Quick flow of fast food
Third-party distributor Golden State Foods services nearly 800 McDonald's restaurants quickly and accurately from its well-organized distribution center in City of Industry, Calif.
By Corinne Kator, Associate Editor -- Modern Materials Handling, 4/1/2007
Truckloads of McDonald’s french fries arrive each day at the Golden State Foods distribution center (DC) in City of Industry, Calif. A case of frozen fries remains in the DC for less than two days before shipping out to a McDonald’s restaurant.
When inventory turns over this quickly, flow-through matters. And the year-old DC was designed for just that.
Golden State Foods is the second largest distributor of McDonald’s products in the United States. Its new City of Industry facility is a full-service DC for 799 McDonald’s restaurants in Southern California, providing them everything from frozen beef patties to cash register receipt paper.
 Golden State Foods receives cases of Happy Meal toys from China and manually palletizes them for distribution to other McDonalds' DCs. |
The main area of the facility is separated into three sections:
- dry goods,
- chilled (for produce, cheese and other products kept at 38 degrees), and
- frozen (where the temperature stays below zero).
Full pallet loads enter through dock doors on the south side of the DC. Mixed pallet loads destined for restaurants leave through dock doors on the north side.
Each section of the facility—dry, chilled and frozen—is organized under the same principle. Products are stored in rows of pallet flow rack with the sections of flow rack facing each other so that every other aisle is dedicated to either putaway or picking.
"With this arrangement," says the DC’s general manager Joe Michel, "there’s no cross traffic." Lift truck drivers putting away full pallets aren’t competing for space in the same aisles as order pickers and their pallet jacks.
The flow rack stores pallets three levels high. In the dry goods section, the flow rack goes 10 pallets deep. In the chilled and frozen sections, where there are fewer products and products turn around faster, the flow rack goes five pallets deep.
From Receiving to Shipping
Pallets of products from McDonald’s many suppliers enter the DC at the receiving docks. Lift truck drivers put products away in their designated slots in the dry, cooler and freezer flow rack systems, as directed by printed records of receipt. If the designated slot is full, drivers find an unused slot above it and replenish the designated slot when needed.
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Order selection has always been manual at Golden State Foods DCs, but that’s changing. The City of Industry DC has begun a transition to voice-picking technology. (See "Productivity, one bite at a time".)
Today, order pickers in the chilled section are testing out voice-pick headsets. In the frozen and dry goods section, pickers still use a paper-based system. For each restaurant order, they get a sheet of labels printed with the locations and descriptions of products. Once they’ve located and picked a case, they tag it with the correct label and add it to the pallet load for that order.
When their portion of an order is complete, the pickers take their mixed pallet loads to a semi-automatic stretchwrap machine. The dry and chilled portions of each order are staged at the refrigerated shipping docks near the freezer. When a trailer is loaded, pallets of frozen goods go in first, followed by the chilled and dry goods that have been staged at the shipping docks.
Additional Functions of the DC
As the largest DC in the McDonald’s system and the closest one to California’s major ports, this facility serves several additional functions:
- It prepares shipments bound for 56 international locations in such places as Fiji and Guam.
- Using 20,000 square feet of storage space, the facility serves as a hub for pallet loads of bulk dry products going to other McDonald’s DCs in the western United States.
- Using 75,000 square feet of space on the west end of the DC, the facility acts as the distribution point for Happy Meal toys—receiving container loads of toys from China, manually palletizing them and then distributing them to other McDonald’s DCs in the western United States.
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