Lincoln Premium Poultry (LPP), owned by Costco Wholesale Corp. and manager of its vertically integrated poultry complex in Fremont, Neb., began processing chickens for Costco warehouse stores in 2019. LPP and Costco knew automation would be at the center of the complex from the beginning. LPP started as, remains and continues to grow as a beacon of innovation and technology in the poultry industry.
“It wasn’t easy putting all of this together, developing all the infrastructure, the personnel and the new types of equipment,” said Walt Shafer, chief operations officer at Lincoln Premium Poultry. “There was a lot of learning along the way, but here we are almost six years later, and our owner of Costco is very pleased with our results, the quality of our product, and Costco members continue to send a lot of positive comments about our product.”
Over the last six years, LPP has added some new pieces to its technology arsenal. The addition of technology, innovation and automation is always attached to the goal of efficiency and raising the level of its production team members.
New tech
As the managing company of Costco’s poultry business, almost half of LPP’s daily production mix are the wildly popular rotisserie chickens (called deli by the LPP and Costco team) available at Costco stores. LPP typically produces between 15,000 and 16,000 rotisserie birds a day, and those birds need to be trussed.
When LPP opened and began processing chickens, the rotisserie birds ran down a regular conveyor and the birds were trussed by hand.
“We had identified that as one of the toughest jobs that remained in our plant,” Shafer said. “After we had automated the breast deboning, it [hand trussing] had one of the highest turnovers rates in our whole plant, and it had a lot of people doing it too, both shifts taking 80-90 team members. We set out to find technology to eventually replace that.”
The technology to replace hand trussing rotisserie birds came in the form of robots. As of May 13, 14 robots handle all the trussing, and by the end of May there were expected to be 18 total robots trussing, allowing 80 to 90 people to be utilized in other positions within the facility.
The robots came from Scott, a robotics and automation solutions company in Dunedin, New Zealand and majority owned by JBS. The technology was specifically designed for the United States and are supported by US-based technicians. The robots are configured in cells with two robots per cell. They use single-loop trussing with a three-strand polyester string. The rate of trussing is 5 seconds per bird, per robot.
LPP has trained and moved the majority of those who formerly hand-trussed birds to new technical or operational positions. So rather than eliminating team members from the workforce, they took manual labor from that pool and created skilled positions for those people.
Another new addition to the innovation and automation heavy facility is a robot that creates what LPP calls a rainbow pallet, a unique order of multiple products for an individual Costco warehouse store. All LPP products ship to a depot, and that depot might supply between 120 and 130 stores. The rainbow pallet allows unique orders for specific stores to arrive at the depot built and ready to go out with no repack required. At LPP, the robot removes the need for hand picking specific items to a pallet waiting for them before being wrapped, labeled and shipped to the depot.
“We might be waiting for a box of something to create the whole order,” Shafer said. “Before we would bring the order down and try to put that one thing on by hand. We came up with the robot now that reverse indexes that into a system where we can just put a pallet there. The order is waiting on it, the robot will pull it and then feed it back to the system to release the order. Took the people out, took all that process out.”
Other additions since operations began include an automatic box liner sealer for the rotisserie chickens before shipping, as well as an automatic taper for packaged parts that come in connected packages of six, with three on each side. Both the sealed plastic bags for rotisserie shipping boxes and the taping together of the sides of the “six packs” of breasts, tenders, wings and thighs has previously required manual labor.
Hand trussing had been identified as one of the "toughest jobs" and one of the jobs with the highest turnover at LLP. (Source: Scott Automation and Cole Packaging)Fine tuning
While automation and innovation remain a central piece of the puzzle LPP is putting together in the form of continued growth and success at LPP, Shafer said there is another component to it. It’s more than just filling the plant with the most innovative machines to replace manual labor.
“The innovation actually has functionality,” Shafer said. “You better learn how to use it, and we’re still on that journey today.”
All of LPP’s Marel equipment links directly to a central mainframe. That single location tells the human interface everything the equipment does during operation, if there are deviations, misses, etc. Shafer said the current challenge is gathering that information and using it to quantitatively improve processes. When operations at LPP started, the team was learning the equipment. The maturation process over six years has been to tune the equipment for optimal performance, and overtime, allow the equipment to optimize itself.
“Some of it’s actually the artificial intelligence [AI] where the thing will learn on its own and start making itself better and learning how to do that with this equipment,” Shafer said. “…If you’re not going to use it and understand it, don’t put it in; it will overwhelm you. So, we’re getting to that part in our process. If you ask where we are almost six years later, it’s getting into that.”
As technology, innovation and automation progress at LPP, the team members on the floor must also progress in their knowledge of what the machines are doing, that is AI learning, collecting data, etc., and how they can utilize the machines’ full capabilities and maintain them.
For the team members on the floor, LPP has partnered with a local high school that recently built a state-of-the-art career education facility for its students. Team members from LPP will have the opportunity to take community college level classes at night from community college instructors at the new facility.
“Over the course of time team members can get actual college credit, and eventually if they wanted to, fill in their general education and walk away with a degree, so it’s a great program,” said Jessica Kolterman, director of administration at LPP.
Robotic trussing provided the opportunity for 80 to 90 team members to move to other positions at LLP. (Source: Scott Automation and Cole Packaging)Automation acquisition
To bring in the right automation, at the right time and put it in the right place requires a great deal of time, research and knowledge of company need. These requirements coincide with the requirements of operating a facility at the same time.
“Our job here is to run this facility,” Shafer said. “I don’t have people traveling the world. It’s another resource that we’ve put into play where the latest technology now kind of comes to us. And we don’t have to do all the travel and research.”
LPP and Kevin Kopka, president of Cole Packaging, Fremont, Neb., created a unique partnership to solve the problem of time spent on research, travel, etc., necessary in knowing the automation solutions that will fit LPP’s exact needs.
Kopka routinely travels nationally and internationally specifically looking for technology on LPP’s behalf. He brings the latest in poultry processing back and presents it to Shafer and LPP. What makes the partnership truly unique is Kopka’s home office located within the LPP complex and his dedication. Kopka relocated, not only his home office, but his home to Fremont.
“We’ve got a vendor on our behalf that does that for us, it’s a unique partnership,” Shafer said. “I’ve never in my career had a vendor who had an office in my facility and essentially sells me technology. He goes out and researches the technology and brings back the ideas that we may never have come up with.”
Kolterman added, “What’s really nice is we have team members that can now walk over to his office and describe the challenges they have on the floor, or things they see on the floor that could improve, and say, ‘Hey, look for this when you’re out, or see if you can find something for this problem.’”
