me in 2018: food handling equipment can't switch quickly btwn different packaging sizes & that's a huge problem

everyone in 2018: ...

everyone in 2020: oh sweet Jesus food handling equipment can't switch quickly btwn different packaging sizes & that's a huge problem

so help me we're gonna make SMED happen in the food system & it's gonna revolutionize life for small & medium businesses

pitched nobody ever bc it's too inside baseball to ever get funded

details to follow, got to go plant some ferns while it's cloudy

SMED = Single-Minute Exchange of Dies.

It's the dullest-sounding thing

but if you work in a place that makes things it is aaaaaa life-changing

SMED, like a lot of "how to make things & not have your head up your ass about how you do it" magic, was invented by Toyota.

Basically, car doors & other body panels start as flat sheets of metal.

You put them through a die-stamp machine to press them into the correct shape.

Those videos of things getting smashed on hydraulic presses?

That's what those machines are really for. You put a molding piece on the piston & "anvil" part, & the press provides the force to smash a flat metal sheet or other raw material into the desired shape.

Hydraulic presses are big, heavy machines with lots of force!

So the molds, or "dies" that went onto both sides, have to be substantial enough to hold up to that force.

They also have to be aligned v precisely or parts won't come out right, & maybe it'll destroy the machine.

tl;dr if you want to switch from making one kind of car door to another, you have to switch out the dies.

And because the dies are so heavy & need to be arranged with precision, it can take hours or sometimes even days to swap them out.

That means your machine is out of commission for a long time if you switch from making one thing to another.

To make up for this, a lot of manufacturers started making giant batches to drive down the total downtime/item & prevent $ loss.

In other words

the fact that you have to stop making things for a long time during changeovers

is a main driver behind why mass production exists.

This is how US automakers like Ford, GM, Chrysler, etc were doing things post-WW2.

They made huuuuge batches. Like they'd make driver's-side car doors for one model for a week; then switch to back-seat doors for a week; and so on.

It took FOREVER to make all the parts of a car.

So they'd have to have huge warehouses to store all the parts while they finished making them, before they could even start making the cars.

Meanwhile in Japan, Toyota looked & said "fuck that we don't have that kind of space."

Toyota said

"Does switching out dies really need to take HALF A DAY? Nope!"

So they just treated it the way a NASCAR pit crew treats a tire change: have all your tools ready & someone to do each part of the job so you can do it all at once & finish in less than 1 minute.

Eventually Toyota also updated their die press machines to make them more accommodating to rapid switchouts

but for real, in many cases good organization is all it takes to knock a switchover process from multiple hours to single-digit minutes.

Toyota's goal was to get their switchovers down to 60 seconds or less, hence SMED (single-minute exchange of dies).

Since switching from 1 model to another cost them almost no downtime, they could make lots of things cheaply & with good quality

WITHOUT MASS PRODUCTION

Yeah a side-effect of SMED is it turns out mass production isn't actually mandatory in modern consumer manufacturing.

You don't have to make huge batches of each item to make them low-cost and profitable.

This has HUGE implications for the food system.

For ex, I had lots of greenhouse clients who needed to make 2 packs:

-8oz to 16oz plastic clamshells of salad mix for retail

-20lb boxes of salad mix for restaurant & foodservice customers.

*this is a retail clamshell pack

1 machine that can do both would be great.

However, unless every single client I ever had was super bad at sourcing equipment, *that kind of machine doesn't exist.*

You have to get 1 whole-ass production line for 1lb retail packs & a different one for 20lb boxes.

This is a horrible PITA for startups with tens of millions of dollars in the bank.

It's extra-bad for smaller operations who have to buy double the equipment to make what is actually a completely normal range of products (both retail & wholesale-sized packs of the same item).

This is the exact problem King Arthur had in the pandemic: all of their packing partners could make 50lb bags but very few had equipment that could make retail-sized bags of flour (2, 5, & 7-lb). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-06-16/how-king-arthur-dealt-with-a-flour-shortage-during-the-pandemic

Switching pack sizes on food lines is a lot more complicated than swapping dies out on a hydraulic press. For ex, a bottle-filling line might need different grippers for different types of bottles; attachments for screwing on different types of lids; etc.

But the point is, it shouldn't be impossible to switch from wholesale & retail-sized packs of the same item

and it appears that on a lot of food equipment it is.

It's designed to be rigid & inflexible.

Like every other design choice, it's a choice.

Anyway this is a problem that I was trying to tell people about before the pandemic, but mostly from the standpoint of "having to buy multiple machines to make a normal array of products is a serious barrier to farm-to-table food systems."

but like... talk about blank stares.

When people think about farm to table, they think a lot about the farm & very little about the handling afterwards.

But even in farm-to-table, THAT'S WHERE MOST OF THE WORK IN THE FOOD SYSTEM IS. Not the farm, but postharvest handling.

It took serious food shortages to get visibility into this problem.

And like most serious problems, it actually comes down to something that feels pretty trivial: whether or not you can swap out parts on a machine.