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Royal Cup Coffee and Tea creates a bridge to its future

The complex, multiphase project cuts labor in half and doubles production capacity with bridges that create one interconnected facility instead of three. This new linear flow streamlines the product’s journey from raw material to final package.

Burlap sacks travel to the automatic bag slitting machine, which places green coffee beans in the hopper and then disposes the sack. This limits handling of the product, reducing worker and food safety risks. Photo by Brian Hippensteel/Brand Neue.
Burlap sacks travel to the automatic bag slitting machine, which places green coffee beans in the hopper and then disposes the sack. This limits handling of the product, reducing worker and food safety risks. Photo by Brian Hippensteel/Brand Neue.

Royal Cup Coffee and Tea has come a long way since 1896 when original company owner Henry T. Batterton sold coffee from a horse and wagon in Alabama. After Batterton and his wife died in a tragic car accident during the 1920s, bankers managed the company until the 1950s, when Billy Smith returned from World War II and bought the business along with two minority shareholders. 

Smith changed the company name to Royal Cup Coffee, based on Batterton’s slogan — a royal cup of coffee. The rest is history, as the saying goes, and today, Billy’s grandson, Bill Smith III, serves as CEO. Royal Cup now has the capacity to handle up to 120 million lb of green coffee beans with the recent completion of a multiphase project that includes a new 33,150-sq-ft green bean receiving, cleaning and storage facility; expansion and renovation of its main roasting and packaging facility from 113,000 sq ft to 130,000 sq ft; a warehouse expansion of 11,000 sq ft; and a 4,000-sq-ft enclosed bridge between the roasting/packaging facility and the storage warehouse. 

This project was honored as ProFood World’s 2019 Manufacturing Innovator of the Year award winner during a special presentation on March 27 during ProFood Tech 2019 in Chicago. (To learn about other Manufacturing Innovation Award winners and ProFood Tech, visit https://bit.ly/2ZNfv2i.)

The new campus allows Royal Cup to move raw coffee beans directly from the receiving dock to the cleaner and into storage mechanically. Plus, automated scanning inputs new inventory into Royal Cup’s new supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system automatically, meaning the company knows exactly what products it has in stock.

Cutting-edge innovations in the green bean receiving facility include telescopic conveyors, automatic bag slitters and a custom pipe bridge for bean transport. 

“The telescopic conveyors eliminate the need for manual unloading, which saves time and eliminates forklift accidents that could injure employees and ruin product,” states Kevin Boughner, senior vice president of operations at Royal Cup Coffee and Tea. “We took a three-shift unloading operation and streamlined it into one,” he adds.  

Rather than the conventional method of manually cutting bags with a knife, automatic slitting equipment allows beans to enter the hopper for cleaning and disposes of the sack, reducing worker safety and food safety risks while improving efficiency. 

Weekend warriors remove bottlenecks

The complex project began by building the green coffee beans facility. In the past, receiving was one of Royal Cup’s biggest production bottlenecks. “We would accept trucks with 40,000 lb of coffee, but the biggest bin we could put beans in was 10,000 lb,” explains Boughner. “The new facility completely reshaped our business potential. Now we have 32 silos capable of storing 1.2 million lb of coffee.” 

At the green bean facility, incoming coffee is cleaned in a dry process to remove any foreign materials from origin and then placed in the silos. When a recipe is ready for processing, clean coffee beans are sent pneumatically via a bridge to the roasting plant. A custom transport system minimizes bean breakage as coffee beans travel that distance. 

Royal Cup’s coffee production peaks from September through December, so much of the project work needed on the existing facility had to be done before that timeframe. “We put on a new roof, new walls and did a lot of floor work while we were operating the plant,” recalls Boughner. 

During two, nine-month periods of the three-year project, Royal Cup gridded off certain areas of the existing production plant. The operations team had pre-meetings on Thursdays to communicate where construction and renovation would happen that weekend. The goal was to complete 20 different sections of the plant over the multiple weekends.

“On Friday afternoon, we would do a formal pass off to construction. On Sunday afternoon, our food safety team would come in to sign off that the plant was ready for food production,” explains Boughner.
In the roasting plant upgrade, Royal Cup installed a new Probat R2000 and upgraded its existing Probat R2000Z as well as the controls on its Probat RZ4000. 

Roasted coffee is sent to whole bean packaging or to the grinding area before being sent to one of the 18 rebuilt packaging machines. Royal Cup also built a state-of-the-art-flavor room for ground coffee. If a recipe calls for flavored coffee, the system will pull the ground coffee into the blender, pull the right amount of flavoring out of the flavoring tanks and create a batch. Once it’s complete, the batch moves to the aggravating line. 

When switching from a batch of hazelnut-flavored coffee to chocolate, for example, Royal Cup needed an efficient way to thoroughly clean the blending equipment to reduce flavor cross-contamination. Engineering and construction firm Stellar transformed the flavor room into a washdown area with high levels of food safety standards. The highly automated flavor room replaced a very manual previous process.

MES, SCADA systems provide tighter control, help increase throughput

Royal Cup’s process includes an advanced SCADA system designed by Factora that integrates all of the facility’s equipment. The green bean receiving system allows the plant’s various machinery and storage silos to communicate with each other and provide real-time feedback. “The system continually monitors and reacts to this data to improve the efficiency of product flow,” explains Kurt Warzynski, Stellar’s vice president of process engineering. 

The beans are tracked multiple times after passing through the automatic slitter, after cleaning, after leaving the storage silos, and both before and after roasting. Bean weighing is also monitored in real time. The process data allows Royal Cup to display a continually updated reading of cycle levels, monitor weight discrepancies to ensure accurate inventory, and prompt the cleaning tower to automatically adjust conveyor speeds based on the weight of the sacks received. 

“This is giving us tighter control of our margins and a better foundation to run our business,” states Boughner. The SCADA system also tracks downtime accurately. This high volume of data helps Royal Cup accurately understand efficiency losses and opportunities for improvement throughout the entire process. The system can also prompt personnel to address problems occurring on the line. 

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