If you’ve never visited a large-scale bakery facility, stepping onto the production floor of Highland Baking’s flagship location in Northbrook, IL is likely to overwhelm.
Snack food and wholesale bakery companies are building varying levels of automation in their warehouse shipping and receiving areas, ranging from forklifts to autonomous vehicles, to traceability software and more, all in an effort to make their operations more efficient, effective, safer, and more profitable.
The puffed and extruded snacks category is having a great year: all of its subcategories are up from the same time period last year, per Circana data, and consumers are returning to gatherings where snacks like Cheetos, Funyuns, and other snacks are omnipresent.