Red Gold, Inc., the world’s largest privately-owned tomato company, recently opened a new 250,000 square foot (23,000 m²) warehouse with leading edge technologies. Connecting to its existing Alexandria (IN) Distribution Center (DC), there is now a total of 1.25 million square feet (116,000 m²) of storage and truck loading capabilities to speed deliveries of tomato products to retail and foodservice customers.
“The new facility adds 14 loading docks to speed deliveries to our many customers,” says Brian Reichart, President and CEO of Red Gold. “Additionally, we have added 82 truck-trailer parking spaces for our customers picking up loads or parking for Red Gold’s own Transport fleet.”
“We experienced tremendous growth in sales over the past two years as customers made the switch to Red Gold products due to our product quality and supply chain issues experienced by other brands,” says Colt Reichart, Red Gold’s Senior Director of Marketing and Consumer Relations. “The new facility assures that we have the capacity to continue our growth of the freshest, best-tasting tomatoes in the world.”
The new building houses a giant high tech racking system that stores hundreds of tomato products to better serve Red Gold’s customers. “Racking for pallets of tomato products is 53 lanes wide, 23 pallets deep and 5 levels high… that’s 8,215 total pallets in our racking system alone,” said Mike Herrmann, Red Gold’s Director of Engineering. “The new building and DC also received 68 new Wireless Access Points to make sure all the new technology is connected to the forklifts and shuttles, allowing them to move seamlessly throughout the connected facilities,” Mike said.
The new addition connects to the Red Gold tomato processing plant in Orestes allowing finished goods to be transported to the existing Alexandria Distribution Center. “By connecting our factory to the DC and utilizing this innovative system, we are able to remove 9,000 semi-truck trips (annually) between Orestes and the DC,” says Beau Reichart, Red Gold’s Chief Operations Officer. “This saves time, reduces costs and CO2 impact to the environment.” Beau adds, “This project features new automated rack shuttles (skid movers) which are remote controlled. These robots move skids through the rack aisles, making it possible pick more pallets perfectly.”
Source: fsrmagazine.com
