A Chilliwack food processor scaling past a few pallets a day runs into the same wall eventually, where hand-filling bags and hand-packing cases only stretches so far before order volume outruns the crew. Chilliwack has more than 25 food processing companies employing close to 600 people, spread across the city's food-industry parks, with operations ranging from berry processing to meat, dairy, and poultry. Packaging automation solves the throughput problem those processors hit once volume outpaces manual labor. A Mars Series VFFS bagger forms, fills, and seals bags at a rate no hand-packing crew can match, and an EliteWeigh multihead weigher feeds it accurate portions of anything from frozen berries to snack mix without constant operator adjustment.

The scale of demand in the city backs that up. A major regional brewery opened a 400,000-square-foot facility in Chilliwack in 2019, its largest brewing operation in Western Canada, and food-industry-park tenants include a berry-processing plant built in 2016 and a food-ingredients manufacturer running 67,737 square feet. Agriculture still anchors the city too, accounting for about 5 percent of local GDP across 939 farms. For a brewery, that means PackMaster cobot palletizers and case packers that keep pace with can and bottle lines; for a berry or meat processor, it means checkweighers and metal detection to catch defects before cases seal. A facility that size doesn't wait on custom-built equipment, and neither do the smaller berry and meat operations feeding off the same food-industry parks. We keep this equipment in stock so you can get a line running against this year's harvest, not next year's.