Packaging automation in Elgin starts with nuts. Elgin's 4th-largest employer runs a nut-processing and packaging operation employing roughly 1,742 people, built on a food-production history that runs back further still. An 1866 condensed-milk factory capitalized on Elgin's earlier reputation for butter and dairy goods sold into Chicago. A watch works here ran what was, from the late 19th century until 1965, the largest watchmaking complex in the world, employing three generations of Elgin families before the plant closed and was demolished in 1966. That precision runs deep.

An industrial-bearings manufacturer also ranks among Elgin's top-10 employers today, with roughly 675 jobs on the books. A local resident invented the motorized street sweeper here in 1914. That equipment-manufacturing tradition still runs in the city, and it's exactly the kind of workforce a nut-processing plant can draw on for packaging automation. PLAN IT has no office in Elgin. The equipment still ships here: EliteWeigh multihead weighers and EliteFill auger fillers for portioning nuts and snack mixes to exact weight, plus EcoBagger premade-pouch machines for retail-ready bagging and automatic case packers for finishing product into shipping cases at line speed. You know nuts and snack mixes; our machines weigh, bag and case them without slowing the line down. Our Illinois location page and food and beverage industry page cover the region. Details on each machine sit in the VFFS machine category, automatic case packer lineup and full solutions catalog, matched to Elgin's nut-processing plant and its century of precision-manufacturing history.