Cicero's industrial character isn't a memory, and it still shapes the kind of packaging equipment the city's plants run today. As of 1999, roughly a quarter of the town held one of the densest industrial concentrations anywhere in the country, more than 150 factories packed into 1.7 square miles. Those plants made communications and electronic equipment, sugar, printing presses, steel castings, tool-and-die parts, forgings, and rubber goods. East of Cicero Avenue, a landmark tower marks where a communications-and-electronics plant, once counted among the largest factories in the world, ran production lines before it closed. None of that was food or consumer packaged goods manufacturing the way some Chicago suburbs saw, but it was, and still is, heavy general-industrial output: metal, rubber, sugar processing, and precision parts.

That sugar-processing history lines up directly with equipment we build for granular and powder products: EliteFill auger fillers and EliteWeigh multihead weighers that portion consistent weights batch after batch. The broader factory base, heavy on metal, rubber, and assembly work, is a better fit for case erectors and PackMaster cobot palletizers, which take finished product off your line and build pallets without adding headcount. We've supplied similar automation to co-packers scaling production without expanding floor space, the same floor-space-constrained scaling problem a lot of Cicero's metal, rubber, and assembly plants face today. Cicero isn't home to a PLAN IT facility, but we serve manufacturers across Illinois, supplying and supporting this equipment on-site and remotely as needed.