Baking & Snack - October 2010 - 24
24
Flowers Foods' bakery at
Bardstown, KY, explores
energy management and
automation advances that
could profoundly change
the way the company
operates for years to come.
Setting
a New
Benchmark
BY LAURIE GORTON AND DAN MALOVANY
ake no mistake about it. The top-line manufacturing imperative at Flowers Foods,
Thomasville, GA, is to be the industry's
low-cost producer. In fact, that's been "The
Flowers Way" for decades. It's also been the primary
objective for Robert Benton, corporate vice-president
of manufacturing, and the company's engineering staff
since Flowers launched its long-term strategy for sustainable growth in 2004. That's when the company began to steadily expand beyond its core market in the
South to contiguous territories throughout the Southwest, Mid-Atlantic and lower Midwest.
To accomplish this initiative throughout the past six
years, Flowers has made eight acquisitions, spent an industry-leading $482 million in capital investments and
added 15 new production lines as well as hundreds of
new routes that now deliver its products to 40 million
additional consumers or nearly 50% of the US population. "We've been growing so fast and had to build bakeries so quickly that we've been concentrating on how fast
we can go, how fast we can build the bakery and how
fast we can get out and be effective in the market," Mr.
Benton said.
In 2009 with the opening of the new $57 million
bread and bun bakery at Bardstown, KY, however,
Flowers found itself entering uncharted territory in
M
BAKING & SNACK / October 2010
more ways than one. From an operations perspective,
the facility's energy management system is turning out
to be a game changer when it comes to building new
bakeries as the company continues to expand in the
future. Specifically, the Rockwell Automation RSEnergyMetrix program architecturally sits on top of information gathered by the other Allen-Bradley PLCs and
control devices throughout the bakery and provides a
central warehouse of data that tracks energy, electricity, natural gas and water usage. It also monitors heating, cooling and air quality systems that the company
hadn't been able to consistently gauge, according to
Eric Lewis, manufacturing manager for Flowers Baking Co. of Bardstown.
"I can see the humidity in the building, the temperature in the building, the temperature outside
the building and the differential pressure within the
building," Mr. Lewis said. "In the past, we had to guess
how to change the process. Now we're putting numbers to how we have to change the process in ways that
we never could before."
BENCHMARK STATUS. While many bakeries designate
a flagship plant that defines their operations, the Bardstown bakery can be best described as Flowers Foods'
new benchmark facility. The data gathered from this
Baking & Snack - October 2010
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Baking & Snack - October 2010
Contents
Baking & Snack - October 2010 - 1
Baking & Snack - October 2010 - 2
Baking & Snack - October 2010 - 3
Baking & Snack - October 2010 - Contents
Baking & Snack - October 2010 - 5
Baking & Snack - October 2010 - 6
Baking & Snack - October 2010 - 7
Baking & Snack - October 2010 - 8
Baking & Snack - October 2010 - 9
Baking & Snack - October 2010 - 10
Baking & Snack - October 2010 - 11
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Baking & Snack - October 2010 - 38
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