Fun and food go hand in hand, especially at Nation Pizza and Foods. With more than 60 years of experience in the baking and prepared foods business, this manufacturer/contract packager/recipe creator is an expert at crafting frozen pizzas, pizza crusts, sandwiches, appetizers, cookies, bread sticks and a variety of sweets at its two U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) facilities at rates of more than 2 million pieces daily.
Axium Foods, known best for private-label, corn-based snacks, launches its own brand of enhanced-nutrition tortilla chips of a different color, Mystic Harvest Purple Corn Tortilla Chips. Loaded with healthful antioxidants, the chips are not only eye-catching, they have a tasty flavor and crunch.
Pork rinds are probably the most misunderstood item in the snack category. This is surprising, because people have been eating pork rinds—also called pork skins—as long as they have been eating pigs. One of the world’s first snack foods created thousands of years ago, and favored in the southern states, pork rinds are a simple combination of fried pork skins and salt.
Axium Foods’ 130,000-sq.-ft, corn-based snacks operation in South Beloit, Ill., has expanded several times, thanks in part to the success of the many private-label products it packs and products it copacks. It’s also launching its own line of Mystic Harvest purple tortilla chips, which contain powerful antioxidants. Outfitted with seven highly flexible production lines, Axium produces 150 different stock-keeping units of snacks each week.
Serving a substantial portion of the Southeast, including the Five Guys hamburger restaurant chain, Masada Bakery has a deep commitment to customer service, quality standards and an ability to flex with a major growth curve in a tough economy. It’s for these and other reasons that we named it our 2012 Wholesale Baker of the Year.
Masada Bakery’s 100,000-sq.-ft. bakery operation in Norcross, Ga., continues to grow, even in a slumping economy, thanks in part to the dramatic success of several customers.
Not many things these days can truly be called “something new under the sun.” But Frito-Lay North America’s snack-processing plant in Casa Grande, Ariz. is one of them. Opened in 1984, the plant is possibly the most sustainable facility of its kind in the U.S. Combining sustainability for the future, a learning site and snack production, the facility currently serves a seven-state snack distribution network on a sprawling 280 acres in the Sonoran Desert. Occupying 170,000 sq. ft. of total space, with 160,000 sq. ft. under one roof, the Casa Grande plant is part of Frito-Lay’s
Chipping in for a “greener” future, Frito-Lay North America’s snack manufacturing facility in Casa Grande, Ariz., is the company’s first Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold snack unit—a remarkable achievement in its own right. But the plant, which Frito-Lay calls its Near Net Zero project showcase, is also the result of a highly ambitious sustainability project that took the location “off the grids,” running primarily on renewable energy sources and recycled water, while producing zero landfill waste. The plant could be the most sustainable food production facility of its kind in the U.S.