G&G Specialty Foods Factory Relocation in Five Months
The Challenge
In April of 1998 G&G Specialty Foods, maker of cheese spreads, hummus and salsa for retail sale contracted Millennium Mechanical to relocate its existing factory in San Francisco to a larger facility in Santa Rosa, CA. The owners wanted their 150 employee’s children to be able start school in the fall of that year, relocate all existing equipment, add new equipment, and continue filling orders while the relocation work took place.
New Methods
The Millennium team quickly aligned the needs of each department, and established the workflow to achieve all milestones to make the rapid transformation occur smoothly. Millennium Mechanical crafted an agreement with the Santa Rosa Planning Commission to rush expedite all permit reviews. This was done by streamlining the normal process of submitting plans and waiting for comments, revise the plans, and resubmit until complete which would take months. Millennium’s staff was granted direct access the City’s Plan Checking staff to review all the compliance requirements for the project. The plans were approved within a few weeks!
Arturo Gallardo, left, adds fresh tomatoes to a chopper while making the Sonoma Salsa produced by G&G Specialty Foods.
Rapid Design
Concurrent with the permit processing, was the plant designed, work schedule, and competitive bid packages of the new production facilities. Approximately 135 existing and new pieces of equipment had to be installed. Everything from mixers, ovens, kettles, boilers, exhaust hoods, conveyors, packing equipment, blast freezers, and material handling equipment, air compressors, pallet racks, and sanitizing equipment had to itemized, measured, specified and/or newly purchased for the new plant. All the necessary utilities for compressed air, hot/cold water, steam, power and lighting had to be designed.
Lastly, the most advantageous relocation/ install sequence of production equipment and utilities was determined. The equipment relocation was split in two phases, so that production would not completely stop during the relocation. Utilities were pre‐installed and a portion of the 55,000-square-foot plant was installed and commissioned. The new plant ran while the rest old plant was relocated. The customers never had a shortage of products and the relocated employee’s children attended their new schools in the fall semester.
