PlantOperations

DA N N O N

DANNON PLANT
UPGRADES ITS
CULTURE
The largest yogurt production and
packaging facility in North America is seeing
the fruit of years of investment in people,
business processes and equipment.
/ by

PA N D E M E T R A K A K E S, E x e c u t i v e E d i t o r

hen Dannon bought a fluid milk

facility from a pair of brothers in
Minster, Ohio, about 45 miles
north of Dayton, in the late
1960s, yogurt was mostly for
ethnics and health nuts.
Now yogurt, in its many forms, is firmly in the
American mainstream. And the Minster facility is
Dannons biggest yogurt plant in North America.
The 336,000-square-foot plant sits on 29.5 acres in
Ohio farm country. Each day, it turns in excess of 1.5
million pounds of milk into Dannon yogurt, Light & Fit
yogurt, the childrens drink Danimals and Dannons new

PHOTOS BY

VITO PALMISANO

The decision to do
away with overcaps
actually made sealing
slightly easier.

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2008

probiotic products, Activia yogurt and DanActive dairy

beverages. This production pace ranks Minster third in
volume among the more than 40 plants that Groupe
Danone, Dannons French parent, runs worldwide.
As the largest-volume North American plant, Minster
had long enjoyed a sort of privileged status within
Dannon, simply because there was nothing nearby to
compare with it. That led to a certain attitude of complacency among personnel. But the reality, plant executives
say, is that among Danone facilities worldwide, Minster
ranked somewhere in the middle.
This plant has always been the biggest one in
North America, says John St. Clair, the plants quality and food safety manager. As compared with
[other Dannon North American plants], the bar for
operational performance wasnt necessarily very
high. So while we always considered ourselves the
best in the U.S., we didnt compare well when benchmarked against all the operational performance indicators of our sister plants throughout the world.
A combination of new products and new demands
formed the motivation for the Minster plant to embark
on a series of significant improvements. For instance,
about two years ago, Dannon decided to make Minster
share the responsibility for producing yogurt beverages
like DanActive. Up to then, they had all been produced
at the Dannon facility in Fort Worth, Texas. Splitting the
production with Minster meant quicker access to
Eastern marketsa critical consideration for products
with a shelf life of about 50 days. But it required shifting around some lines and reducing their footprint.

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Results emerging

Other improvements came in, such as cup thermoNewly thermoformed cups

formers that eliminate the hassle of storing and hanare filled before being sealed
dling preformed cups. More than one third of the
and cut apart. Dannon is
total plant capacity has been upgraded or replaced
looking to increase its use of
thermoformed-on-site cups,
over the last three years, says plant director Didier
which are more efficient than
Menu. This required a significant effort for the team
premade ones.
on-site to learn how to operate the new technology.
The results are just starting to emerge, Menu says
and to become clear to the plants workers.
The challenge was to get people involved with
the new plan, Menu says. I can [now] say I believe
we are getting there. But if we had met six months
ago, I would have said, This is our plan, but Im not
quite sure. But people are starting to see that all
these changes are bringing benefits. They are starting to believe our plan and results are showing.
With operators on the manufacturing floor, the
formula the Minster plant uses is QCDM: quality,
cost, delivery and motivation. The plant
ties these concepts to specific metrics and
AT-A-GLANCE
posts the results, for each line, in the
plants hallways. Quality translates to the
Company: Dannon
amount of product removed from each
Location: Minster, Ohio
line per shift; cost, to production effiProducts: Dannon yogurt,
ciency (actual production divided by
DanActive, Activia, Danimals
maximum throughput).
Packaging: PP cups, HDPE bottles
The plant produces about 100 stockSize: 336,000 square feet
keeping units (SKUs). Planning is done on
a batch basis. Each batch of yogurt is
Employees: 400
assigned a production order number. Plant 4

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PlantOperations DANNON

Thermoformed cups
use in-mold labels, cut
from rollstock, which
confers more flexibility
than pre-labeled
containers.

execution software identifies and outputs the kind and

amount of all the materials needed to package the
batch. From raw materials ordering through distribution, this system is integrated with SAP.
With the large number of SKUs produced, plant
managers try to hold changeover to a minimum. (The
plant operates 24/7, although not all lines run all the

time.) Most changeovers have to do with flavors and

product types. When packaging machinery needs to be
adjustedfor instance, to change from four-packs to
six-packs of 4-ounce cups, or to switch from singlelayer to double-layer casesits done with a combination of manual adjustments and servo controls.
Packaging operations

The plant is divided into five major areas, two of

which directly concern packaging: the packaging
building, with about a dozen linesmost for cups or
tubs and a few for bottle productionand a facility
leased and operated by Graham Packaging, which
produces bottles for Danimals and DanActive in a
through-the-wall arrangement.
One of the most significant transitions at the
Minster facility, which is still ongoing, is a move from
preformed polystyrene cups to cups thermoformed on
site. Minster now has several thermoformed PS cup
lines, which is the companys fastest area of growth.
Thermoforming the cups on site has several advantages. The half-ton roll of thermoformed plastic lasts
for several hours of production, freeing workers from
the tedium and less optimal ergonomics of loading
stacks of cups into hoppers. Rolls of plastic are much

Cup set parameters

Traditional yogurts, which are fermented in the cup, have

a different filling process. Quart tubs and 6-ounce cups

are filled in preformed PP

containers on a system
from Gasti. Cups are
assured to be clean before
filling with blasts of sterilized air. The cups and
tubs enter a HEPA (highenergy particulate arresting)-filtered air chamber,
and cups and tubs are
hot-filled with cultured
milk. After filling, the
cups and tubs are sealed.
Fruit-on-the-bottom
products have fruit
deposited in the empty
containers by separate
nozzles before the yogurt. These products, as opposed to
the blended ones, are then incubated, which turns the
cultured milk into the viscous yogurt.
When Dannon stopped using overcaps for most of
its 6-ounce products three years ago, it not only
saved about 3 million pounds of plastic a year, it
made sealing easier. The cups have a slight raised
ridge of plastic running around their rims, and the

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2008

easier to store than stacks of preformed cups.

