Case Study: Aunt Millie's Bakery

For more than 100 years, Midwestern grocery shoppers have trusted family-owned Aunt Millie's Bakeries for quality baked goods: bread, buns, rolls, English muffins, bagels and donuts. Aunt Millie's headquarters are in Fort Wayne, IN; the company operates seven bakeries in Fort Wayne, Coldwater, Jackson, Kalamazoo and Plymouth, Michigan, and in Sidney, Ohio. Aunt Millie's has more than 2,000 employees.

All of Aunt Millie's bakeries are fully automated with state-of-the-art equipment:

• The Fort Wayne Bakery has five packaging lines baking 180 loaves of bread a minute.
• The two Coldwater bakeries produce buns, muffins, and bagels; the Coldwater plant was named Wendy's "Supplier of the Year" in 2003.
• Aunt Millie's Jackson bakery houses four packaging lines, baking 160 loaves of bread per minute.
• Eight hundred hot dog buns and hamburger rolls are produced every minute at the Kalamazoo bakery runs. The plant also produces bread to meet customer demand.
• The Plymouth Bakery opened in May 2005 to produce hamburger and hot dog buns.
• The Sidney plant was purchased in 1995; it houses Aunt Millie's fastest bun production lines - three lines bake 6,000 12-packs of buns per hour.

Aunt Millie's has expanded rapidly in recent years. Five of these seven plants have been brought on line in the past fifteen years. Joe Steele, Vice President of Engineering and a 30-year Aunt Millie's employee, has overseen the construction of these new facilities and took charge of selecting the metal detection equipment in each.