To eliminate the operational challenges of hand-squeezing lemons in its restaurants, Chick-fil-A built Bay Center Foods, a highly automated facility that uses high pressure processing (HPP) to deliver lemon juice with a fresh-squeezed taste.
Before the fast-food chain set out to create Bay Center Foods in 2019, “Some restaurants were squeezing thousands of lemons in a day, and it created a big bottleneck in the back [of the restaurant]; it added a lot of complexity,” according to Kurt Cahill, Executive Director of Manufacturing Innovation at Chick-fil-A, who spoke at PACK EXPO Las Vegas September 30.
The Valencia, Calif., facility eases the load on restaurant employees by processing nearly 200 million pounds of lemons annually, using an exclusive extraction process and HPP to achieve the right flavor.
