HJ Heinz European Frozen and Chilled Foods invested $9 MM to establish a strategic headquarters in Dublin and expand its frozen ready-meals production facility.
Project Highlights
Dennis Group provided facility and process design-build services for the expansion of an Heinz’s existing facility located in Dundalk, Ireland. The facility design included renovation of 5,000 m2 of internal production space and the construction of 3,000 m2 of new food manufacturing and utility areas.
This project involved the installation of two high-speed fully automated frozen-ready meal production lines.
A state of the art sauce manufacturing system utilizing vacuum cooling and a flexible batch management and control system supported the production lines.
Additional process equipment included pasta blanching, high shear slurry blending, and potato and fish handling.
Installation of completely new utility systems and a wastewater treatment plant was also incorporated into the project.
Dennis Group completed a master planning study for the layout of a grass roots facility to be built in Las Vegas. The scope of the project included:
Developing a design basis for the new facility in terms of production and process system capacities
Determination of building size to meet current and future needs
Layout of the employee, process and utility areas of the facility including bulk liquid receiving by rail/truck
Layout of rocess areas for batch and continuous emulsion systems, starch preparation, cooking operations for sauces, dry ingredient blending and line layouts for high speed retail glass, food service, bulk tub and portion control lines
During the implementation phase of the project, Dennis Group provided complete building mechanical and electrical design, environmental design and permitting and coordination of architect, structural engineer, civil engineer activities for a 140,000 SF salad dressing plant.
Segregated waste systems and stringent sanitary design requirements were key features of this project.
Shortly after the merger between Nestlé and Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, the decision was made to consolidate manufacturing and distribution functions at the Operations Center located in Bakersfield, CA.
Project Highlights
This expansion consisted of adding over 320,000 square feet of processing, utility, warehouse/distribution, and R&D space, including six new production lines.
In addition to three conventional ice cream mix production tanks, the facility includes a yogurt production room. This space is pressurized to preclude infiltration of airborne contaminants. 3000 gallon batches of cream are inoculated with live yogurt cultures to produce the base yogurt mix. The mix is batch pasteurized, then pumped to surge tanks for addition of flavors, prior to freezing, hardening and packaging.
Once the expansion was completed, in fewer than 12 months from groundbreaking to saleable product, Dreyer’s manufacturing throughput was doubled.
