A Recipe for Success at Barilla with Mettler-Toledo Hi-Speed
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Since 1877, when Pietro Barilla opened his small pasta and bread shop in Parma, Italy, an entrepreneurial spirit has been the key ingredient to the growth of the Barilla pasta company. Their recipe for success is to combine challenging work with the best technical expertise available in a safe and sanitary environment.
Barilla's plant engineering and design goals made it an ideal opportunity for Mettler-Toledo product inspection technology. The combination of Hi-Speed checkweighing and Safeline metal detection has been part of this success story since the first Barilla plant opened in Ames, Iowa in 1996. The Barilla plant in Iowa has a capacity to produce 150,000 tons of pasta annually. Running inside are five Hi-Speed checkweighers (two Cornerstones, and three Checkmates) with Safeline metal detectors on every line.
Barilla was already the world largest pasta manufacturer when they entered the U.S. market. Focusing on their Italian heritage, the company's traditional product sold very well and their new whole-grain pastas are popular in North America as well. By 2005, the 420,000 square-foot Ames, Iowa plant reached maximum capacity and the company needed to expand, or build a second plant. Analysis showed that building a new plant in the Northeast would save the company millions of dollars in distribution costs.
The site chosen for the new plant was Avon, New York just an hour's drive from
Hi-Speed's headquarters. "The new Barilla plant was designed to be state-of-the-art. Work flow was a major consideration," says John Davlin, manager-engineering. "The last decade has seen major advances in the use of data to help improve productivity and control costs."
Davlin, an electronics engineer, recognized the benefits of choosing equipment that could interface easily with the automation infrastructure of the new plant, standardized on Rockwell's Contrologix PLC. "We must have five different types of PLCs in Ames, and the maintenance and training costs are huge. The goal is centralized data management and to reduce the number of PLCs to one. We knew Hi-Speed's Ethernet/IP fieldbus interfaced with Rockwell."
Reliability, ease and predictability of maintenance, accuracy and data output requirements drove the decision process when selecting equipment for the new Avon plant," says John Davlin. Hi-Speed's field engineers were on site to help install equipment and commission the five Cornerstone checkweighers. "One of the things I like about Mettler-Toledo Hi-Speed checkweighers is that they hold their accuracy after they're set." says Devlin. An equal number of Safeline metal detectors went online in the new Avon plant. Plans are to add three more production lines to the new plant and equip them all with Mettler-Toledo Hi-Speed checkweighers and Safeline metal detectors. Mettler-Toledo meets Barilla's goals for a robust, easy to maintain and user-friendly product inspection equipment.
About Mettler-Toledo Hi-Speed
Mettler-Toledo Hi-Speed (www.mt.com/hi-speed) is North America's largest checkweigher manufacturer. In 1981, the company joined METTLER TOLEDO, the world's largest manufacturer of weighing solutions for laboratory, industrial, and food retailing applications. Combined with sister companies Safeline and Garvens, make up the Mettler-Toledo Product Inspection Team, the world's largest manufacturer and marketer of checkweighers, metal detection devices, and other end-of-line inspection systems serving local and multi-national customers worldwide.
