Unilever – North American Ice Cream
Various Locations | Food + Industrial
Overview
ISG collaborated with Unilever to design a new facility, complete with major mechanical equipment, cold storage, and structural design considerations.
Opportunity
To meet production demands, the transnational consumer goods company required continuous renovations and expansions of current facilities in Missouri, Tennessee, and Nevada. Aiming to remain operational during various construction and remodel projects, Unilever calls on ISG for designs that support production goals.
Solution
Unilever and ISG have partnered on many projects, including improvements to a facility in Sikeston, Missouri, and a new facility in Covington, Tennessee. Efforts were aimed at enhancing operations to streamline production. ISG provided multi-disciplinary design services including planning, architectural design, water solutions, and mechanical, electrical, and plumbing system engineering for a broad spectrum of projects.
In the Sikeston, Missouri, production upgrades included a new strawberry room, ice alley addition, batch room with a truck dock and storage silo addition, new carton folding rooms, tank room expansion, and production hall expansion that included spiral freezers. I In preparation for planned production increases, the plant’s engine room was enlarged to handle the additional equipment load. Employee locker rooms were expanded, and a wastewater treatment building was added with a focus on sustainability. The expanded and updated plant now spans 223,000 square feet.
In Covington, Tennessee, ISG worked with the Unilever team to design and plan a 90,400-square-foot ice cream facility adjacent to an aseptic, ready-to-drink product plant while allowing existing operations to continue without disruption during construction. The project included the integration of a new 67,000 pound-per-hour steam system, an automated cold storage and retrieval system, and reinforcement designs to accommodate utility equipment located on the facility’s roof.
ISG provided rate and construction negotiation with the utility to deliver a 12.47 kV feed to the largest ice cream production facility in the world. Design work included 12.47 kV switchgear, overhead and underground distribution lines, primary line protection equipment, utility and plant metering using Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), 12 unit substations ranging from 2.5 to 3.75 megavolt amperes (MVA) each, and low voltage distribution from the substations to plant loads.