The Background….
“It was clear early on the Jerry was passionate about HPP. He helped me look at the process from a different perspective. With his expertise and passion, we worked together to improve our financial outcomes and customer satisfaction.”
Tim Cox, Former Vice President of Liberty Cold
Liberty Cold Logo
Liberty Cold provides Warehouse, Logistics, High Pressure Processing (HPP) Tolling, and Food Processing for customers in the Midwest. Liberty Cold is based out of Bolingbrook, Illinois and is part of West Liberty Foods, LLC.
Liberty Cold installed a Hiperbaric 525L High-Pressure Processing machine back in 2016. The line is configured with ancillary equipment that helps load the baskets and weigh them prior to HPP. After HPP has been achieved, the line is equipped with in line packing stations that dry the packages and place them back into the shipper.
Customers deliver inventory for HPP in a variety of shipping containers that includes, boxed and palletized, bulk gaylords, and cardboard trays filled with juice bottles.
Cold Pressed Juice bottles being loaded into HPP Baskets/Tubes 
Deli Meat packages being loaded into HPP Baskets 
Vertical Hopper/Conveyor for filling HPP Baskets/Tubes
The Opportunity….
- Improve Cycles per Shift
- Evaluate downtime and parts availability
- Provide on time delivery to their clients post-HPP
The Impact….
- Production Variances – Labor/Yield
- Customer Satisfaction
- Underutilization of the asset
The Benefits….
- Cost
- Yield
- Customer Service
The Solution….
- HPP Advisors presented a solution to decouple the line to maximize cycles and improve yield. This solution included Basket Loading Stations, Buffer Transport Pallets, and Loading Pallet Index Platforms.
- Liberty Cold tested HPP Advisors baskets to see how the improved design could impact performance.
- Increase collaboration between Maintenance, Purchasing and Operations to improve uptime through parts management and scheduling the line.
The Results….
- Improved Basket Filling by 10%.
- Cycles per Hour improved 40%.
- Decided to keep line setup “as is” due to capital restriction. Because of this, we worked around it through training of operators and focus on making sure that we were achieving our target of cycles/hour through improved shop floor reporting.
- Reviewed Parts Availability to make sure we were staying current on parts and PM’s.
- Established buy-in from the team on what line was capable of and set them up for success. Production Standards were based on what was achievable in basket filling and final packaging.
- Long term strategy would be too decouple if loading and packaging was ever a pinch point. Customer still saw it as right thing to do but didn’t prioritize it over some of the other initiatives.
