Case Study: Arcadia Farms Beverage and Foodservice
Solid, reliable people, forming great businesses and great partnerships: the Arcadia, Hytrol, and Advanced Equipment Company story is one for the history books.
Needed: A More Efficient Solution
Founded 75 years ago in 1939, Arcadia Dairy Farms, Inc. was a small first generation dairy business with 30 cows and 70 acres in Arden, North Carolina. Today, while still a family business, Arcadia has a 200,000 square foot automated facility that supplies club, drug, food, foodservice, mass and wholesale channels.
Hytrol integration partner Advanced Equipment Company began working with Arcadia in 2004, adding pallet handling conveyors to support more palletizers. Scott Hovis said the initial project was initiated by a need to make the business more efficient by using fewer fork trucks. Hovis said, “We developed a conveyor system to transport cartons from filler room to palletizers.”
A Second Look
The solution worked well enough that Arcadia worked with AEC again in 2008. Arcadia added more palletizers and AEC added more conveyor lines to support those palletizers; they also made pallet handling conveyors to transport full pallets through automated wrappers continuing to the end of the line. In 2013, AEC assisted Arcadia by adding a new pallet conveyor line to handle a new product.
James Ward of Arcadia said, “We use Hytrol Pallet Handling Conveyors with the accumulation features to automate the wrapping of our pallets and to distribute those pallets to the warehouse. This helped us reduce operator touches.”
Hovis is celebrating 20 years at Advanced Equipment Company. AEC has been an expert conveyor and material handling systems for 54 years, quickly earning the title, “North and South Carolina’s trusted source for conveyor systems.” The company opened its doors in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1960. Hovis is a dedicated representative of the company’s philosophy to go beyond material handling systems into material handling strategies. This means smart design that anticipates business conditions and maximizes efficiency today and well into the future.
The AEC-Hytrol Partnership
AEC and Hytrol Conveyor have been working together for 50 years. The teams bring together experienced engineers and emerging technologies for integrated material handling systems. In 1947, Tom Loberg founded Hytrol as a small company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin making conveyors. The company moved to Jonesboro, Arkansas in December 1962 and since then, Hytrol has undergone several expansions to reach its current size of over 550,000 square feet. Hytrol has developed game-changing technology with its EZLogic® zero-pressure accumulation family of conveyors, as well as the rapidly growing E24™ 24-volt motor-driven roller family. Introduced in 1997, Hytrol has sold over 1.5 million feet of EZLogic®. E24™ was introduced in 2008 and accounts for 15 percent of powered conveyor sales. Hytrol currently employs over 800 people and works with more than 100 integration partners, like AEC, globally.