Packerland
Packing, a division of Smithfield Foods, was using off-site
warehousing and blast freezing along with manual sortation,
so they decided to build a new distribution facility of
their own hoping to save labor cost and improve product
safety. The best site available was property they already
owned, a greenfield site approximately 600 feet away.
The only problem was an active railroad line running between
their processing plant and that site.
Having recently completed a similar project for another
Smithfield company, Tippmann Group knew exactly what needed
to be done. Tippmann designed a distribution center that
is attached to the plant by a conveyor tunnel that goes
up and over the railroad tracks. The new facility also
has its own blast freezers.
The conveyor tunnel was designed to feed directly into
an automated sortation/palletizing system with a manual
stack-off for slow-moving items.
With the distribution center site essentially a separate
facility, product safety is enhanced. Outbound shipping
trucks have their own dedicated entrance, so there is
no crossover between the incoming livestock and the outgoing
finished product. This separation of the distribution
and the processing helps maximize the ability to keep
the product safe.
