the plant's 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. day) are held once every four weeks to discuss prior performance on waste reduction, efficiency, quality and productivity. "When you start empowering people, you get a lot of untapped talent that you would not normally get otherwise," Williams says. "Once we're satisfied internally, our external customers are satisfied."

According to Nelsen, plant managers work to develop their staff through an ongoing formalized process. Individuals receive feedback on a regular basis and personal development plans are established on an annual basis. Individual employees and Safeway benefit from the process through performance improvements and by helping individuals achieve their career aspirations. In addition, Safeway's 31 plant managers meet as one group on an annual basis to review each plants key performance metrics along with the annual operating plan for the next year.

"Providing coaching is really a win-win situation, and it gives our employees the opportunity to sharpen the saw," Nelsen says.

Employee efforts are publicly recognized. Safeway introduced plant awards to recognize improvements in the areas of Safety, Quality, Innovation and World Class Manufacturing. Merced's award banners are hung in the warehouse area with the same pride that high school and college sports teams hang their championship banners.

A friendly spirit of competition co-exists with teamwork, both of which contribute to the plant's production excellence. The water line operators nicknamed themselves the Water Dogs, and the grocery line employees are the Tomato Bullies. While the two teams vie for internal rewards, they also play side-by-side on the company-sponsored plant softball team.

Full bottle

The bottled water line doesn't look a day over two weeks, thanks to the meticulous upkeep of its recently installed Krones equipment. The installment of the bottled water line was a two-phase process.

Safeway first had to install the water lines. Twenty-five percent of the production is spring water, which is sourced from Baxter, Calif. (about 180 miles away), and the rest is purified drinking water. In this first phase, the plant used stock plastic bottles from a supplier, costing roughly $8,000 a day, according to Williams.

In the second phase a year later, a Krones blow molder was installed and the plant now produces what it needs on-demand.

The Merced plant handles bottled water production for all of Safeway's brands, so efficiency is a necessity. The plant produces 0.5-, 1- and 1.5-liter bottles, and change parts along the line are color-coded for changeover efficiency Orange is for the 0.5 liter, yellow for I liter and green for 1.5 liters. "One-Point Lessons" also were developed for quick changeovers; pictures are posted with arrows that point to what parts need to be changed, rather than having employees read a five or six page written document.

The bottled water line starts with bottle manufacturing. Seventy-two totes of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) preform vials (19,800 to be exact) are held in a temperature-controlled room where they cure for 48 to 72 hours. They are then fed to a Krones Contiform $24 blow molder. (To learn the new machine, Jayasinghe, plant engineer Tony Delgado and lead operators were sent to Germany for a week of Krones training and did factory acceptance tests on their own machine.)

The preforms are heated to 67[degrees] C., 230 at a time, for two and a half seconds. The stretch blow molder pushes down the preforms and blows the walls against the bottle mold. The 500-milliliter bottles are blown with a pattern just below the neck that adds panel strength.

As the bottles are being blown, quality checks are performed by an operator once an hour. Pictures are posted in the quality control area that show what visual characteristics the operator should look for, such as puddling, haze and cocked necks. The plant uses the same pictures as the preform supplier to improve communication. "We wanted to make sure we spoke the same language," Jayasinghe says.

The formed bottles are then accumulated and passed through at roughly 300 feet per minute. An air-driven conveyor moves them along a 200-foot path overhead to the Vacufill 60-valve rotary filler. This filler is a self-contained positive air enclosure that includes a bottle rinser and a 15-head capper.

After the bottles are filled, it's off to the packaging area (for the remainder of both the bottled water and grocery lines). The Krones clout continues here with a Canmatic labeler and Variopac tray packer.

The Canmatic applies label stock to the bottles at 615 bottles per minute, and a Diagraph coder marks the necessary tracking information. A lane separator then divides out the proper number of bottles, which are packed into trays and shrink wrapped.

The trays then travel to the next room to be palletized and are live loaded for shipment (all trailers are held on the lot for 24 hours). The plant handles 135,000 cases of water per week, adding up to more than five million cases per year.

