Bakery Facility

CONFIDENTIAL

A new greenfield facility was built on a 35-acre site to produce a popular line of frozen baked goods.

Speed-to-market was key to meet growing consumer demand, and this fast-track project which included a 188,000 SF bread bakery, automated sandwich assembly and packaging line, went from site design to commissioning in under 12 months.
The campus encompassed a 20,000 SF finished goods storage freezer, refrigerated shipping docks and 18,000 SF of office space.
Future expansion needs played a role in both the building design and the utility system sizing, and subsequent projects executed by Dennis Group have enlarged the footprint to 320,000 SF.

Shortly after the merger between Nestlé and Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, the decision was made to consolidate manufacturing and distribution functions at the Operations Center located in Bakersfield, CA.

This expansion consisted of adding over 320,000 square feet of processing, utility, warehouse/distribution, and R&D space, including six new production lines.

In addition to three conventional ice cream mix production tanks, the facility includes a yogurt production room. This space is pressurized to preclude infiltration of airborne contaminants. 3000 gallon batches of cream are inoculated with live yogurt cultures to produce the base yogurt mix. The mix is batch pasteurized, then pumped to surge tanks for addition of flavors, prior to freezing, hardening and packaging.

Once the expansion was completed, in fewer than 12 months from groundbreaking to saleable product, Dreyer’s manufacturing throughput was doubled.

When Dreyer’s combined its ice cream business with that of Nestlé’s, expansion of East Coast manufacturing and distribution capacity was one of the highest priorities in rationalizing the merger. Dennis Group was selected as a partner for the evaluation and execution of this major facility and process expansion project.

The project involved acquiring and re-zoning 40 acres of property, increasing the size of the facility six fold to over 600,000 SF, creating a 23,000 pallet minus 20 degree distribution center, and adding 10 new ice cream and frozen yogurt lines.

This major undertaking was affected over a two year construction period, and was accomplished without sacrificing a single minute of the existing facility’s available capacity.