Diverse Service Offerings Improve Food & Beverage Facility.

T. Marzetti Company—a subsidiary of Lancaster Colony Corporation headquartered in Columbus, Ohio—serves retailers and food services companies nationwide with a wide family of quality products, including salad dressings, fruit and vegetable dips, and frozen baked goods.

The Start of a Valued Relationship

This multi-phase project began in 2005, when T. Marzetti partnered with Gray to design and build the original 235,336 s.f. salad dressing and sauce production facility in Horse Cave, KY.

The next year, T. Marzetti selected Gray to design and build a 104,000 s.f. bakery facility for Sister Schubert, which was later expanded an additional 50,000 s.f. Gray then added a butter applicator room and performed other site work to finish Phase I at the Horse Cave campus.

Improving a Growing Operation

In 2011, T. Marzetti trusted Gray for Phase II—an expansion of the facility’s cold storage, with freezers capable of sustaining a temperature of -10 °F.

Most recently, Marzetti chose Gray’s robust service offerings for Phase III—a large-scale expansion project which will double the size of the original facility to meet the business’s growing consumer demands. The latest project will add 220 jobs to the facility and provide space for future operational expansion.

This continued partnership between T. Marzetti and Gray underscores Gray’s commitment to being driven by deep customer relationships and their long-term success.

Modern Manufacturing

In addition to providing design-build services, Marzetti leaned on Gray for specialty engineering services to improve its processes and controls. Project teams updated the facility’s cook system and packaging lines to increase production efficiency and capacity while also integrating automated IT and OT control systems and providing equipment design, procurement, and fabrication services.

Gray is updating the customer’s process with a high-temperature skid and continuous cook technology, while reducing the footprint for the process. Filling and packaging design will add two lines for bottling 8–24 oz. salad dressings. The new lines will serve as T. Marzetti’s fastest, capable of processing 400 bottles per minute, and will significantly improve throughput for this stage of production.

Gray’s integrated project services also include the custom design, fabrication, and installation of 11 HMI control panels with NEMA 4X washdown enclosures and nine I/O panels, along with motor control centers, variable-frequency drives, and other instrumentation for the facility’s automation & controls upgrades.