Saginaw Bakeries is a family-owned company based in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada, that was founded in 1993 and currently employs 87 people at its 34,000-square foot production facility on the outskirts of Vancouver. It produces a variety of doughnuts, cookies, brownies, muns, sliced cakes and other sweets for roughly 400 customer locations on a daily basis. Given that the departure time for trucks leaving the facility is critical, the time window for producing baked goods for delivery is extremely limited.

During the past few years, Saginaw started investing in high-performance automation systems and equipment to improve productivity and customer service while lowering the risk of repetitive motion injury for its workers.

In one recent project, the company worked with Apex Motion Control and Vital Manufacturing Inc. (both based in Surrey) to develop an automated tray stacker using controls from Omron.

Unique Solution

The company worked with automation solution providers to develop a fully automated tray stacking system using Omron control and safety technologies that can stack any collection of industry-standard bread baskets at a speed of 15 trays per minute.

Customer Benefits

The new tray stacking system’s speed provided a 25% improvement over the productivity of a three-person stacking crew and allowed these employees to take care of other tasks while also protecting them from repetitive motion injury.