Heavy-equipment and earth-moving-machine manufacturing is what Peoria makes today, precision work at serious volume that has shaped how the region thinks about production tolerances. Packaging automation sits in that same tradition of machine building. The business traces back to farm-machinery manufacturing that started in Peoria in 1837 and grew the city into a global center for tractors and earth-moving equipment. The company born here in 1925 remains a top-2 local employer with roughly 12,000 jobs, and a second major heavy-equipment manufacturer runs a large mining-truck facility in Peoria, with a new engineering and manufacturing building completed in 2025.

Food and beverage manufacturing runs even deeper in Peoria's history than heavy machinery does. The city was once a world leader in distilling and brewing, home to 24 distilleries and 73 breweries between 1837 and 1919 that at one point generated up to half the nation's federal alcohol tax revenue. The USDA's National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research is headquartered in Peoria today, running more than $2 billion in research annually, in the same lab where mass production of penicillin was developed in 1942 from a moldy Peoria cantaloupe. Tell us your bag count and case rate, and we build the line to it. PLAN IT keeps no building in Peoria, but the equipment we ship here matches this city's pace. Mars Series VFFS baggers bag snacks, powders, and frozen foods, and PackMaster automatic case packers move cases off the line just as fast. Peoria producers can start with our Illinois location page and food and beverage industry page; the scaling-production case study, VFFS category, and automatic case-packer category cover the equipment itself, and our solutions page rounds out the catalog.