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Automated Conveyor System Is a Dream Come True for Fairytale Brownies

Thirty years into a business started by two school friends, the introduction of the smaller Magic Morsel found the brownie maker searching for a happy ending to an end-of-line challenge.

Most of Fairytale Brownies’ sales come as customizable gift packages of brownies, blondies, and cookies.
Most of Fairytale Brownies’ sales come as customizable gift packages of brownies, blondies, and cookies.
Fairytale Brownies

Count to 100. I’ll wait. Any distractions while you counted? Are you sure you didn’t miss any numbers? Now do it again. All day long.

Fairytale Brownies was founded by two childhood friends, David Kravetz and Eileen Spitalny, who met in kindergarten. After graduating from college and spending a few years in the corporate world, they took their friendship, entrepreneurial spirits, and Kravetz family brownie recipe, and went out on their own to launch a company in their hometown of Phoenix. Thirty years later, and their company employs more than 130 people, selling multiple flavors of brownies, blondies, and cookies through online delivery to customers all over the world.

When Kravetz and Spitalny first launched their business from a single bakery storefront, they started with full-size 3-in.-square brownies. Later, they started making half-size brownies they called Sprites. A few years after that, they added quarter-size brownies called Magic Morsels. In recent years, demand for those bite-sized morsels has exploded. “That’s the size and the line that has just taken off,” Kravetz says. “I think about 70% of our volume right now is in that size brownie.”


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And here’s where the problem comes in with counting to 100. Fairytale Brownies’ workers were counting brownies by hand and placing them into reusable totes, which were then taken to the freezer to be ready for assembling into gifts. The full-size brownies and Sprites were one thing, stacking nicely in the totes and making it easier to keep track of the count. But employees struggled to count and keep track of the 500 bite-size brownies that fit into each tote.

“They’re too small to stack and organize. The team would have to count 100 pieces, put down a piece of parchment paper, then keep going,” Kravetz explains. “The only reason they’d do a layer of parchment was if they lost count, instead of starting over, they would only go back to the previous layer.”

It’s not difficult to see that this sort of task is better suited to automation than it is to human labor. As burgeoning demand for the Magic Morsels began to cause problems for the end-of-line conveyor system, the team at Fairytale Brownies realized they needed some help.

Automating the sort and count

Fairytale operations were using a relatively slow flow wrapper—about 150 pieces a minute—along with a single accumulation table. From there, workers placed products into totes, counting and stacking as able. To keep up with growing demand, especially during the peak gifting season, Fairytale needed a faster flow wrapper. But there was no way that workers were going to be able to keep up with a faster flow of product with the current system in place.

John Glenn & Associates, a material handling and engineering consultant based in Scottsdale, Ariz., equipped Fairytale with a new Syntegon horizontal flow wrapper to individually wrap brownies and other products. To reconfigure the rest of the system, the consultant turned to Dorner for its conveyor expertise.

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