Chip making is high-tech business whether the
silicon or the potato variety. And Shearers Foods Inc., the family-owned manufacturer
and distributor of Grandma Shearers Snacks, has become an industry leader in
its use of computerized equipment to make the latter variety.
Take the Opti-Sort, for instance. Shearers Foods uses the sorting system as a quality-control device for final inspection of the more than 50,000 pounds of potato chips the company produces each day. The machine uses lasers to peruse them at a rate of 1,000 feet of chips per minute. When it detects chips that are too dark or have unappetizing spots, it shoots a burst of air to sweep away the bad chips from the good.
Peeling, slicing, washing, frying and salting are now computerized, too, according to Robert Shearer, who founded the company in 1974 as a small hand-cooked operation. The goal is to continue improving on quality for the Grandma Shearers snack line and the private-label products made for such customers as Giant Eagle, Super Kmart Centers, Buehlers, Seaway Foodtown and Discount Drug Mart.
Perfection in every bag is the
companys slogan and its stated mission. Quality is our number-one priority, Shearer says.
And quality and specifically its
insistence on quality control is why Shearers is being honored with a 1999 Manny Award.
In November, the company completed a $13 million, 78,000-square-foot expansion of manufacturing, warehouse and office space to double the size of the Brewster, Ohio, facility. The added space has allowed Shearers to begin producing its own line of corn products. Until last year, Shearers had outsourced its corn chips, nachos, tortilla chips, baked cheese curls, cheese puffs and popcorn, but, according to Shearer, We felt we could have better control by taking over production. Despite the emphasis on automation, the expansion still has added more than 60 jobs.
Using technology new to the industry, Shearers automatically controls the thickness of its ground corn mixture. Measuring in increments of one-thousandth of an inch, two state-of-the-art lasers, easily controlled by a touch-screen
system, adjust
the dough to a predetermined thickness.
Although the snack maker works hard to research and incorporate new technology into its production process, Shearer says that perfection in a bag begins with the basics: selecting the highest-quality ingredients and keeping the process clean.
Potatoes are trucked in daily a
company record 45 million pounds over the course of 1998 and tested for specific gravity and pulp temperatures before unloading. For the corn products, two silos stock 120,000 pounds each of yellow and white corn, allowing Shearers to begin with raw corn (rather than purchasing masa flour) to better ensure manufacturing consistency. Before production begins, the raw materials are inspected and tested to meet Shearers strict specifications.
Each day an entire shift of the round-the-clock production schedule is dedicated to cleaning the equipment, a fastidious practice the company says far exceeds the industry average of scrubbing every three to five days. I just think a food product needs to be produced in the cleanest place possible, Shearer says. Customers would likely agree.
Such attention to detail has earned Shearers snacks awards in a number of national taste tests where the old-fashioned approach to quality control validates its high-tech kin. In addition to constant visual checks, company snackers periodically munch on Shearers foods as well as competitors brands to ensure Grandma Shearers high flavor standards continue getting the attention they deserve.
Theres no replacing that human touch or, rather, taste.