Food Warehouse Lightens the Load to Attract Workers
Dot Foods is allowing workers to handle smaller loads in an effort to expand its hiring pool, as an improving economy drives up demand for the company’s food distribution business.
Workers at a Dot Foods warehouse in Mt. Sterling, Ill. pick light-weight cases of food to fill orders. PHOTO: DOT FOODS
The warehouse network that feeds restaurants, hospitals and schools is becoming increasingly automated. But in one corner of the food supply chain, a company is redesigning its warehouses to accommodate more workers, not less.
Privately held Dot Foods recently lowered the maximum weight some workers in its Mt. Sterling, Ill. warehouse are required to lift. The new rules – 35 pounds, instead of 65 pounds – allowed the company to quickly hire 51 new workers, including many women and older men, two groups that often struggle to handle heavier loads. This summer, the company opened a 150,000-sq. ft. addition to its Mt. Sterling warehouse where only those lighter-weight cases are stored.
It’s an unusual way of responding to higher demand, which is testing the capacity of companies like Dot Foods. Many food companies are installing machines to retrieve goods from shelves and assemble orders. But the technology isn’t cheap, and grows more expensive when orders are varied or complex.
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Dot Foods serves as a link between food manufacturers that sell goods by the pallet or truckload to distributors that don’t always have space for excess inventory. Dot’s 10 warehouses stock about 40,000 different items—from canned green beans to frozen chicken, crackers, spoons and spatulas—and ships many different quantities and combinations within a couple days. On an average day, the Illinois warehouse ships out about 85,000 cases of various goods.
“Automation works well when you’re moving full pallets of product, but it’s not the most effective solution for what you call single case fulfillment,” said Bryan Langston, manager of Dot Foods’ Mt. Sterling facility. Mr. Langston said business has been booming as the economy rebounds and he has jobs to fill. But it can be a challenge to find those workers, given the warehouse’s far-flung location.
Elizabeth Preston, 34, started at Dot Foods’ Mt. Sterling facility in April, where she works exclusively in the warehouse’s “light-pick zone,” as they refer to the new addition. The average case weight in that part of the warehouse is 6 to 7 lb. “It’s a little easier on your body,” she said.
On a typical 12-hour shift, Ms. Preston drives a forklift around the warehouse with a list of items she needs to pick up for customer orders. If it’s croutons, for example, she’ll pull up to the crouton shelf, collect the cases she needs, scan their bar codes, and drive on.
Ms. Preston’s husband, who has worked for the company for 13 years, has tougher lifting requirements. “I could probably do what he does right now,” she said, “but in 10 years could I lift the big cases? No, and I wouldn’t want to try.”
Ian Hobkirk, director of warehouse consultancy Commonwealth Supply Chain Advisors, says in a low-margin business like food distribution, “it’s desirable to reduce labor costs as much as possible.”
Mr. Hobkirk said pricy automation can cut down on the physical requirements for workers while reducing the need for labor generally, but there are other systems that aren’t quite as extreme and “let you get the most out of the labor you invested in.” Technologies such as “voice-directed picking,” which eliminates cumbersome barcode scanners, or “engineered labor standards,” which set calculated performance goals for each worker, are some examples, he said.
Dot Foods is sticking with what works.
“We need to make sure we’re casting our net into the widest waters,” Mr. Langston said, which they’ve accomplished by “creating new positions in the warehouse that will appeal to a wider group.” The Illinois facility expects to add 60 more warehouse workers to its crew of 850 by the end of the year.
