BEST-IN-CLASS PLANT PROFILE JOYCE FASSL | EDITOR IN CHIEF
CTI Foods Automates Its Hot to Handle Taco Packaging Line Tacobots efficiently upgrade and automate production with a unique two-pick mechanical tool. The recent line integration project wins a 2021 Manufacturing Innovation Award from ProFood World.
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HERE ARE MANY different interpretations as to exactly how the popular phrase “Taco Tuesday” originated. But at CTI Foods based in Saginaw, Texas, every day is taco day. The culinary-driven company was founded in the early 2000s by a group of industry veterans, and today, it is owned by a private equity firm and has seven plants throughout the U.S. The 187,000-sq-ft Saginaw facility was built in 2010 and started taco production in 2011. “We’re mainly focused on high-quality, casual, fast casual and quick serve food products,” states Will Davenport, CTI Foods’ senior director of engineering. “Our plants make a wide variety of products, almost all protein products and cooked meats. We make a dehydrated refried bean right here in Saginaw at the facility next door. We also produce a variety of soups and sauces on-site.”
Producing fresh tacos for major fast food chains and packaging them while still warm was a labor-intensive and repetitive task. In fact, the company employed 16 workers on each shift to manually load filled, soft tortilla tacos into chipboard trays that were also manually formed. The workers would orientate the tacos and load two stacks of 25 into each tray. “The tacos have always had a very unique packaging orientation, where there’s 50 to a tray,” explains Davenport. “We’re packing them hot, and then, they go through a spiral freezer.” To keep the tacos from misshaping through the freezing process and transit, they were interwoven within the trays by hand. “We were constantly having to shift people from spot to spot to not have a repetitive motion injury,” he adds. At the Saginaw facility, white corn is cooked, washed, hulled, stone ground, and formed into tortillas. www.profoodworld.com
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Fresh tacos that were once too hot to handle manually are now placed into trays by JLS Talon robots. PHOTO BY JOYCE FASSL
| August 2021 | PROFOOD WORLD
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7/22/21 8:20 AM
