Colgate-Palmolive Opens AI-Infused Plant to Propel Hill’s Growth
Colgate-Palmolive is bringing high tech to its new Hill’s Pet Nutrition manufacturing plant as it seeks to overcome the capacity constraints dogging its growth ambitions.
Located in Tonganoxie, KS, the 365,000-square-foot smart factory is the company’s most advanced plant, employing artificial intelligence within a digital food safety system, as well as automation and robotics.
The factory, which held a ribbon cutting this week, leverages automated guided vehicles and autonomous mobile robots to move materials. As part of this, the robots are responsible for moving product and formula samples to the quality lab for testing; this in turn reduces workers’ time on this task, allowing for consistency and more frequent quality checks to be completed, Colgate-Palmolive told CGT.
A tech-enabled “Mission Control Center” taps AI to provide increased visibility and monitoring throughout the pet food lifecycle, from ingredient intake to packaging. The production process is an entirely ”enclosed system,” the company said, from ingredient mixing to cooking and container filling, which is designed to prevent food exposure to environmental contaminants.
The plant’s overall design marks a step change in strategic automation and technological advancements in the pet food industry, according to Colgate-Palmolive, and is expected to improve speed to market by shortening the production cycle.
Hill’s Pet Nutriton’s Dramatic Growth
The Tonganoxie plant is expected to result in new product innovations to grow the Hill’s Pet Nutrition brand, which has been a consistent growth spot for Colgate-Palmolive for several years, in part due to rising swell of pet ownership. Net sales for the Hill’s segment grew 16% in Colgate-Palmolive’s most recent quarter — and 21.5% in the one before that — and it’s been cited by CEO Noel Wallace as one of the company’s best growth engines.
Capacity constraints, however, have impeded growth efforts, which the company has sought to remedy through the acquisition of a trio of plants from private label manufacturer Red Collar Pet Foods last year, a facility in Italy, and the opening of this new plant. The Tonganoxie facility will enable the company to expand in the wet pet food category, one that was previously under-indexing in, Wallace said at an investors conference last month.
In addition to opening the new factory, Colgate-Palmolive is also leveraging decision intelligence at several Hill’s plants, resulting in improved stock deployment operations.
