Fifty years ago, Ready Foods made dishes like salsa and pinto beans out of a small factory on West Colfax in Denver. Since then, the company has grown: now it produces over one million pounds per week.
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A stream of black beans snakes around the factory floor being cleaned, soaked, mixed with sauce and bagged. A crane lifts pouches of beans into tanks of hot water.
“This all would have been done by hand, and now this is all incredibly automated,” Ready Foods CEO Marco Antonio Abarca said of how operations have changed.
He is guided by principals from the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a concept about the technological advancement of the 21st century.
"What it's talking about is the marriage of information technology and operational technology, so that you can use AI to analyze vast quantities of production information and to find anomalies and find waste and find problems," Abarca said.
Workers test beans for pH and viscosity; a mechanic fixes a sensor on a smokestack attached to an oven that roasted vegetables for salsa.
“They are truly more machine operators than they are cooks,” Abarca said. ‘It's a cooperative relationship with the machines: maintaining, working, resolving problems with the machines.’
Colorado manufacturers are turning to automation in industries from aerospace to food. Walking onto a factory floor these days, oftentimes means bright lights and computers along with workers and raw materials. Automation can help address workforce and productivity issues.
Out of Ready Food’s five plants, this one is the newest and the most automated, by far. When Abarca started dreaming up this facility years ago, workforce issues were on his mind.
“Finding good workers is always hard. Training good workers is hard,” Abarca said.
But ultimately, Ready Foods has been able to make better beans at a better price through automation. This plant is on its way to producing nearly four times the amount of beans and salsa with the same number of workers.
“What they (the beans) are is they're more consistent,” Abarca said. “We find the best profile, and we hit it every single time, for taste, for viscosity, for salt, for all the different things that are parts of it. We are able to really dial in and make the perfect bean.”
'The biggest pain'
"A decade ago, companies felt like they were forced to automate to address a workforce issue," Bart Taylor, the founder of Inside Manufacturing, an industry publication, said. "Today, companies are automating because they're really not competitive if they don't."
Loveland-based Vectis Automation is in the business of selling welding and cutting robots that aim to both increase productivity and address workforce issues.
CEO Doug Rhoda says these so-called ‘cobots’ —collaborative robots—can help address the enormous shortage of human welders; cobots are able to do much of this work.
“That's probably the biggest pain in the marketplace is around workforce,” Rhoda said.
“They grab the end of this arm and teach it, point-to-point, what the path that they want to weld it to be. They can walk away, press a button, and then it will repeat that over and over,” Rhoda said.
According to Vectis, its customers say these cobots are helping their shops become three to four times more productive but haven't replaced workers.
“It's a compliment,” Rhoda said. “You still need, you know, a human to teach it and to load, unload it.”
'This is factory work'
On the factory floor at Ready Foods, a robotic arm with suction cups stacks bags of cooked pinto beans into boxes while another loads boxes onto pallets. But something stops working.
“I can see the problem is that they have a hang up right there,” Abarca said, pointing up to a conveyor belt.
Workers in navy blue lab coats and hair nets start moving beans into boxes.
“So you can see here what happens when things aren't working well. They have to be loaded manually, and that's what we're trying to avoid,” Abarca said.
This is why he still needs human employees. Plus, Abarca describes these as good, serious, working class jobs with benefits. The starting pay at Ready Foods is $25/an hour.
“This is a physical job. You have to move. You have to be aware. Sometimes you'll be on your feet,” Abarca said. “I don't want to sugarcoat it as being some incredible ideal. This is factory work.”
But it is much easier than it used to be, Abarca adds, thanks to automation.
