BRENHAM, Texas-Among the suppliers of packaging and ingredients at Blue Bell Creameries Inc.'s anchor plant here in central Texas is a lumber supplier. Yes, lumber. The famous ice cream maker from Texas also builds its own pallets at its 500,000 foot headquarters plant. But it also operates six robotic palletizers that feed a highly automated warehouse and distribution system. And while Blue Bell uses the latest packaging materials for those containers and novelty wrappers that accompany its product to the end user consumers, those packaged products are put into waxed, corrugated cardboard shipping boxes that come back to the ice cream plant for re-use.
This odd juxtaposition of modern technology and do-it-yourself ingenuity might be surprising, but then again, Blue Bell is a company that makes a point of doing some things its own way, says Gene Supak v.p. of operations.