At Port Wentworth, a More Efficient Way to Make a Pallet

Port Wentworth refinery automated unitized pallet operations.

If you’ve been to Sam’s Club or Costco lately and seen forklifts whiz by, loaded with stretch-wrapped pallet of goods, you’ll better understand why Imperial Sugar invested over $1 million into high-tech machinery that can neatly stack and wrap 495 four-pound bags of sugar in five minutes flat — and can do that neat trick continually, 24/7.

“Grocery retailers normally request their sugar purchases in shrink-wrap bales of bags that stocking personnel can carry to the shelf to replenish sales. The club store format started a transition to a more demanding pallet display for aisle sales where 495 bags are individually stacked on a pallet for direct sales. In the beginning, we were stacking the bags on pallets manually,” says Warren Hunt, director of business planning for Imperial Sugar.

“Today, however, this style of pallet has become very popular and the logics of manual production has become costly and very difficult to administrate. Many of our customers want their sugar delivered as unitized pallets – the ‘trade’ name for this type of pallet – as mainline grocery chains transition parts of their stores to this more efficient way of merchandising.”

“It’s clear that automating the production of unitized pallets is a competitive advantage. The bags are stacked significantly faster than workers can accomplish and they are straight every time. The quality of our new unitized pallets are substantially better.” Hunt says.

That’s why, as soon as planning began for the rebuilding of the Port Wentworth refinery, the idea of buying the machine, called a unitizer, immediately emerged. The cutting-edge equipment is one of only two being used by the sugar industry in the United States, and it’s a first for Imperial Sugar.

To understand how the unitizer gives the company a leg up, one must begin with a stroll down a grocery aisle. At a conventional retailer, such as Kroger, you’d notice the store promoting certain goods by putting stacks of them at the ends of each aisle, called “end caps.”

Sugar bags packed in the conventional way arrive at Kroger in 10- or 8-unit bales, wrapped in plastic or brown paper. As shoppers pluck bags from the display, a stock person must keep unwrapping bales.

For retailers, then, having a “ready to display” pallet worth of goods is appealing, both in terms of the labor saved and the appearance of the display. A forklift can deliver 495 units of sugar right to the end of the aisle. And a tightly packed unitized pallet arrives looking “exactly the way it looked when you put it on the truck,” says Hunt. By contrast, manually packed pallets can shift and lean during transport.

For club stores, whose stores are designed around the idea of bulk displays, the need for unitized pallets is even stronger.

Says Hunt, “Club stores like Sam’s Club or Costco always want their product in a unitized pallet. They want to forklift it right into the aisle, so consumers can easily select what they want. If we want to sell to Sam’s and Costco, you have to mass produce excellent unitized pallets.”

That’s why today at Port Wentworth, a conveyor belt moves bags of sugar away from the packaging machine toward the unitizer, which quickly turns and stacks the bags, 10 per layer. Flip a switch, and the bags shuttle down a different lane to be packaged in the traditional way for grocery shelves.

“That’s the real benefit,” Hunt says. “We have a lot more flexibility to market and sell exactly what our customers want.”