Thermoformed cups use in-mold labeling, conferring significant scheduling flexibility over preforms,
which must be pre-labeled. And thermoformed cups
have two important environmental advantages: they
have walls about 25% thinner than preformed ones,
and they are easier to transport, this lowering the
packagings overall carbon footprint.
One of the thermoforming lines fills 4-ounce cups
of Activia. The plastic sheet unrolls into a web that
flows into the thermoform-fill-seal system from Arcil.
The plastic web is heated and positioned over a grid
of molds on arms that rotate beneath the web. The
molds have already had labels inserted into them, cut
from a separate web. Plungers descend and push the
heated plastic into the molds, forming a block of cups
that travel below a cluster of filler nozzles.
Activia, which is fermented in a tank like other
blended yogurts, gets filled and the lid is applied and
heat-sealed, after which the block of cups is cut into
four- or six-packs.

The Minster plant

recently started
producing yogurt drinks,
as part of Dannons
strategy to make its
three major U.S. plants
into regional facilities.

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PlantOperations DANNON
foil seals have a coat of lacquer around their edge.
Heat sealing attaches the seals to the cup and tub
rims. When Dannon was using overcaps, the heating
had to fall within a window: Too much heat would
cause the containers rim to expand too much and
make it hard to get the overcap on; too little heat
meant the rims expansion was inadequate, leaving
the overcap loose and liable to fall off.

For the 4-ounce blended Activia cups and other

products of that size, paperboard sleeves are
applied by a system from the Aries Packaging division of MWV (previously MeadWestvaco). A
rotary inserter uses suction cups on a wheel to
pluck the sleeves one at a time from a stack in a
magazine and position them over each cluster of
four, eight or 12 cups. A series of crimpers, folding
wheels and guide rails fold and seal
the sleeve around the cups.
Yogurt in a bottle

The bottling lines, which handle

Danactive probiotic and Danimals
childrens drinks, use high-density
polyethylene (HDPE) bottles produced by Graham Packaging in a
facility Graham leases and operates
on the Minster campus. The bottles
are conveyed from that building to
the packaging area, where they are
lifted from a hopper, then set into
platens and filled in a system from
Ermi Agroalimentaire. Foil seals are
set on parallel rows of platens and
plucked off, two rows at a time, by
long arms of suction cups, which
then slide over to the rows of filled
bottles. The seals are then thermally
attached to the bottles.
For most of the 4-ounce cups, secondary packaging consists of wraparound corrugated, applied by an
Axiom case packer from Douglas
Machine. The corrugated has holes
on each side. The holes allow airflow
that cools the individual yogurt cups
when the boxes spend several hours
in a cooling tunnela process that
helps set the product at the proper
viscosity. By the same token, the ramstyle palletizers, from Priority One,
are programmed to stack the boxes in
a pattern that maintains the airflow.
Because all of our products have
live, active cultures, we try to cool
them down as quickly as possible,
St. Clair says.
Some of the packaging lines use
automatic guided vehicles (AGVs)
from HK Systems to take the pallets
to the Lantech stretch wrappers.
The AGVs do not use floor-based
guidance strips; a post-mounted

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transceiver sends laser signals to each of the three

units, guiding them between the palletizers and
the stretch wrappers.
Solo operator

The AGVs are part of a drive to refocus manpower

to improve productivity. In that respect, the role of
operators is being focused on value-added
processes. A new line has just been
started with this concept and ultimately will be operated by a single
person between the filler and the
palletizer. Dannon believes in the
model of the soloist line operator
supported by a team.
Teamwork will be the key to doing
that, Menu says: To have one person
per line, you need to have an operator like a race car driverhowever,
that operator needs a high-performance support team helping them.
As an example, Menu says, operators under the old model have to cart
packaging waste and recyclables to
the bins themselves. The new line is
serviced by a waste and recycle
trainan electric cart carrying a

chain of small, wheeled bins, each one carrying a

load of corrugate, plastic trimmings and so on.
Half-jokingly, Menu adds that keeping the bins small
has another benefit: When you reduce the size of the
bin, people find a way to reduce the amount of waste.
Menu concludes, in all seriousness, All of these
changes are bringing improvement to our employees,
the environment and our consumers. F&BP

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Arcil
011-33-1-30-15-29-30
Aries Packaging
011-33-3-25-71-39-00;
www.aries-packaging.com
Douglas Machine
320-763-6587;
www.douglas-machine.com
Ermi Agroalimentaire, rep. by Geosaf
514-331-4147;
www.geosaf.com/ermi.html
Gasti, an IWKA Co.
011-49-791-402-0;
gasti.oystar-group.com
Graham Packaging
717-849-8500;
www.grahampackaging.com
HK Systems
800-HK-SYSTEMS; www.hksystems.com
Lantech
800-866-0322; www.lantech.com
Priority One
800-387-9102;
www.priorityonepackaging.com

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