Shearer’s Foods infrared oven isn’t much to look at.
From the outside, the big steel rectangle Shearer’s uses to bake tortilla chips at its new $20 million Massillon facility looks a little like a boxcar without a locomotive.
It’s what happens inside, though, what you can’t see — especially when the triangles or circles of masa dough (depending on the chip being made) is baking — that sets this oven and Shearer’s Foods apart from the rest of the snack food industry.
Instead of using an open flame to bake the chips (the current industry standard uses ribbon burners, much like you’d find on a gas grill), Shearer’s has installed an oven with 24 infrared burners. The burners are powered by gas but use far less than the open-flame oven.
“It toasts the product more evenly, more cleanly,” says Scott Weyandt, (pictured at left) Shearer’s facilities and sustainability manager, who adds that product taste is the top priority when it comes to changing processes. “We’re putting out more product with less than half the energy.”
Most importantly, the rectangular silver box of an oven has just two tiny openings; one where the dough is fed in and another where half-baked chips come out and drop into a fryer.
The underside of the old ovens was open so heat was routinely lost from drafting air. That doesn’t happen anymore.
“Now we’re only using what is necessary to heat the product,” Weyandt says. “The industry has been focused for a very long time on quality, safety, delivery and cost. It’s becoming more apparent that sustainability is equally, if not more, important. You have to balance all of them to be a good manufacturer.”
Shearer’s, of course, is a sustainability leader in the snack food industry thanks to work it has done at its existing production facilities in Brewster and Lubbock, Texas.
The new facility in Massillon sits on a 32-acre site. Fifty-one percent of the land must be returned to its natural habitat, part of the effort to make the Shearer’s Foods facility the first food manufacturing site in Ohio that will meet or exceed LEED Gold certification standards.
Natural light fills the factory thanks to huge window bays that surround the entire building. On a partly sunny day in April, those windows let in enough light that only three or four banks of fluorescent lights (out of dozens) were on in the cavernous packaging area. All lights at the new plant have occupancy and light sensors.
The effort to save energy and resources even extends beyond the factory floor to the restrooms, where the urinals are waterless and toilets use water harvested from rain.
The results is a 60 percent reduction in water use than in industry-standard restrooms. The company should know by midsummer whether it has met the LEED Gold standards. The facility is starting with 30 new employees and has the opportunity to grow to 180 within two years.
“As a business leader in the community, I think it is our responsibility to preserve the natural resources that we use,” says Bob Shearer, CEO of Shearer’s Foods and a fourth-generation member in the family business. “That is important. I think [the new facility] is sort of a statement to our commitment to do that.”