Sargento Foods

Sargento Foods Inc. (Sargento) founded in Plymouth, Wisconsin, in 1953, has grown into a powerhouse of cheese manufacturing and is a dominant brand across the United States. Sargento is the company that successfully introduced America to pre-packaged sliced and shredded natural cheeses and cheese blends. Originally specializing in Italian cheese varieties, Sargento eventually climbed to be one of the largest cheese retail companies in the U.S. The Wisconsin-based, family owned company also produces ingredients and snack foods for grocery stores at the retail and corporate levels for clients like restaurants and even other food manufacturers.

For more than 65 years, the company has continued its journey to be the most innovative, best-loved real food company by pioneering pre-sliced cheese, vacuum packaging, resealable packaging, and production of shredded cheese and shredded cheese blends.

Originally, Sargento had a completely conventional distribution center (DC) that had experienced a number of expansions over the years, and the company was growing concerned about the depletion of available space for future infrastructure growth. Therefore, Sargento sought a solution that would extend the life of the distribution site with support to increase future capacity.

Critical to this strategy was the desire to couple the manufacturing process to the warehouse, thereby ensuring that no product was being double handled, or worse, moved to an offsite storage location.

The construction and transition plan to use the existing DC extended the overall schedule somewhat, however, the savings associated with keeping all distribution activities under one roof were too high to ignore.

As a first step, the team determined important data points that would help them select a warehouse solution, including the size of the warehouse, how much space was utilized with the traditional picking system, and how much more capacity would be needed to continue growth at the current rate for a number of years.

“We were beginning to run out of space to expand the warehouse, and we needed to look to the future and what that growth will actually look like in the given space,” said Matt Schaub, senior manager of logistics, Sargento. “First we went over our data with Westfalia and then we collaborated on the solution.”

The proposed solution for Sargento needed to support both layer picking and full pallet handling, since nearly 60 percent of the warehouse operations revolve around these processes. The solution also needed to accommodate the warehouse activities during implementation, and ensure that the warehouse would be able to continue filling orders without a gap in throughput.

Westfalia collaborated with the Sargento engineering team to develop a streamlined solution that was easy to support, operate, and maintain. Together, they looked at various design solutions for the facility using
Westfalia’s high-density AS/RS integrated with a layer picking system.

The entire solution is run by Westfalia’s Savana.NET® Warehouse Execution System (WES) to optimize order fulfillment from picking products to delivering them to the order staging area.

Thanks to Westfalia’s phased-installation approach, Sargento was able to continue operations and maintain outbound orders and customer satisfaction.

Furthermore, Sargento was able to eliminate their need for case picking as a result of the automatic layer picking system so that processing orders became streamlined. Additionally, the installation of the AS/RS dramatically increased floor space in the existing warehouse. Now, Sargento is able to turn trucks much faster on the loading docks, ensure product is not handled manually until loading, and have increased storage density tremendously.

There are future plans for a new project that will expand the low-bay AS/RS, adding an additional 6,000 pallet positions to rid Sargento of the need to outsource storage and gain more control by having inventory on-site. This expansion of inventory capacity and throughput is sure to save Sargento both time and cheddar.

“By implementing Westfalia’s automation, we were actually able to extend the life of our current distribution center by up to a decade thanks to the higher density storage,” Wisnefske said.