Manufacturing
The manufacturing facility at WTI was built with the greatest attention to detail for maintaining cleanliness. The floors in both the warehouse and the production areas have been coated and sealed to minimize locations for harborage of bacterial growth. The coving and tile walls also aid in the cleanliness of the facility. In the blending rooms we utilize both dust collection systems and bag compactors to reduce dust in the air and debris on the floor. The positive pressure of the dry blending area is designed to prevent material from blowing into the area while the high speed roll-up doors are open.
The production areas were created with the idea of product flow and efficiency in mind. There is no “backtracking” of materials once the raw materials have been pulled for production. The raw materials are prebatched in our pilot area, and then the batch is moved down the hall to the blending rooms. The raw materials are added to the blenders in a specified order and mixed according to the product requirements. Once blending is complete, the batch is discharged into totes in the room below and then moved to the packaging line. Here the finished goods are bagged; the bags are sealed, and then palletized. Once the pallets are full they are moved out of the production area and to the pallet wrapper where they are immediately wrapped and then put away.
For liquid blending, the raw materials are added to our various styles of tanks where they can be mixed, heated or chilled. After the mixing process is complete, the finished product is packed off into various sizes of containers for consumer use. These packages range from a few gallons to more than 200 gallons in volume.
To aid in traceability, recall and inventory, we have also implemented bar coding of all finished goods and raw materials with lot numbers and our internal item numbers. This bar coding system communicates directly with our accounting software, and helps us to maintain a real time inventory of all products. It also allows us to track each lot number and all of the transactions associated with that lot. |