The automated line has only five operators. And, while they always have their eyes and ears open to check for quality, some 50 vision sensors oversee all packaging operations.

For quality assurance, at least one bottle of each batch is kept at the Merced plant for the duration of the two-year shelf life. Samples also are collected each week and sent to an independent lab for quality checks.

Bosses of the sauce

The introduction of O Organics meant a new niche market for Safeway, and mandatory certification for its plants. The Merced plant got certified through Quality Assurance International a few years ago.

"It was a lengthy process with a lot of paperwork," says Jayasinghe. The plant's QA personnel conducted the necessary training. Employees were trained about what organics are and how to avoid cross contamination. The plant gets recertified annually, but according to Nelsen, the organic certification was just an extension of the processes already in place at the plant.

To run the O Organics line, the plant has to use special boiler chemicals that take 48 hours to run through the system. For that reason, the organic line is run every two weeks. The grocery line also accommodates jams, jellies and sauces for Safeway Select, and recently started doing test batches of Eating Right. More than 100 different labels are handled on the grocery production line. (Quality assurance starts with the certification of suppliers. Read more about the process in "Quality controlled" on this page.)

At the beginning of the grocery production line, bulk jars are depalletized and inspected for defects. The jars are then hot-filled at 190[degrees] F. by an RP21 Elmar filler at 200 jars per minute (preserves are filled at 197[degrees] E) and vacuum-sealed with metal closures. Vision sensors check the accurate placement of the cap.

Jars accumulate and then travel 75 feet through a Bevco hydrocooler to finish the pasteurizing process, which takes 45 minutes to cool them down. They exit the cooler and proceed to the open packaging area for hot-glue paper labeling. (Pressure-sensitive labels are used for jams and jellies.

A Videojet Excel 178i coder marks a "Use by" date, time and plant code for tracking and tracing before products enter the Douglas case packer.

Secondary packaging, primary priority

The plant uses two Lantech palletizers, one dedicated to each line, to package the cases of bottled water and grocery products. Vision sensors make sure the lids and bottle caps are on properly and the trays are oriented correctly. For the bottled water line, the palletizer creates one pallet (72 cases) every minute; for the grocery line, it's one pallet every four minutes. Some 41,000 cases are packed in two 10-hour shifts.

Two line support drivers are the only operators in the distribution area. A laminated sheet with 13 different codes based on the package type is posted near the computer controller for automatic and pre-programmed changeovers.

"It's just a matter of pressing a button and clearing the line out," Williams says. "It takes 30 seconds."

After the trays are palletized, an operator uses a standup forklift to move the pallets to the six storage levels in the warehouse. The storage area can hold 2,500 pallets at capacity. Bottled water is stored at Merced for at least 24 hours. During filling, ozone is added to the water for sterilization, but it has to dissipate before the water is drinkable. The process takes 12 hours; Safeway doubles it to be safe.

When the pallets are slated for distribution, they're loaded onto trucks in one of nine loading bays. Seventeen truckloads of water per day are distributed; 30 truckloads of overall product per day.

AT-A-GLANCE

  Company:     Safeway

 Location:     Merced, CA

Plant Size:    133,000 square feet

Employees:     72

 Operating     2 shifts, 4/10s on the
    Hours:     water, 5/8s on the
               grocery line

   Product     salsa, pasta, jelly, preserves
     Lines     and bottled water
  Handled:

   Package     glass jars, plastic bulk
    Types:     containers, PET bottles

    No. of     2
 Packaging
    Lines:

Quality controlled

Quality checks don't start at the Safeway plant; they start with its suppliers, To achieve Quality Assurance vendor approval, packaging manufacturers have to:

* Complete a pre-audit questionnaire

* Submit samples for approval

* Receive a third party audit (Grocery Manufacturers Association-Safe audit or equivalent) for food or pass an internal audit

* Have first production samples approved

* Receive ongoing sample evaluations

by Megan Waitkoff

Associate Editor