Butter and powdered baby formula once rolled out of a creamery in Meridian, long before the city became one of the fastest-growing suburbs in the Treasure Valley. A local dairy cooperative ran that creamery seven days a week from 1929 to 1970, producing butter for regional distribution, and a pharmaceutical company later partnered with the plant to manufacture powdered baby formula on site, a packaging equipment challenge not unlike what powder producers still face today. When the creamery closed in 1970, area dairy farmers shipped their milk to a cooperative in nearby Caldwell instead, and the original creamery bricks now form the Heritage Pavilion at Meridian City Hall Plaza, a physical marker of the industry that built the town. A rail spur that opened in 1900 still ships agricultural and forest products through Meridian today, tying the city into a Treasure Valley freight network that has carried food and farm goods for well over a century.

We build EliteFill auger fillers and Mars Series VFFS machines for exactly that powder-handling history. These machines run powdered and granular products, from formula-style powders to snack seasonings, at volumes a hand-fill line cannot reach, and an automatic case packer then boxes finished bags for regional distribution much like the old creamery relied on, just faster and with fewer people on the line. Filling powder by hand is what the old creamery had to do; an EliteFill auger doesn't need the guesswork. Meridian is not home to a PLAN IT plant. Idaho and Treasure Valley food producers still get EliteFill and Mars Series lines from our solutions lineup, and our case study covering a food producer that ramped up production after moving off manual filling shows the kind of throughput gain a plant this size could expect.