Casting a Wide Net in a Niche Market 

If you’ve eaten a hotdog over the last forty years, there’s a 90% chance you’ve enjoyed food from a Drake Loader. With over 1,700 machines sold worldwide, capable of putting out 2.5 million food products per minute, Drake is part of a much bigger picture. As a Middleby Food Processing brand, they have a big reach focusing on food safety, sustainability, and innovation.

Drake, a Virginia-based OEM, creates finely tuned, custom equipment for the global food processing industry, occupying the end of production lines that align, convey, and autoload foods from ovens and freezers into packaging machines. Connecting to legacy equipment from any manufacturer or as an integral part of Middleby Solutions, Drake knows how to exceed expectations when it comes to primary food handling and takes pride in their custom automation.

From their humble beginnings in 1979, they rose to dominate this unique market, specifically by patenting new, more efficient methods of loading hot dogs and sausages. Drake has remained the industry standard not only by keeping up with advances in technology, but also by innovating new applications and sanitation practices for other products like chicken, patties, cheese, pickles, snack sticks, corn dogs, and more. Always setting the technology bar higher, they continue to develop vision, robotic, and integrator applications to increase food safety, throughput, and ease of use.

 Source: ©Drake

Powerful Partnerships

Drake’s newest innovations come from their inspired engineers who make global food production safer and more efficient. By partnering with powerful allies like FANUC and Rockwell Automation, Drake produces custom autoloading equipment that solves many primary food-handling challenges.

Their full line of centrifugal and robotic autoloaders brings modern inspiration to the factory floor and comes with food-grade, stainless steel FANUC robots and patented end-of-arm tools. FANUC is the global leader in robotics with over 40 million products installed worldwide. As a certified integrator, Drake’s customers have an expert team of service, support, and training instructors standing by.

“FANUC’s DR3 stainless steel series of robots pairs with Drake’s loaders to supply customers with complete, hygienic equipment solutions for safe primary food handling.” –Wes Garrett, Exec. Dir. Global Accounts

Another strong partnership Drake has built through the decades is with Rockwell Automation, which provides all of Drake’s electronics & controls. All Drake loaders use their touchscreen HMI technology to allow for rapid adjustment to various areas of every loader.  

Rockwell understands not only the factory floor of Drake’s largest clients and the business models that make them the most productive, but also how to identify and capture critical data and utilize it as an OEM. With a century of standard setting in core controls and now at the front of digital transformation, Drake’s Gold-level partnership with Rockwell keeps them highly innovative and ready for the future.

Equipment Innovations for Poultry and More

 These partnerships, combined with their newest line of rugged, robotic autoloaders have greatly increased the type of food applications Drake is famous for. They can now pick and place, rotate, stack, and inspect most types of products that require state-of-the-art food safety and industrial sanitation practices.

Beyond the robotic autoloaders, Drake has also recently innovated poultry production by designing a “Singulator” that automatically spaces out poultry pieces on the line to help downstream processes like X-ray and breading stations that require only one piece at a time.

New Website Showcasing Sustainability Practices

 To help showcase their offerings as the “right hand of food production,” Drake has launched a new, modern website where potential customers and the curious can read about their legendary customer and technical service, new loaders and equipment, and sustainability practices. The new website will also host an online client portal where clients can log in and easily find important documents like manuals and see parts turnover time.

 As for sustainability, Drake uses 83.6% recycled stainless steel, a wonderfully green resource. Additionally, their research, development, & manufacturing facility in Waynesboro, Virginia, USA has a very low carbon footprint, as they make everything on-site. Over the past 45 years, Drake has proven dedicated to inspired engineering, sustainable manufacturing practices, and partnering with customers for success.

Source: ©Drake 

 

Unleashing the Power of Middleby

In 2011, Drake was acquired by the Middleby Corporation and is now an integral part of their complete line solutions for the food processing industry. Equipped with the power of the Middleby brands, Drake’s reach in global manufacturing, service, collaborative engineering, and innovative leadership is second to none.

Middleby Food Processing Group partners with industrial protein and bakery processors, providing the most advanced operations solutions. Their protein, sanitation, and automation brands, which include Alkar, Armor Inox, Cozzini, CV-Tek, Danfotech, Drake, Hinds-Bock, Filtration Automation, Maurer-Atmos, MP Equipment, Pacproinc, Proxaut, RapidVisionPak, Scanico, and Thurne, Colussi Ermes, Key-Log, and Vemac collaborate to provide top of the line robotic and on-site automation solutions. The future of facilities is rapidly changing and becoming more user-friendly and cost-effective while improving sanitation, maximizing labor, and ensuring employee safety.  

Middleby Food Processing has success in maintaining a level of individuality, allowing engineering exploration, and developing new technologies in all divisions. This approach has made the entire, broad portfolio very appealing to customers from food processing and packaging to baking. By offering a seamless combination of brands for one full-line breakthrough solution that improves throughput, raises profitability, and expands capacity, Middleby maintains consistency for higher quality to reduce costs in sustainable ways.

Combining Middleby’s broad portfolio of patented technologies and integrated systems with Drake’s experience, innovation, and reliability assures you have a complete line of best-in-class solutions for all your food processing and packaging applications. With Drake’s legendary customer service, parts turnaround, terms & conditions, and available upgrades & mods, you’re assured of efficient, rugged autoloading equipment that helps you automate your food production lines and gives you both a heavy return on investment and confidence in your ability to meet future demands.